ODC Webinar
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND AFFECT IN HYBRID WORK ENVIRONMENTS
Gianluca Carnabuci
Professor of Organizational Behavior at ESMT Berlin
--- 17th July 2025, Thursday at 9am EST/3pm CET ---
We study how virtual versus face-to-face collaboration affects the risk of omission errors, defined as coordination failures that arise when employees fail to establish information exchange relationships with interdependent coworkers. Drawing on relational affect theory, we argue that virtual collaboration ties tend to generate relational experiences lower in energy (arousal) and emotional reward (valence) than face-to-face ones. As a result, employees collaborating virtually are less likely to act on recognized interdependencies, increasing the likelihood of omission errors. We test and find support for this hypothesis using rich dyadic data from three independent organizations: across all settings, omission errors are more likely in virtual than in face-to-face collaboration ties, and this effect is mediated by lower emotional arousal and valence. These findings advance organizational design theory by identifying affective experience as a micro-foundation of coordination and by showing that the emotional quality of collaboration ties is central to whether interdependent work succeeds or fails.
About the Speaker:
Gianluca Carnabuci is a professor of organizational behavior at ESMT Berlin, where he holds the Ingrid and Manfred Gentz Chair in Business and Society and serves as Director of Research. He is also a Senior Editor at Organization Science. His research examines how networks and classification structures influence the dynamics of innovation, as well as other organizationally relevant phenomena such as productivity, gender inequality, and leadership emergence.
Last date of registration is 16th July 2025, 9 am EST.
Hope you will be able to join us!
