Abstract
The landscape of work has undergone a transformation in recent decades, marked by the increasing adoption of flexible work arrangements (FWAs) that alter traditional notions of when, where, and how work is performed. This evolution taken place in tandem with technological advancements and global events, including Covid-19 and increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and other digital mobile technology. While the new technology facilitates virtual work, enables remote supervision, and supports asynchronous collaboration across time zones and geographical boundaries, they have also created risks in performance management, employee well-being (e.g. tech-stress caused by extensive use of digital tools) and interpersonal relationship. Overall, employees, managers and organizations cannot merely trust that flexible work is only beneficial for them as the technology-assisted flexibility brings in a paradoxical effect on management, work and personal life. Therefore, the current state of the discourse surrounding technology that facilities flexible work calls for more nuanced theorizing of association between flexible work arrangement and technologies (including AI). Underpinned by a systematic review, we argue what technology are mostly focused on the flexible work in past 50 research (2015-2024) and explores the technology’s influence on relationships of flexible workers on and off work. Besides, research on flexible work is seeking for more robust theoretical explanations in transformed collaborative and organizational practices, and novel ways of managing and supporting remote work by technology. For this purpose, all categories were cross-referenced with existing concepts from the literature, and we concluded that our categories from the axial coding strongly correspond to the 3Cs collaboration model. In this model, Cooperation assumes workers share the same physical space, Communication describes the process of exchanging information among individuals and Coordination matches with studies that focus on how technology alters the way of adjusting individuals’ work effort to accomplish a larger goal. As our contribution, we adopted these categories and extending its use in flexible working, called ROT (Remote/virtual cooperation, online communication and technology-mediated coordination) framework. We developed four main themes through iteration and refinement as follows: the “employee-manager relationship” theme (Theme 1), the “employee-employee relationship” (theme 2), the “technology-human relationship” (theme 3), and the employee-family members relationship” (theme 4).