Weaving Dialectical Webs Around the World: Experiencing Agency While Navigating Connectivity in Global Teams

How do global team members experience agency while navigating connectivity in their work communication across countries, continents, and time zones? Adopting a phenomenological approach, this study examines this question by investigating how employees in a global organization experience agency as a dialectical interplay of being able and unable to connect, respond, or disconnect. Based on an iterative analysis of interviews with 37 team members, we show how this experience unfolds relationally, shaped by the global context, organizational characteristics, work demands, communication technologies, and coworkers. At the team level, these relations form a dialectical web of freedom and constraint. Our findings advance understanding of how connectivity and agency are co-constituted in global teams, offering theoretical, methodological, and practical insights into the communicative experience of working in globally distributed, technology-mediated environments.