Changing Work Practices: Acceptance of Virtual Work among Knowledge Professionals Engaged in Offshoring Activities

Technological advances and economic changes have increasingly enabled distant collaboration between knowledge workers across boundaries (Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). A well known example of this trend is given by offshoring of professional services to emerging countries. Notwithstanding the advantages that offshoring brings to Western organizations, it is perceived as a turmoil by knowledge workers. The literature on globally distributed teams (GDTs) shows some of the challenges of distant collaboration between geographically and culturally distant members, such as compatibility with existing organizational hierarchical structures, need for increased coordination, awareness of other team members activities, trust, virtual members’ socialization processes, and leadership (e.g. Mohrman, 1998, Paul & Mc Daniel, 2004, Weisband, 2007). Today many types of work require individual cognitive activities and conventional collaborative activities with co-located colleagues, alongside other collaborative activities at distance supported by technology (Perlow, 1999). ICTs contribute to the spatial reconfiguration of work, allowing a person to work from different locations (re-location) and to rely on cyberspace to share work outputs (dis-location). Hybrid workspaces are work arrangements where ‘individuals are relocated and dislocated and continue to participate in more traditional workspaces’ (Halford, 2005, p.22). To date, little we know about the impact of multiple spatial locations (hybrid workspaces) on actual work practices (Barley & Orr, 1997; Halford, 2005). To this regard, members of GDTs typically experience different workspaces. The interpretation of physical space by a worker has a significant impact on (and, at the same time, is impacted by) the way he or she interprets himself or herself as a professional, that is, his or her professional identity (Pratt, 2006, Elsbach, 2003). Added to this, in GDTs individuals in different countries have typically different professional backgrounds and experiences (e.g. Gurung & Prater, 2006). This results in heterogeneous and potentially conflicting professional identities. While the literature on distributed work recognizes the challenge of different identities and the positive effect of a shared team identity (Hinds & Mortensen, 2005), there is still little empirical evidence about the effects of different professional identities of members on the GDT. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of the increasing use of offshoring on hybrid workspaces and the interplay with professional identity. We try to respond to the following research questions: How does the introduction of distributed work change the work of professionals, such as the way individuals share their time between different projects and activities in different locations? How do individuals in a globally distributed team interpret collaboration with offshorees, and how is this collaboration influenced by their professional identity and by the perception of the offshoree’s professional identity? We conducted a qualitative exploratory study based on two case studies (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003) of GDTs of engineers and developers belonging to Italian software companies offshoring R&D work since 2000. We refer to the two companies as (1) Dream and (2) Core, with GDTs composed of members located respectively in (1) Italy and India and (2) Italy and Tunisia. To select our cases we looked for teams that were comparable in terms of governance form (captive offshoring), nature of work (software R&D), performance (successful), and stage of offshoring (‘third stage’: Couto, Mani, Lewin, & Peeters, 2006). At Dream 40 Indian and 52 Italian engineers collaborate at distance for (a) the development of new parts and (b) the release of updated versions of a CAD software. At Core, 35 Italian and 15 Tunisian developers and engineers collaborate on (a) new domain development and (b) maintenance of existing domains for an ERP software. In both cases, GDT members have frequent and both sequential and pooled interactions (Thompson, 1967; Von Glinow, 2007). The sources for our data include: 38 semi-structured interviews with managers, engineers, and developers, both onsite and offshore; observations of video conferences; archival data, such as internal reports, job descriptions, organizational charts, quality manuals., etc. In analyzing our qualitative data, we followed the framework depicted by Strauss & Corbin (1998) and Locke (2001) to build a grounded theory. We identified some recurrent themes; we grouped convergent themes at a higher level of abstraction; and we then looked for aggregate theoretical categories in order to organize the emergent findings in a coherent framework. Overall, we identified the following aggregate theoretical categories: acceptance of virtual work, integration with regular workflow, sensemaking of offshoring activities, and perception of difference in competences and identities. Finally, we connected the above-mentioned theoretical categories into a grounded theory