The benefits of an enabling managerial control style in a teleworking situation. A latent profile analysis

The Coronavirus pandemic forced a significant number of organizations worldwide to introduce teleworking. In this context of physical distance, the first objective of this article was to present the different attitudes toward control used by managers in teleworking situations, as well as the impact these have on employees' occupational health, job performance and organizational commitment. We also investigated whether these managers’ attitudes toward control depend on the intensity of their employees' teleworking. Thanks to a survey of 2,522 employees carried out in a branch of the French Social Security administration between November 2021 and February 2022, we developed a Latent Profile Analysis method. Our results highlight four managerial control styles with different consequences on occupational health, job performance and organizational commitment, depending on the balance between task control, managerial trust and empowering leadership. They also suggest that telework does not affect the managerial relationship as fundamentally as it might seem from the work of many researchers studying this practice.