Rethinking telecommuting with an i-deals perspective

COVID-19 has accelerated the spread of telecommuting in Japan. In past studies regarding telecommuting, it was proved to be the result of i-deals, so it was discussed in the context of location flexibility i-deals (LFi-deals). The spread of COVID-19, however, has given rise to semi-compulsory telecommuting. Therefore, this study takes three groups: Group A, which continues to work at the office as before; Group B, which has started to telecommute (inexperienced telecommuters) so that telecommuting is regarded as semi-compulsory; and Group C, which has experience with telecommuting (experienced telecommuters) so that telecommuting is the result of making LFi-deals; and investigates the relationship that telecommuting has with the degree of selfdetermination (DSD) and productivity. Our analysis found that between Group B and Group C, which were both telecommuting, both DSD and productivity were significantly higher for Group C a) Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan, tsukamoto.yusuke.jpn@gmail.com The author confirms sole responsibility for the following: study conception and design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of results, and manuscript preparation. The author declares there are no competing interests. A version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2020 Winter: Part1 (Tsukamoto, 2021). © 2021 Yusuke Tsukamoto. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) license. The CC BY 4.0 license permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Annals of Business Administrative Science 20 (2021) 33–46 https://doi.org/10.7880/abas.0210115a Received: January 15, 2021; accepted: February 8, 2021 Published in advance on J-STAGE: February 11, 2021