Managing weak ties in collaborative work

Information and communication technology, ICT, has introduced new styles of working. Based on ICT, these styles have a strong virtual flavour, ranging from flexwork, hot-desking and telework to virtual teams and virtual organizations. The virtuality of the styles has impacts on how employees within an organization perform their task and how they interact with colleagues, clients and supervisors, but the impact is not yet well understood. 24 board level executives from 18 Swiss knowledge firms have been interviewed about virtual work arrangements and the change these bring in networking dynamics within their organization. The contribution of the paper is that new networking dynamics can be related to complement the theory on weak, strong and absent ties. More in particular, virtual networks can be located in weak ties, thereby making strong ties less important. We point out how network dynamics are located in weak ties through which virtuality and flexibility of a network can be expressed.

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