Completely different incentives. Executives are in those roles because their anxieties for control align with productivity for shareholders. The coercive threa

Completely different incentives. Executives are in those roles because their anxieties for control align with productivity for shareholders. The coercive threat is the whole point of executive management in private profit focused organizations. Researchers on the other hand are not as interested in maintaining the power distribution bias. Rather they use “economic” factors like described in the article to describe what would seem to be a mutually beneficial situation. So what’s so confusing? It’s because all these commenters are still stuck in the thinking that by default, incentives are aligned all the way from investors to line workers in a firm (otherwise why would they be there? They can just move in a “free market” - they are “rational actors” and other economics lies etc…) As these studies show, coercive executives hate remote work because it reduces the frequency they can create pop-up tasks and break workflows to satisfy their desires. So productivity is up but control is down. It also makes bullying and intimidation much harder to get away with. So the conundrum is simply executives throwing tantrums about their loss of structural methods of coercion they aren’t able to effect as easily. Never forget, unless you are an owner of the company (eg. meaningful ownership, that has the ability to shut the org down) management, executives and investors are not only not your friends, but they are adversarial to your benefit. Studies like these demonstrate that almost perfectly and yet everybody’s confused about why is it not the same? It’s exceptionally simple and it’s something we’ve all known forever and it’s been captured in comic books and movies and everything else: middle management and above is incentivized to be antagonistic to non-ownership labor by function of the structure that it’s within.