Managers use return-to-office mandates for the wrong reasons, a recent academic study found: not to improve performance but to control and blame employees.

The study by two researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that managers do not impose return-to-office mandates because they believe that such mandates increase firm values; rather, they use them “to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.”

The study’s leader, Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration at the university's Katz Graduate School of Business, started the research hoping to understand why some S&P 500 firms want employees to return to the office while other firms avoid calling them back, he told Business Insider.

"One of the most common arguments management suggests is that they want to return to office because employee productivity is low at home, and they believe returns to office would help firms improve performance and ultimately improve the firm's value," he told Business Insider. "That's the reason they give—but our results actually do not support these arguments."

Using a sample of Standard &Poor’s 500 firms, Ma and doctoral student Yuye Ding examined determinants and consequences of U.S. firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates. In addition to revealing why managers impose these mandates, they also reported significant declines in employees’ job satisfactions, but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after RTO mandates.

“In summary, our research contributes to the ongoing debate over RTO versus working from home and has important implications for practitioners,” they wrote.

Ma said that one potentially contributing factor as to why firm performance has not improved could be the higher expenses caused by bringing employees back to the office. Those expenses could include parking, office space, catering and other in-house costs.

"So, on average, if we take a look at all these benefits and the expense average, the net benefit is really close to zero," he told Business Insider. "That's what our studies are suggesting."

Managers feel a false sense of control by exerting authority over their employees, which makes them feel more secure about their job and their own careers, Ma said.

“It is my personal belief that, as prior research suggests, most CEOs are very narcissistic. That means they are used to being in the center of everything and issuing orders for employees to follow. But after the pandemic, they feel kind of like they're losing power because employees became more and more aware of their rights during the great resignation. So, the managers feel that they are losing their power inside the firm, basically, and as a result, they want to grab their power back in this relationship. And that's the reason we found such results," he told Business Insider.

Blaming poor performance on employees who they claim underperformed while working from home is another excuse for return-to-office mandates, the research suggested. "So rather than say the poor performance is because of the manager's bad decisions, they will try to tell investors, 'It's not my fault, it's the employees who are being lazy at home,'" Ma said.

To analyze the impact of strict return-to-office policies on workers, Ma's team collected all the employee reviews on Glassdoor for S&P 500 firms, finding that “after return to office mandates, employees' job satisfaction significantly drops," he said. "Based on our findings, … that decrease translates into lower productivity—even though maybe before the pandemic it was true that people were more productive in the office."

Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School and remote work expert, found in recent research that employees who worked from home 75 percent of the time were the most productive. "When you allow flexibility, it expands your talent pool," Choudhury told Business Insider. "Whether the economy is contracting or expanding, the best workers always have outside options,” making it imperative for companies to provide a model that gives the best employees flexibility, lest they be poached by competitors.

Ma echoed that view, telling Business Insider that, instead of forcing everyone back to in-office work, employers should allow employees who perform well at home to continue working remotely. That would benefit the employee as well as help the firm to retain its high performers.