Abstract
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.
The globalization of work has profoundly reshaped how employees communicate (Gibbs & Ganesh, 2020; Kolb et al., 2020). In global organizations, team members regularly collaborate across countries, continents, and time zones (e.g., Hinds et al., 2011), relying heavily on connectivity, “the core infrastructure of globalization” (Kolb et al., 2020, p. 1590) that enables technology-mediated interaction between them. Global team members thus engage in daily communication and collaboration via digital platforms, whether or not they are geographically close to one another (Dery et al., 2014).
While public discourse often offers optimistic advice on managing global collaboration (Bourke, 2018; Neeley, 2015), recent reports show declining employee engagement and well-being worldwide (Gallup, 2024). The rise of hybrid and virtual work arrangements, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to generate new forms of flexible work arrangements (Jooss et al., 2022; Sivunen et al., 2023a). These shifts raise timely questions about how global workers experience their ability to act and interact in meaningful ways in digitally mediated environments.
These questions motivate our study of how global team members experience being able to navigate connectivity, that is, to make decisions about when and how to connect and/or disconnect in communication with their team members. Specifically, we investigate how they experience agency, which we understand as the in/ability to act otherwise (Iverson et al., 2018), in relation to the ongoing demands of global connectivity. In doing so, we contribute to scholarship on dialectics in global work (Gibbs & Ganesh, 2020; Putnam et al., 2016) and, more specifically, global teams (Gibbs, 2009), emphasizing that agency is not a fixed trait but a situated capacity that unfolds in relation to dynamic constraints and possibilities. In global team settings, these constraints and possibilities may take the form of technological features (e.g., persistent notifications), organizational practices (e.g., expectations around meeting availability), and global conditions (e.g., time zone differences) that shape how workers experience their ability to connect or disconnect.
To examine these dynamics, we adopt a phenomenological approach (Meisenbach & Pringle, 2024), analyzing interviews with 37 members of six global teams in a single multinational organization. Through iterative, qualitative analysis (Tracy, 2020; Tracy et al., 2024), we identified five interrelated dimensions through which workers experience the dialectics of agency when navigating connectivity: global context, organizational characteristics, work demands, communication technologies, and coworkers. These dimensions form what we call a “dialectical web”—a network of relationships in which the capacity to act otherwise is continually negotiated as global workers navigate dis/connecting decisions in relation to shifting organizational, technological, and interpersonal conditions.
Our study offers five key contributions. First, we extend research on agency and technology use in organizations (Cousins & Robey, 2005; Leonardi, 2011, 2023; Murray et al., 2021) by showing how connectivity produces situated possibilities and constraints that workers must navigate in practice. Second, we deepen understanding of dialectics in global work (Gibbs & Ganesh, 2020) by illustrating how workers experience both being able and unable to act otherwise while navigating connectivity. Third, we foreground the relational nature of agency: human beings experience their in/ability to act otherwise in relation to other entities (Bailey et al., 2022). As Bailey et al. (2022) observe, entities such as humans, technologies, routines, and norms are not static but evolving relations constituted in interaction. Our findings highlight how the complexity of global organizational life shapes the conditions under which agency is experienced. Fourth, we offer a methodological contribution by showing how phenomenological inquiry can reveal naturally occurring expressions of dialectical agency in employees’ own talk. While previous studies have explored how technologies may act alongside humans (Leonardi, 2011, 2023, 2025), our focus is on how employees navigate constraints and possibilities to act otherwise within connectivity, in relation to nonhuman actants. Finally, we offer practical insight: many of the constraints experienced by global workers are communicatively reinforced and therefore open to being questioned, reframed, or transformed through collective reflection and coordination.
In what follows, we will elaborate our theoretical framework, describe our methods, present findings from our analysis, and discuss the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of our research.
The Dialectics of Agency and Connectivity in Global Work Communication
To investigate the dialectics of agency from the perspective of global team members, we begin by outlining what characterizes global workers and global teams. Global work encompasses various roles and forms of employment, including expatriates on international assignments, flexpatriates with shifting locations, and global domestic workers who collaborate globally from their home countries (Shaffer et al., 2012). Global teams may therefore include expatriates and nationals alike. A defining feature of these teams is that members are distributed across countries and time zones (Gibson et al., 2014; Hinds et al., 2011). These conditions increase the complexity of interaction (Gibbs, 2009), requiring workers to be highly attuned to their own and others’ work hours and temporal rhythms.
Because face-to-face interaction is rarely possible, global team members rely on communication technologies to collaborate (Dery et al., 2014; Nurmi & Hinds, 2020). These technologies enable work-related connectivity across geographic and temporal boundaries (Hinds et al., 2011). We use the term “connectivity” to refer to technology-mediated acts of connecting and disconnecting for the purpose of work-related social exchange (see Kolb, 2008). Connectivity, in this view, is not merely a technical infrastructure but a communicative practice that modulates how and when interaction occurs. Kolb (2008, p. 129) identifies “actor agency” as a key attribute of connectivity, and Dery et al. (2014) extend this view through the metaphor of a tap, highlighting the control individuals may exert over the communicative flow.
Correspondingly, we propose that global workers’ agency, which we understand as the in/ability to act otherwise in work communication, manifests through their everyday connectivity decisions, as they adjust communicative flow by connecting and disconnecting via technologies (see also Dery et al., 2014; Kolb, 2008). While prior research has recognized individual control as integral to connectivity, we advance this line of thinking by introducing a dialectical perspective and applying it to global work.
We align with scholarship that defines agency as a capacity unique to humans: the ability to act knowledgeably, intentionally, and reflexively (Bandura, 2006; Bratman, 2000; Iverson et al., 2018; Rose & Jones, 2005). Yet the technologies that structure global work are increasingly “smart” and autonomous in ways that challenge this distinction (Bailey et al., 2022; Frischknecht, 2021; Murray et al., 2021). Although technologies may appear to act (e.g., remind, notify, or interrupt) and people often treat them as having agency (Leonardi, 2011, 2012), we follow Iverson et al. (2018) in distinguishing perceived agency from reflexive, intentional capacity. Technologies may make a difference, for example by reminding a user of an upcoming meeting, but such difference becomes meaningful only through human interpretation.
Scholars continue to debate whether agency should be reserved for humans (e.g., Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) or distributed across human and nonhuman actors (e.g., Brummans, 2018b; Cooren, 2018; Robichaud, 2006). While we recognize the relational nature of agency (Bailey et al., 2022), we maintain that it is ultimately experienced by humans. What matters, we argue, is not whether technologies possess agency, but how humans experience their own in/ability to act otherwise in relation to technologies, coworkers, organizational norms, and other constraints. As Rose and Jones (2005) emphasize, it is the as if quality—humans behaving as if machines had autonomy—that shapes experience in meaningful ways (see also Leonardi, 2025).
Grounding our approach in this view of human agency, we conceptualize it as being dialectical. The term “dialectics” refers to opposing but interdependent poles (Putnam et al., 2016). The dialectics of agency thus describes the lived interdependence between the ability and inability to act otherwise. These poles implicate one another: the experience of constraint presupposes the possibility of freedom, and vice versa. In global work, this dialectic becomes especially salient as workers relate to and act within an array of communicative, technological, and organizational forces.
From global workers’ perspective, everyday communication is an interpersonal process involving team members and the technologies that mediate collaboration (Dery et al., 2014; Nurmi & Hinds, 2020). Workers must negotiate their own preferences as well as collective expectations around when and how to connect (van Zoonen et al., 2021). They are also influenced by broader contextual factors, including time zones, communication volume, and industry-specific demands (Barley et al., 2011). As such, global workers often find themselves navigating demands shaped by various organizational, technological, and temporal constraints (Reiche et al., 2019; Sivunen et al., 2023a).
Conceptualizing agency as dialectic foregrounds the ongoing negotiation global workers undertake between acting and being acted upon. Rather than a dichotomy, agency becomes a lived interplay between moments of freedom and moments of constraint. Workers may have some control over their connectivity, yet they must also respond to the expectations of others, the features of technologies, and the rhythms of organizational life. Thus, our view builds on Jennifer Gibbs’s (2009) work on dialectics in global organizing (see also Gibbs & Ganesh, 2020), shifting attention from team-level dialectics to individual team member experiences of agency as they unfold within the communicative fabric of global work.
To investigate how global workers experience these dialectics, we adopt a phenomenological approach to illuminate lived experience (Orbe, 2009). Phenomenology seeks to describe how phenomena appear to consciousness, that is, how the world is experienced by knowing subjects (Lanigan, 1988; Meisenbach & Pringle, 2024). As Max Van Manen (1990) observes, “the subject matter of phenomenological research is always the structure of meaning of the lived human world” (p. 11, emphasis in original). Because technologies do not possess consciousness (yet), they cannot be the direct subjects of phenomenological inquiry. Technologies per se, or their capacity to act, can be studied differently, for example through sociomaterial approaches that attend to the material features and materializing processes produced by technologies (e.g., Leonardi, 2017). Our focus, however, is on how humans experience technologies as enabling, constraining, and shaping their agency in meaningful ways. Our goal, then, is not to assess the agency of nonhuman entities or actors, but to investigate the dialectics of human agency as experienced while navigating connectivity in everyday work communication.
This area remains underexplored, and global workers may not always reflect explicitly on their agency experiences. As Letizia Caronia (2018, p. 119) suggests, the lived realities are often taken “at face value.” Yet phenomenological analysis is designed precisely to surface “the taken-for-granted experiences that are reflected in our everyday interactions” (Orbe, 2009, p. 750). Given that technology-mediated connectivity has become ubiquitous and largely normalized in global organizations (Kolb et al., 2020), it is especially relevant to examine how workers experience these dialectics; how they find themselves, at times, “betwixt and between” the ability and inability to act otherwise while navigating connectivity decisions and expectations. These experiences, we suggest, may have implications not only for team dynamics, but also for individual well-being, performance, and organizational life more broadly.
To study these experiences in an actual global organization, we formulated the following research question: How do global team members experience the dialectics of agency while navigating connectivity in their work communication?
Methods
Data Collection
To investigate our research question, we conducted qualitative in-depth interviews (Orbe, 2009) with knowledge workers from a global company in the natural resources industry, referred to here as “Globa Natura” (a pseudonym). The study was part of a broader research project on boundary management and communication technology use within global teams. We selected Globa Natura because its operations, such as the coordination of material transport, require ongoing collaboration and the performance of knowledge-intensive tasks. Its employees are distributed across multiple continents, and their work relies heavily on technology-mediated communication across time zones and geographic boundaries.
Research Participant (Interviewee) Information
Note. All names are pseudonyms. The name of each team leader appears in bold.
aWhen not all team members were interviewed, the complete number of team members appears in parentheses.
bIf not a national of the country where the person works.
cInformation not disclosed.
Interviewees were recruited with the assistance of internal liaisons at Globa Natura. The first and second author, along with a third research team member, conducted one-on-one online interviews via video or audio calls. A semi-structured interview protocol was developed to explore Globa Natura employees’ experiences of team communication, technology use, and connectivity in global work. The guide included open-ended questions across several domains: (1) communication practices and tools in global teams (e.g., “How do you communicate as a team? What specific tools do you use?”); (2) experiences of being contacted and responding outside standard work hours (e.g., “Do you ever contact each other outside office hours? If so, how?”); (3) perceived expectations around connectivity within and across teams, regions, and the broader organization (e.g., “Do you discuss connectivity expectations within your global team? If so, how?”); (4) national and organizational norms shaping connectivity and response behaviors (e.g., “Are there any national or organizational norms you’ve noticed that shape how quickly or in what ways people tend to respond?”); and (5) reflections on global roles, well-being, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on everyday work (e.g., “How would you describe your current role in the global team?”; “How has working in a global team affected your sense of well-being, either positively or negatively?”; “Since the COVID-19 lockdowns, have you noticed any lasting changes in how you stay connected, share information, or collaborate with your global team?”).
These interviews prompted rich reflections on the perceived benefits and challenges of communicating while connecting and disconnecting via specific technologies, as well as participants’ in/abilities to control technology use in the context of global collaboration. The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified the relevance of these reflections, as virtually all collaboration, regardless of geographic distance, was technology-mediated during the data collection period.
All interviews were audio-recorded. The average interview lasted approximately 74 minutes (ranging from 53 to 110 minutes), yielding a total of 45 hours and 20 minutes of recorded audio. These interviews were subsequently transcribed verbatim, producing 1,380 pages of double-spaced text (12-point Times New Roman).
Data Analysis
To examine how Globa Natura team members experienced the dialectics of agency while navigating connectivity in their work communication, we conducted a phenomenological analysis (Lanigan, 1988; Meisenbach & Pringle, 2024; Orbe, 2009; Van Manen, 1990). We treated participants’ talk as “vehicles for the analysis” (Caronia, 2018, p. 122), examining how the in/ability to act otherwise manifested in relation to shifting technological, organizational, and interpersonal dimensions. To guide our process, we adopted Sarah Tracy’s phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) approach (Tracy, 2020; Tracy et al., 2024).
We began by organizing the data meaningfully (Tracy, 2020; Tracy et al., 2024), grouping individual interview accounts by team membership. This enabled us to focus on individual experiences while also identifying team-specific dynamics. Some teams were more globally dispersed across time zones than others, and collaboration practices varied depending on operational roles (e.g., more intense coordination in finance during month-end closes).
Next, the first author conducted an initial reading of the transcripts to gain a sense of how workers talked about agency in their communication. Specifically, she identified moments when participants discussed their ability or inability to act otherwise in relation to connectivity—that is, when describing how they navigated connecting and disconnecting in their day-to-day work communication. The transcripts were then uploaded to ATLAS.ti and coded descriptively in an initial round of analysis, focusing on how participants expressed agency in relation to connectivity.
Following Tracy’s (2018) recommendation that primary cycle coding be conducted on approximately 20% of the data, we initially coded about one-third of the interviews. Early codes included categories such as “context justification” (e.g., explaining actions based on time zones), “social expectations” (e.g., norms around dis/connectivity), and “technology-related benefits/challenges” (e.g., how tools are experienced as enabling or hindering communication).
We then met as a research team (first, second, and third authors) to discuss the emerging codes and impressions. Across interviews, participants consistently described their agency, particularly with respect to connectivity, as shaped in relation to different dimensions. We began grouping these dimensions into three second-level thematic categories: context, communication technologies, and coworkers. This structure guided our second cycle of coding, during which we revisited the entire dataset while remaining open to inductively generated codes (Tracy et al., 2024). In turn, we divided the “context” dimension into three distinct themes (global context, organizational characteristics, and work demands) to reflect the nuance in participants’ accounts.
Analytical Steps and Examples From Interview Data
As a final step, we grouped interview excerpts by team membership, enabling us to compare how members of different teams experienced and negotiated the dialectics of agency.
In the next section, we present the results of our PIQDA. Some interview excerpts were translated from Finnish into English, and pseudonyms are used throughout to protect participants’ identities.
Experiencing the Dialectics of Agency: How Global Workers Navigate Connectivity at Globa Natura
Global workers experience agency dialectically, in relation to the global context in which they operate, Globa Natura’s organizational characteristics, the demands of their roles in global teams, the communication technologies that mediate their connectivity, and the coworkers with whom they interact. These dialectical relations are depicted from the individual employee’s perspective in Figure 1. Each coil represents a dialectic between a worker’s experienced in/ability to act otherwise and a particular dimension, as it plays out through connectivity-related possibility and constraint. While analytically distinct, these relationships are deeply intertwined. We organize our findings in two sections. First, we describe how team members experience the five dialectical dimensions of agency. Then, we focus on the team level, examining how these experiences differ and converge within and across teams, highlighting the web-like nature of agency in global work. Individual global team member’s experience of the dialectics of agency while navigating connectivity
Experiencing Dialectical Agency in Relation to Key Dimensions
First, our findings show that as Globa Natura employees talk about their work communication, they relate to the global context of their work, especially the temporal distribution of team members and tasks across time zones, which was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions. Often, the global context is perceived to limit employee agency, thus leading to an inability to act otherwise (InAb) when it comes to connectivity. Yusuf (T1), for instance, states that receiving messages during weekends “cannot be avoided” because of the time differences between him and his coworkers. However, employees also adopt strategies to work around the challenges posed by the global context, demonstrating their ability to act otherwise (Ab). As Antoine (T4) stated, for example, “If I cannot [call] due to time zone, I will send an email.”
Second, interviewees’ talk shows that they experience in/abilities to act otherwise in relation to the culture and communicative practices at Globa Natura (i.e., its organizational characteristics). According to Mira, a Team 5 member, the meetings-oriented culture of Globa Natura (organizational characteristic dimension) combined with the COVID-19 restrictions (global context dimension) pose a challenge for her ability to act otherwise (Ab), leading to moments when she cannot act otherwise (InAb): Ab I try to take breaks and walk away from the screen. InAb But some days it’s challenging. Our [organizational] culture is very meeting-oriented. We have a lot of meetings, and they are consecutive…And now that one works from home, the challenge is there’s no proper disconnection from work.
Third, employees experience in/abilities to act otherwise in relation to the work demands brought about by their roles and the tasks of their teams. For instance, Venla (T5), who works in a highly distributed team on organizational sustainability tasks, says she can easily disconnect (Ab) because there is no expectation in her role to stay connected after hours. On the contrary, while located geographically close to his colleagues, Klaus (T6) tends to stay connected through his smartphone, even after workhours because of his role in Public Affairs (InAb). Klaus further justifies his connectivity habits with his previous experiences in similar roles: “I have worked in communication and lobbying, where you have to react instantly.”
Fourth, technologies are perceived as having benefits and they are strategically used to enhance or extend one’s agency (e.g., working via mobile phone while commuting), yet they are also perceived as challenging one’s agency (e.g., making disconnecting difficult), again showing the dialectical interplay that characterizes the experience of agency. This interplay is illustrated by Giuseppe (T1), who says: InAb I like to think I’m not dependent but then I can see myself checking the phone all the time…Unfortunately, I think technology is pervasive but that’s the way it is, in good and bad. Ab It’s personal discipline not to be addicted to it, InAb but it’s difficult because there’s everything on the phone…So it’s kind of easy to get lost.
Giuseppe’s talk reveals the well-known addictiveness and pervasiveness of communication technologies (e.g., Vanden Abeele, 2021) by showing how this global worker attributes his inability to act otherwise (i.e., checking his phone all the time; difficulties in exercising self-discipline) to the features of technologies affecting his connectivity in ways that are hard to control. Moreover, Giuseppe sees his phone as the portal to what he calls “everything” in terms of his work and personal interactions. This emphasizes how these technologies are not only pervasive because of their technical features but also because they are the means for relating to others.
Finally, Globa Natura employees experience in/abilities to act otherwise while relating to their coworkers across the world. This dialectic especially revolves around the ways employees attune to each other, and the responsibilities they attribute to themselves and each other for dis/connecting. The dialectic is illustrated by Antoine, the Team 4 leader, who talks about how he encourages his team members to act otherwise: InAb It’s a bit more challenging for the team in Australia, I think. Sometimes they have a lot of requests for meetings outside of office hours, so Ab I empower and encourage them to decline a meeting…I’m telling them: “Frankly, you can refuse. Decline.”
As this excerpt shows, global workers’ experience of agency fluctuates in their interpersonal relationships with their coworkers. Accordingly, their in/ability to act otherwise in relation to each other can also manifest through promoting each other’s agency by, for instance, encouraging their team members to disconnect and thus act otherwise.
In sum, employees experience the dialectics of agency in relation to global context, organizational characteristics, work demands, communication technologies, and coworkers. As the examples above illustrate, global workers’ relations to these dimensions can be separated merely analytically as they are deeply intertwined (see Figure 1). Examining the dynamic and intertwined nature of these dialectics on a team level is especially insightful, as we will show next.
Navigating Dialectical Agency within Global Teams
Figure 2 depicts global workers’ experiences, zoomed out to the level of a global team. This figure shows how team members experience the dialectics of agency as a complex, dynamic “field of relation” (Massumi, 2015, p. 200; see also Bencherki et al., 2024; Massumi & Brummans, 2025). In what follows, we introduce the teams and then explore how team members experience their in/abilities to act otherwise while navigating connectivity within this web of relations. Global team members’ experience of agency while navigating connectivity: A dialectical web of relations
The global teams we investigated work across diverse operations: acquisition and development of raw materials (Team 1 and Team 4), financial affairs (Team 2), logistics (Team 3), sustainable development (Team 5), and public affairs (Team 6). When discussing their communication and connectivity practices, team members often justify their actions by referring to the nature of their team’s work. For instance, members of Team 3, working in logistics, emphasize that operations “never stop.” They experience their work demands as limiting their ability to act otherwise, particularly in terms of disconnecting. This is illustrated by Paul, a Team 3 member who is a logistics manager in the US: InAb Our jobs, by nature, never stop. You can’t just shut the laptop and walk out of the door at five o’clock. Ab Although that is encouraged and I think that’s a part of well-being, InAb there are times when that just doesn’t work. But I’ve never experienced any resistance to that. It’s a reality of time zones and the nature of what’s at hand.
Notably, Paul does not frame his inability to act otherwise negatively. He accepts after-hours connectivity as a “reality” of time zone differences, thus attributing his inability in part to the global context.
Similar experiences of voluntarily and occasionally forfeiting one’s agency for organizational functioning were shared by others. Team 2 members in finance acknowledged that month-end closes increase work demands and limit agency, but they accepted this as necessary for timely task completion. Wei (T2) illustrates this positive framing: InAb Because we work in finance, we know that you need to commit to your work. Because when things happen and if it’s urgent and you need to go for it, definitely we will, because it’s the nature of the work that we need to ensure that things are operating smoothly.
Dina (T2), a member of Wei’s team, echoes this experience: InAb During the closing, we need to work late hours so it can be until 10, 10 or 11 p.m., for the first four…five days of the months. Ab Then, during mid-months, I try to shut down at about 6:30, seven o’clock.
Dina and Wei describe pressure to stay connected during month-end closes, yet they highlight Globa Natura’s culture of valuing disconnection when possible. For instance, Dina notes that their team leader Simo encourages disconnection, showing that despite occasional inabilities to disconnect due to work demands, connectivity norms at Globa Natura also support employees’ well-being.
This well-being orientation is also reflected in how team members attune to one another. Daniel, the Team 3 leader, supports coworkers’ agency by discouraging late-night responses: “If I send emails late in the afternoon [local time] to Singapore and still get a response, then I might say, ‘Get off the computer now! It’s late!’” Ethan, an Australian member of Daniel’s team, affirms this, saying his colleagues “walk the talk” regarding disconnecting. This shared attunement reveals how team members support one another’s capacity to act otherwise, even when constraints such as work demands or time differences suggest otherwise.
Wei (T2) adds that attuning to others sometimes leads to hesitation: he fears disturbing colleagues whose calendars are already full—a reflection of Globa Natura’s meeting-oriented culture during COVID-19. Yet Wei also notes that attunement can be counterproductive: it can cause “delays in terms of efficiency.” Klaus (T6) recognizes the very same challenge but, in contrast, emphasizes personal responsibility in managing connectivity: InAb Sometimes, it’s better to send the message when it’s on the agenda. Then you won’t forget it and then the message has been sent. Ab And I think it’s…the responsibility of the recipient whether they keep their notifications or their phone on and whether they let those messages disturb, whatever time it is. If one doesn’t mute one’s phone during nighttime and a message is received, then I’d rather blame the recipient than the sender.
Klaus sees his coworkers as able to act otherwise and uses this to justify sending messages when convenient for him. Notably, Klaus is based in the Nordics, where time zone differences between team members are minimal.
The emphasis on individual responsibility surfaces in other interviews as well. Kiia (T5) says that while she can act otherwise in relation to work demands, “there’s work available constantly,” so it falls on the individual to “draw the line” and disconnect to take some time off. Ethan (T2), in contrast, notes that he sometimes adapts to others’ schedules (InAb in relation to coworkers), especially when headquarters staff prioritize their convenience: “I think there’s a little bit of lack of consideration from some of the global folk…It tends to be at the most convenient time for [headquarters] and then…we tend to get the short straw.”
Most interviewees describe attuning both to the timing of connectivity decisions and to communication channel choice. Teams have developed implicit norms around which medium to use based on urgency. Hugo (T3) explains: Ab [If I don’t need a response before Monday,] I send [an email] and I don’t expect them to answer me before that. If I want an earlier [response], I use WhatsApp. And then when there’s a high priority, I will call. That’s my way of working.
Hugo’s talk shows agency in using technology, while also reflecting how communication tools mediate urgency. Email is seen as appropriate for non-urgent matters, whereas calls are reserved for urgency, especially outside work hours.
These web-like dialectics of agency illustrate how team members leverage different technologies to signal urgency and response expectations. Thomas (T1), based in Asia-Pacific, collaborates across time zones and describes using his calendar to manage evening meetings: Ab So what I had to do is I created an ongoing meeting for every day…So now I have a reoccurring meeting for every evening from 6 p.m. onward. InAb And it’s not that, I do still a lot of evening calls, it’s just the nature of the job being in remote office like Australia. But what it means is that when people go to book me, they’ll see that I have a conflicting meeting and then they’ll have to reach out directly… Ab and then it’s more of an option.
Thomas’s strategic use of technology enables him to act otherwise in relation to coworkers, while also managing the constraints of the global context. His calendar blocks limit others’ ability to book meetings, giving him more choice—yet the demands of his role still require evening calls.
Nicolas (T5), also in Australia, faces similar challenges. Unlike Thomas, he feels he must adapt to others’ schedules. He avoids contacting Finnish teammates during their off hours but works past his own: Ab Having the capacity to be adaptable with my times, it really helps because I can start out…say 10 a.m…or 11 in the morning, and…I do my eight hours then by, I’ll be closing at eight o’clock and that’s like a good time because then I get a good four or five hours of overlapping time with the Finnish office.
Nicolas notes that his team leader, Sari, encourages him to remain flexible without exceeding his total work hours. Sari, in turn, describes her own flexibility: “I have said [to the Australian team members] that I can [take calls] at 7 a.m. while I’m walking my dog.” This mutual attunement exemplifies how agency in terms of connectivity is relationally negotiated.
Thus, global workers’ experiences of agency when navigating connectivity are shaped by a complex interplay of interpersonal interactions within the teams, the global context, organizational culture of Globa Natura, team-specific work demands, and communication technologies. When confronted with a work-related matter, workers make strategic decisions about when and how to connect. These decisions emerge at the intersection of structural constraints such as time differences and interpersonal relations, as team members navigate their local and the organization’s global (i.e., glocal) realities through everyday acts of connecting and disconnecting via communication technologies.
Discussion
We set out to gain deeper insight into global workers’ experiences of agency in their daily communication with team members across countries and time zones. Our findings show that agency is experienced as a dialectical, relational phenomenon, especially as global workers navigate connectivity. Workers’ experiences fluctuate between feeling able and unable to act otherwise as they relate—often simultaneously—to the global context, organizational characteristics, work demands, communication technologies, and coworkers when making connectivity-related decisions. These experiences are deeply shaped by how connectivity is structured, expected, and negotiated in practice. On the team level, agency is best visualized as a web of relations (see Figure 2), where employees navigate shifting degrees of freedom and constraint through everyday acts of connecting and disconnecting. They move through a dynamic interplay between their own actions and the actions, expectations, and rhythms of others. From a phenomenological perspective, movement within these dialectics is much like breathing: a continuous attunement to the dimensions at play, both enabling and limiting their ability to act otherwise in terms of connectivity. In what follows, we articulate how these findings contribute to theory, methodology, and practice in organizational communication research.
Theoretical and Methodological Implications
First, this article broadens our conception of human agency by viewing it dialectically. While dialectics have previously been used to understand persistent tensions in global team interactions (Gibbs, 2009), our study demonstrates the value of this lens for grasping how global workers experience agency. As Putnam and colleagues have emphasized, dialectics involve opposing poles that exist interdependently, where the dynamics between the poles form a continuous push-pull force (Putnam, 2013, 2015, Putnam et al., 2016; see also Fairhurst & Putnam, 2024). Conceptualizing agency as a dialectic between being able and unable to act otherwise offers a nuanced and situated account of what it means to be a human agent in global organizational life. As mentioned, our findings show that, at the team level, agency unfolds within a web of dialectical forces. In this web, workers’ ability to act otherwise is inseparable from their inability to do so—each conditioned by the other. Agency, in this view, is always distributed across a field of relations involving contextual and organizational characteristics, work demands, technologies, and coworkers (Bailey et al., 2022). How global workers experience agency is therefore contingent on the relational field that is continually (re)constituted through communication.
Second, building on the above, our article provides insight into the kinds of dimensions that are at play in global work communication. We found that humans are not only relating to their coworkers and to the technologies mediating those interactions; the relational field is far more complex. As Figure 1 illustrates, whenever global workers connect with each other, they attune to multiple dimensions, often simultaneously (cf. Ash & Gallacher, 2015). All of these dimensions, in a sense, mediate their communication.
While we do not argue for a fixed or hierarchical order, Figure 1 implies a particular layering of relations: when team members relate to one another (at the “top” of the spiral), that relating is shaped by the global context, embedded in organizational characteristics, structured around work demands, and mediated through communication technologies. As our findings illustrate, though, the way these intertwined relations manifest in participants’ talk varies. Different dimensions become foregrounded depending on which ones are perceived as most meaningful for a worker’s in/ability to act otherwise in a given situation.
In this study, we regarded the interviewed global workers and their coworkers as human agents—individuals capable of acting otherwise in intentional, purposeful, and reflexive ways (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Iverson et al., 2018). However, our findings reveal that other dimensions also play vital roles in shaping global workers’ experiences of agency. Dimensions such as the global context, organizational characteristics, and work demands, in tandem with technologies, influence workers’ in/abilities to act otherwise, particularly in relation to connectivity. It is therefore essential to continue examining how, who, and what contribute to the co-composition of these complex dialectical fields. Technological entities (Bailey et al., 2022), for example, may restrict (e.g., by making it difficult to disconnect) or enhance workers’ cognitive and affective sense of agency (e.g., by enabling asynchronous communication). Specific communication tools and their features can help create workarounds to navigate the contextual challenges inherent in global teams, for instance by signaling (non)urgency (e.g., email vs. phone calls) or availability (e.g., electronic calendars).
Moreover, dimensions such as the global context, organizational characteristics, and work demands shape how workers attune to and compose with everyday work situations. Through these engagements, they experience the in/ability to act otherwise when navigating connectivity. These dimensions are neither clearly human nor nonhuman. Rather, it may be more accurate to describe them as “quasi-material” (Barley et al., 2011, p. 890)—simultaneously encompassing and surpassing human agency. Though experienced as external constraints or enablers shaping the relational field of dialectical forces, these dimensions are continually constituted in and through human communication.
While our analysis does not systematically distinguish between phenomenological experiences of being “acted upon” by humans, technologies, or organizational characteristics, we recognize that such experiences may vary in felt intensity, immediacy, or texture. For instance, a message notification may prompt a visceral reaction, whereas a managerial expectation may register as ambient pressure. These differences are not rooted in ontological categories, but in how specific configurations of the relational field unfold in the practice of everyday communication.
Third, this study contributes to research on global work, particularly in the domain of communication within global teams (e.g., Gibbs, 2009; Gibson et al., 2014). Our research extends this line of inquiry by foregrounding the importance of agency and its dialectical nature in global team contexts. While prior work has illuminated persistent tensions within global teams (Gibbs, 2009), we shift the focus to how individual global workers experience agency as they navigate dis/connectivity within these teams. The dialectical nature of agency is especially salient in this context due to the unique conditions of global work: time zone differences, geographical dispersion, and reliance on technology-mediated collaboration (see Hinds et al., 2011; Nurmi & Hinds, 2020). Our findings show how workers express and make sense of their agency in and through talk about their dis/connectivity decisions, attuning not only to their own circumstances but also to those of their teammates.
Connectivity via digital technologies emerges as a precondition for communication in global teams—particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic—yet it also gives rise to recurring dilemmas about when and how to connect. Our phenomenological analysis complements and extends earlier research by illuminating how these dialectics are experienced and articulated at the individual level, rather than solely on team-level. In so doing, we offer a novel perspective on how global workers’ lived experiences of communication are shaped by a dynamic interplay of relational forces.
The dialectical, relational view of agency we have developed here also reveals how the structural conditions of global organizations amplify the complexity of work. Global workers must navigate multiple and often competing demands: coordinating across time zones, managing the affordances and intrusions of communication technologies, responding to organizational values and expectations, and fulfilling task-related responsibilities. These demands heighten the communicative labor involved in being an agentic participant in global organizational life. Importantly, while our empirical focus is on global teams, we suggest that this view of dialectical agency is increasingly relevant across organizational contexts, as technology-mediated connectivity and its complex implications on employee well-being become more widespread (Aroles et al., 2019; Huusko & Sivunen, 2025; Sivunen et al., 2023b).
Fourth, this study demonstrates the value of a phenomenological approach (Lanigan, 1988; Meisenbach & Pringle, 2024; Orbe, 2009; Van Manen, 1990) for organizational communication research on agency (see Brummans, 2018a). This approach proved especially useful in examining how people experience agency as expressed in their interview talk. Notably, our study was not initially designed with agency as a focal point. Rather, it was through our phenomenological attunement to participants’ lived experiences that the concept of agency emerged, particularly in their reflections on the in/ability to act otherwise while navigating connectivity in their daily work communication.
Combining this phenomenological lens with Tracy’s PIQDA (Tracy, 2020; Tracy et al., 2024) allowed us to identify naturally occurring expressions of dialectical agency in participants’ talk. It also revealed participants’ capacity for critical reflection on their connectivity decisions, even in a technology-mediated global work context where such decisions could be described as routinized or mindless. Our methodological approach thus uncovered a striking degree of awareness among global workers about the dialectical nature of agency. Although participants did not use academic terminology, they articulated with clarity and nuance how they navigate between connecting and disconnecting in the course of their daily work communication.
Practical Implications
Our study suggests that global workers’ connectivity decisions are shaped by the dialectical, relational fields in which they operate and to whose constitution they also contribute through their everyday communication. As our findings indicate, global team members often engage with one another in attuned ways, showing flexibility, adaptability, and awareness of each other’s circumstances. For instance, employees sometimes refrain from reaching out after hours in recognition of their teammates’ time zones or personal boundaries. This interpersonal attunement is often appreciated.
Sometimes, however, the ongoing operations of a global organization can lead to connectivity after hours and produce implicit norms of mutual availability or responsiveness. In some cases, flexibility can morph into an unspoken expectation, reinforcing always-on connectivity. Prior research has shown that such connectivity practices, including after-hours communication, are contingent on team-level norms (van Zoonen et al., 2021). Our findings extend this by showing how these expectations are communicatively negotiated in daily connectivity decisions.
To support employee well-being and promote sustainable dis/connection practices, global team leaders—and ideally organizational leaders—should make connectivity expectations explicit. Open discussions about what levels of availability and flexibility are appropriate in different contexts can surface unspoken norms and support shared agreements. Rather than relying on implicit attunement alone, organizations can treat communication as a tool for collective reflection, enabling teams to revisit, reframe, or transform existing patterns. Doing so empowers global workers to sustain a healthier work–life rhythm and fosters a culture in which agency can be exercised more intentionally.
Moreover, as discussed, our study shows that global workers attribute both benefits and challenges to the technologies they use for work communication. Experiences of technological dependency, difficulty in disconnecting, or perceived overreach of digital tools can undermine well-being. This issue is well documented in research on the complex relationship between communication technologies and stress, overload, or burnout (Ayyagari et al., 2011; Bordi et al., 2018; Parker et al., 2023; Vanden Abeele, 2021). Our findings suggest that the very features that make technologies enabling (ease, mobility, responsiveness) can also become constraining. For example, some global workers noted that because they could do everything on their phones, they sometimes ended up doing everything on their phones, leading to a sense of dependency and diminished self-determination.
Resisting this dynamic may require more than individual discipline. As shown in the experiences of several Globa Natura team members and leaders, cultivating a team culture that explicitly supports disconnecting can help mitigate the unintended consequences of ubiquitous connectivity. Beyond the team level, our findings also point to the role of organizational and institutional dimensions in shaping communicative norms. Many countries have implemented “right to disconnect” legislation to guide organizational policy and support employees in maintaining balanced connectivity (Hopkins, 2024). Policies that acknowledge the dialectical nature of connectivity—its simultaneous affordances and intrusions—can play a meaningful role in promoting well-being. However, as our findings illustrate, operations in global organizations are ongoing. Rather than enforcing strict restrictions, guidelines concerning expected availability, rest periods, and communication practices across time zones can help rebalance expectations and restore a measure of collective agency. In this sense, institutional policies are not just top-down constraints, but communicative resources that can help global teams flexibly renegotiate boundaries, reduce technology-related stress, and sustain more intentional and humane forms of digital connection.
Finally, the dialectical nature of agency within the web of relations is, by definition, irresolvable, as this web is composed of interdependent and often competing forces (Gibbs, 2009; Putnam, 2015; Putnam et al., 2016). It is therefore important for global team members, leaders, and organizational decision-makers to reflect critically on how they can collectively express their ability to act otherwise in the ongoing co-composition of this relational field. As our discussion of quasi-material entities suggests, many perceived boundaries, such as when to connect or how to structure work time, may appear objective, yet they are communicatively constituted and sustained. Consequently, they can also be questioned, adjusted, or reimagined through communication.
Consider the example of time. While time-related norms in global work (e.g., adapting to time differences) are often treated as fixed, research shows they are sociomaterially constituted and open to change (Feldman et al., 2020; Odell, 2023; Shipp & Jansen, 2021). Viewing time as a quasi-material dimension reminds us that work rhythms and temporal expectations are not natural givens, but the result of communicative negotiation and institutional habit (cf. Plotnikof & Mumby, 2024; see also Sharma, 2014). In this light, we encourage members of global and non-global organizations alike to examine whether routine practices and organizational rituals exert agentic force (Koschmann & McDonald, 2015); and if so, whether such forces might be redirected or transformed to better support human well-being and organizational life.
Directions for Future Research
Our study opens several promising avenues for future research.
First, it focused on members of a single global organization. Many interviewees described Globa Natura as cultivating a culture that supports employee well-being and work–life balance. Future research could explore how cultural values shape global workers’ agency experiences, particularly the role of work in one’s life, the emphasis on individual agency, and the attunement guiding connectivity decisions. These are likely to be culturally situated phenomena. Investigating organizations with different cultural orientations may reveal important variations in how the dialectics of agency are experienced and navigated (see Gibbs, 2009).
Second, our findings suggest that global work communication provides a distinct context for examining how people attune to others when making connectivity decisions. In some cases, global workers exercise their ability to act otherwise in ways that support coworkers, tasks, and/or the organization as a whole. Yet these acts can simultaneously lead to a diminished sense of personal agency, for example through after-hours work or delays. This points to the relevance of exploring connectivity practices as expressions of prosocial behavior—actions intended to benefit others (Bolino & Grant, 2016). Future studies could investigate the dialectics between agency and prosociality in diverse organizational contexts.
Finally, our phenomenological study relied on interviews to investigate employees’ lived experiences as expressed in talk (see Orbe, 2009). While this approach revealed rich insights, it did not capture extralinguistic dimensions, such as corporeal and affective aspects, that are vital for understanding how dialectical agency is felt and embodied. We therefore encourage future studies to complement interview data with methods like (non-)participant observation or shadowing (Gill & Barbour, 2024). Such approaches can deepen understanding of the multimodal, multidimensional nature of agency as it unfolds in the relational webs of global organizational life.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We kindly thank Oana Albu, Matthew Koschmann, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and guidance during the review process. We are also grateful to Jonna Leppäkumpu for her help with collecting the data for this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Research Council of Finland [grant number 318416].
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.