Increasing the adoption of teleworking in the public sector

This paper identifies factors that influence the adoption of teleworking among public sector employees. Teleworking, also known as telecommuting, has been argued to be less prevalent in the public sector. First, we reviewed extant literature to distinguish between five types of factors that affect employee adoption or rejection of teleworking: social, organizational, technology-related, financial, and personal. Second, we empirically tested a set of hypotheses related to these factors on data collected from a public sector organization in Canada. The results contribute to theory and practice by suggesting that social factors in terms of damage to teleworker’s image due to reduced visibility to co-workers, and organizational factors in terms of perceived need to be present at the office to perform work tasks negatively affected telework adoption. Financial factors in terms of incurring costs of teleworking were positively linked with the deliberate rejection of teleworking.