Management Principal and Practice in Concern with Control; Technology; Virtual Organization; Empowerment

Trust is an essential element necessary in every organisation for example, in the process of performance measurement (Pettinger, 2002). However, it is perhaps, considered to be of greater importance in virtual organisations due to the lack of physical interaction between employees and management, although, management have provisions in place, such as diagnostic controls (Simons, 1995), call monitoring etc, to ensure that the workforce conforms to their beliefs, practices and instructions, or face punishment, similar to the relationship between that of an adult and a child (drawing upon the work of Berne's transactional analysis, cited in Stewart and Joines, 1997) with an organisation's information infrastructure being the enabler, although ideally it should resemble more of an adult-adult relationship. Therefore, conveying that in a situation where a lot of trust is necessary, the opposite is in fact true, and very little trust actually exists, which could have a detrimental effect on the motivation of the workforce and ultimately on organisational performance, although generally this can be avoided by management empowering the workforce, however, in order for management to maintain control, in this sense, communication becomes pivotal, as any extraordinary change in the environment can cause confusion in who employees can place trust, particularly, in a virtual organisation as purpose can be lost. …