Innovation is crucial for competitiveness and it has been suggested that employees’ ability to quickly pursue their own ideas can help firms to be more innovative. Thus, we explore how such self-management affects innovation via increased organizational commitment. Further, we investigate how the extent of virtual collaboration a firm uses, and the firm’s national culture (power distance) moderates the relationship. The study is very timely since remote work and collaboration is increasingly used in the post-pandemic era, but we know little about how it affects innovation. We analyze these relationships in two very different cultural settings: China and the Nordics. Primary survey data from two respondents from 200 Chinese firms and 161 Nordic firms reveals intriguing insights: organizational commitment mediates the positive relationship between self-management and product innovation, and the impact of a virtual collaboration environment on this dynamic differs across cultures. In high virtual collaboration settings, self-management has a larger effect in cultures with high power distance, like China, compared to those with low power distance, such as the Nordic countries. This variation highlights the often overlooked and crucial role of national cultural values, particularly power distance, in determining the impact of self-management in virtual collaboration contexts.
