New Ways of Working: Chances and Challenges for Trust-Enhancing Leadership

The continued rise of digitalization allows employees to be highly flexible regarding when and where to work, both inside and outside the traditional office, a trend captured in the term new ways of working (NWW). With NWW, increased employee flexibility changes the relationship between supervisor and employees, thereby posing both benefits and new challenges for leadership. For supervisors, NWW particularly complicate the nevertheless necessary task of exercising control over employees. In NWW supervisors often rely on electronic performance monitoring techniques as an alternative to traditional forms of supervisory control. Yet, since employees often perceive electronic monitoring as a signal of their supervisors’ distrust, these new monitoring systems can harm the employee–supervisor relationship. At the same time, by accepting the control and monitoring behavior of their supervisors, employees can form high-quality relationships with supervisors, which can in turn translate into greater productivity and mutual trust. By more closely tracing this process, the present chapter investigates how supervisors in NWW can effectively supervise employees by maintaining control while still expressing trust.