The Role of Organizational Culture in the Post-Covid business landscape

Abstract: As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting restrictions, many companies found themselves in the reality that they had to conduct their business operations from home. The pandemic has heightened the need for Professional Service Firms (PSFs) to shrink, pivot, re-invent themselves, as well as redeploy organisational culture and resources dramatically, abruptly, and possibly disruptively (Ahlstrom & Wang, 2021; Hitt et al., 2021.Thus our multiple case study examines how culture and cultural control is affected by working remotely. By doing this, our study aims to outline how the culture and cultural controls in PSFs may have changed in order to adapt to the conditions of the post-pandemic work climate. Following a purely qualitative and abductive research approach, data is collected through several semi-structured interviews with upper management, middle management and consultants. Our study contributes to the existing literature on organisational culture and how significant the impact of remote work has had on the culture in PSFs. Our results show that PSFs do not have to change their culture in order to accommodate remote work but need to alter several control practices. We find that remote work demands more of the managers in order to enact control, spontaneous interactions are only partially able to occur in remote PSFs and that the mentor process is subject to change when done in a fully remote setting.