Your Boss Wants You at the Office: Supervisor Discretion and Employee Working from Home

We investigate how supervisor discretion is related to the extent of employee working from home (WFH). In the pre-corona pandemic period, WFH was uncommon, and after the pandemic anecdotal and survey evidence shows many organizations want their employees to return to the office. It is unclear whether this preference is shared by the employees’ supervisors, who likely experience the effects of WFH more directly. In a sample of 557 employee-supervisor dyads across various organizations and industries, we find that supervisor discretion is strongly negatively related to the extent of employee WFH (as measured by the share of work time working from home). Employees whose supervisors have to adhere to organizational WFH policy work from home twice as much as employees whose supervisors have full discretion over the WFH policy. Similarly, the extent of overall discretion supervisors experience in their daily work is significantly negatively related to employee WFH. The latter relationship is positively moderated by supervisors’ own WFH performance: supervisors who feel less effective when working from home use their discretion to limit employee WFH.