Managing Remote Employees: A Qualitative Research in the Logistics Industry

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage organizations operating in today's complex global business environment. In particular, to manage the remote employees, who work outside of the physical boundaries of the firms, in accordance with the management principles and through the organizational purposes is considered one of the most challenging area. Despite their constantly growing numbers, the remote employees have been neglected in recent scientific studies. Meanwhile, most of those rare studies have been conducted on the IT industry and its teleworkers. However, it is known that the truck drivers have been working on behalf of a company for years almost never been in the head office. On the other hand, studies on long-distance drivers generally focus on risk factors, job stress and health of drivers. Therefore, it is a significant shortcoming that those employees, who are the critical link of the transportation function of logistics, have not been subjected on to the scientific management and organizational behaviour researches. Thus, the current study aims to eliminate this gap in this issue. This qualitative research study tries to respond above mentioned research gap with the anti-positivist approach. Contrary to the majority of the recent studies, in spite of employees (drivers), the fleet managers of the large-scale land transport companies in the industry have been selected as the unit of analysis. The data obtained from the open-ended interviews were analysed by Nvivo 12 program. The findings of our study were evaluated and discussed from an interpretive and external perspective. (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.uk