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Workarounds represent informal modifications to rules and procedures that individuals will engage into navigate around a process block in order to make their job easier. Although workarounds have been primarily studied from an individual-level perspective, this chapter argues that workarounds are a socially constructed, multilevel phenomenon, meaning that they are influenced by others (e.g., group norms and coworkers) and can result in the emergence of workaround climates. We find empirical support for the view that workarounds are shaped by a variety of social influences. Moreover, based on an inductive exploratory study, we suggest that workarounds are related to informal training and troubleshooting behaviors. We conclude by outlining several theory-based directions for understanding how workarounds spread throughout all levels of an organization as an incubator for future research.

While research has been conducted on the causes of workarounds, less is known about their impact on business processes and system outcomes. This study aims to investigate the impact on accounting information quality from workarounds implemented by personnel at a large global organization.

Interviews and qualitative analysis methods were used at one large multinational organization in the midst of a multi-year SAP implementation. A subset of employees in the desired categories (systems designers and advisors) was gained through snowball sampling.

Workarounds have significant impacts on the quality of both financial and managerial accounting information quality. System users are often unable to fully comprehend their place in the task chain, and thus are unaware of the implications of their actions on information quality.

Control issues are an inherent part of workaround outcomes, as is the notion of system success. The current research suggests a need for much more work in these areas, including additional exploration of the outcomes of workarounds.

The examples demonstrated very clearly that deviations from standard procedures have very real consequences. In particular, the completeness, neutrality and accuracy were impacted, making it difficult for the organization to achieve relevance and faithful representation in their financial information. Additional insights are provided concerning the importance of knowledge sharing and the degree to which an organization may achieve a more integrated information system.

This paper complements existing research on workarounds through analysis of impacts on accounting information quality. An important contribution of the current study is to continue the move away from focusing solely on the causes of workarounds, and instead investigate the outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the studies about workaround behavior in the Information Systems (IS) area, addressing its positive and negative aspects and raising the key related issues.

A systematic literature review was conducted to verify how workaround behavior has been approached in IS studies. A qualitative method was adopted and implemented in two stages: selection of articles from the time period 2007-2017 in the databases Web of Science, ScienceDirect and Scopus and analysis of the selected articles.

The results showed that many studies have been concerned with identifying the principal reasons for the manifestation of workaround behavior and the measures taken to reduce its impacts. Many studies from international journals examined the implementation of an ERP along with the workaround behavior. The need to expand the national studies on workaround behavior is emphasized, because the majority of the identified studies are international.

The key limitation is related to the period of analysis, because only articles published since 2007 were selected.

This paper contributes to both theory and practice, bringing relevant concepts about workaround behavior, and corroborating the importance of the studies on workaround in the IS area. The literature review of the 20 articles analyzed reveals the main features in each article, such as theoretical and methodological aspects that support the research. Based on this analysis, a conceptual map was developed presenting the most relevant points about workaround behavior, where the causes, the negative and positive consequences, the types of solutions and the organizational and individual impacts are presented.

Research into workaround behavior has increased in recent years, however very few studies have been conducted in Brazil. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no articles regarding Brazil and this subject were published between 2007 and 2017. Thus, this paper seeks to redress this imbalance.

Workarounds are defined as user-formulated solutions that overcome the obstacles preventing the system's execution from the users' lenses. In this paper, the authors aim to analyze the workarounds in system implementations and post-implementations with reflections on different levels of resilience in the workplace.

In this paper, the authors conduct a critical review of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system workarounds by evaluating whether the workarounds are treated as resilience enhancers or as hinderers at multiple levels. While doing this evaluation, the authors try to understand the nature of the workarounds (self-serving, social-serving) with respective levels of analysis for resilience (ERP resilience, organizational resilience, team resilience, employee resilience) and to integrate the assessment of similar concepts to resilience such as adaptability, flexibility and agility (in survival and sustainability dimensions).

Workaround solutions can be treated as resilience enhancers when the alternative solutions overcome some systemic problems and prevent system failures in the short run, but in the long term, they should motivate positive change and organizational dynamics. Otherwise, weaknesses of informal workarounds may become embedded in practice, and prevent confronting and correcting the shortcomings of the system and thus harm resilience.

The differentiation of workarounds as self-serving or social-serving and the resilience perspective toward workarounds with different levels of analysis and integrating resilience relevant concepts such as adaptability, agility and flexibility are new as far as the authors know.

Conducted with a staff of 562 persons working in the health sector in Quebec, mainly nurses, the purpose of this paper is to test the indirect effects of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) on workarounds through physical fatigue, cognitive weariness and emotional exhaustion as mediators.

The structural equation method, namely CFA, was used to test the structure of constructs, the reliability and validity of the measurement scales as well as model fit. To test the mediation effects, Hayes’s PROCESS (2013) macro and 95 percent confidence intervals were used and 5,000 bootstrapping re-samples were run. The statistical treatments were carried out with the AMOS software V.24 and SPSS v.22.

The results based on bootstrap analysis and Sobel’s test demonstrate that physical fatigue, cognitive weariness and emotional exhaustion mediate the relationship between PSC and safety workarounds.

The study has important practical implications in detecting blocks and obstacles in the work processes and decreasing the use of workaround behaviors, or in converting their negative consequences into positive contributions.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between PSC, burnout and workaround behaviors. These results could contribute to a better understanding of this construct of workarounds and how to deal with it. Moreover, the test of the concepts of PSC in this study provides support for the theory of “conservation of resources” by proposing an extension of this theory.

There have been many studies that investigated the causes of workarounds, but there is less research on their outcomes, such as the impact on internal control. This study aims to investigate the use of workarounds by a multinational organization that implemented SAP about 10 years ago, and how those workarounds affected internal controls.

A qualitative study is performed by analyzing interviews with company personnel for a multinational organization. Employees selected for interviews are primarily users of SAP’s accounting functions.

Workarounds have significant impacts on the internal controls over financial reporting. Workarounds cause compensating controls to be implemented, which are often manual in nature, and decrease the organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Workarounds become integrated into an organization’s activities to meet its business needs. This research raises questions to determine when maintaining organizational efficiency and control outweighs the need to provide customer service and other business needs.

Companies should consider whether their business processes can be modified to ensure that they can be handled within the enterprise system. In addition, the number of compensating controls required due to workarounds may decrease the organizational efficiency expected from having an enterprise resource planning system to ensure the integrity of financial information.

This paper moves beyond finding the causes of workarounds, and expands what is known about workarounds and their impact on an organization. An important contribution of this study is to consider the intersection of workarounds, ERP systems and internal controls.

The purpose of this paper is to examine workarounds from the perspective of the users of the system, focusing on the outcomes of workarounds and their effect on the quality of accounting information.

Interviews were conducted with employees in the accounting functions at two international organizations using SAP for their enterprise system. Results were coded by two experienced researchers and one undergraduate student, and included a categorization of the outcomes of workarounds.

The most striking result is the difference in views of workarounds between the two organizations. While workarounds are discouraged by the accounting function at both organizations, one seeks out workarounds and enforces standards while the other has not yet achieved process standardization. Not surprisingly, users view the workarounds of others as very detrimental to the quality of accounting information, but view their own workarounds as critical to maintain quality.

Organizations should obtain input from system users to document the extent that workarounds are used within the organization to determine the impact on the quality of their financial reporting.

The focus on outcomes of workarounds is an important shift in the literature, and more work is needed to further refine the categories used in this research, particularly for the effect of workarounds on internal controls and information quality. Additionally, this research surfaced a very strong difference in the actions taken to deal with workarounds, which may be due to organizational cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate relationships between workarounds (solutions to handling trade-offs between competing or misaligned goals and gaps in policies and procedures), perceived trade-offs, information security (IS) policy compliance, IS expertise/knowledge and IS demands.

The research purpose is addressed using survey data from a nationwide sample of Swedish white-collar workers (N = 156).

Responses reinforce the notion that workarounds partly are something different from IS policy compliance and that workarounds-as-improvisations are used more frequently by employees that see more conflicts between IS and other goals (r = 0.351), and have more IS expertise/knowledge (r = 0.257). Workarounds-as-non-compliance are also used more frequently when IS trade-offs are perceived (r = 0.536). These trade-offs are perceived more by people working in organizations that handle information with high security demands (r = 0.265) and those who perform tasks with high IS demands (r = 0.178).

IS policies are an important part of IS governance. They describe the procedures that are supposed to provide IS. Researchers have primarily investigated how employees’ compliance with IS policies can be predicted and explained. There has been an increased interest in how tradeoffs and conflicts between following policies and other goals lead employees to make workarounds. Workarounds may leave management unaware of how work actually is done within the organization and may besides getting work done lead to new vulnerabilities. This study furthers the understanding of workarounds and trade-offs, which should be subject to further research.

Attempts to transform health systems have in many countries involved starting to pay healthcare providers through a DRG system, but that has involved managerial workarounds. Managerial workarounds have seldom been analysed. This paper does so by extending and modifying existing knowledge of the causes and character of clinical and IT workarounds, to produce a conceptualisation of the managerial workaround. It further develops and revises this conceptualisation by comparing the practical management, at both provider and purchaser levels, of hospital DRG payment systems in England, Germany and Italy.

We make a qualitative test of our initial assumptions about the antecedents, character and consequences of managerial workarounds by comparing them with a systematic comparison of case studies of the DRG hospital payment systems in England, Germany and Italy. The data collection through key informant interviews (N = 154), analysis of policy documents (N = 111) and an action learning set, began in 2010–12, with additional data collection from key informants and administrative documents continuing in 2018–19 to supplement and update our findings.

Managers in all three countries developed very similar workarounds to contain healthcare costs to payers. To weaken DRG incentives to increase hospital activity, managers agreed to lower DRG payments for episodes of care above an agreed case-load ‘ceiling' and reduced payments by less than the full DRG amounts when activity fell below an agreed ‘floor' volume.

Empirically this study is limited to three OECD health systems, but since our findings come from both Bismarckian (social-insurance) and Beveridge (tax-financed) systems, they are likely to be more widely applicable. In many countries, DRGs coexist with non-DRG or pre-DRG systems, so these findings may also reflect a specific, perhaps transient, stage in DRG-system development. Probably there are also other kinds of managerial workaround, yet to be researched. Doing so would doubtlessly refine and nuance the conceptualisation of the ‘managerial workaround’ still further.

In the case of DRGs, the managerial workarounds were instances of ‘constructive deviance' which enabled payers to reduce the adverse financial consequences, for them, arising from DRG incentives. The understanding of apparent failures or part-failures to transform a health system can be made more nuanced, balanced and diagnostic by using the concept of the ‘managerial workaround'.

Managerial workarounds also appear outside the health sector, so the present analysis of managerial workarounds may also have application to understanding attempts to transform such sectors as education, social care and environmental protection.

So far as we are aware, no other study presents and tests the concept of a ‘managerial workaround'. Pervasive, non-trivial managerial workarounds may be symptoms of mismatched policy objectives, or that existing health system structures cannot realise current policy objectives; but the workarounds themselves may also contain solutions to these problems.

This research aims to study the coping experience of visually impaired (VI) bankers in India after they have received reasonable accommodation from their employers, that is, the work process or environment has been suitably modified to ensure a barrier-free environment for them.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 VI bankers working with public sector banks in India. A phenomenological approach was adopted during data analysis.

Despite the provision of reasonable accommodations, VI employees often find it difficult to fulfill their job responsibilities. This is on account of extensive paperwork required for completion of their jobs and the partially accessible information systems available to them. As a result, these VI employees are found resorting to workarounds to carry out their jobs, with the nature of workarounds adopted varying with the type and extent of visual impairment. Furthermore, it is observed that VI employees require social support not only from their superiors and peers but also from their subordinates and customers to carry out their tasks.

Data collection was done through snowball sampling which could have resulted in sampling bias. Due to confidentiality issues, observation of workarounds in practice by VI employees could not be carried out as part of the study.

The study contributes to the literature on integration of persons with disabilities (PwDs) by examining their coping experience after provision of reasonable accommodations. It emphasizes the role of workarounds, an under-studied area in PwD integration, as well as support of other stakeholders in the experience.