Telework vs. central work: A comparative view of knowledge accessibility

With increasing popularity of telework arrangements especially among knowledge workers, effective knowledge access in the virtual setup is becoming vital to their performance. Despite the imperative, there has been a lack of theoretical and empirical efforts to investigate knowledge accessibility by distributed workers. Our study examines the gap between telework and central work in accessing knowledge with varying levels of tacitness (or implicitness), and in the use of communication media for knowledge exchange. Media theories offered a conceptual foundation for deriving relevant hypotheses. Necessary data were gathered from teleworkers working at companies with a large telework program in Japan. Both survey questionnaire and interviews were mobilized for balanced information gathering. Data analysis shows that, although information richness perception of a medium is largely rational, it is also partially re-structured by non-rationality factors. It also revealed significant discrepancies between telework and central-work in knowledge accessibility and in the patterns of media usage for knowledge access. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of telework design and telework productivity.