Employee Engagement in Hybrid Work Environments: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The speed of the adoption of hybrid working has also affected the way employee engagement is developed, sustained and lived in organisations. There has been extensive research regarding engagement in traditional and fully-remote learning environments, but the evidence is fragmented and incongruent when looking at hybrid learning environments. This study provides a systematic literature review that brings together the current literature around the employees' engagement in a hybrid working situation. The review systematically synthesizes peer-reviewed research from the last 10 years using theories on engagement (Kahn, 1990), on job demands–resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007), and on flexible work (Allen et al., 2015). The review process was conducted in a transparent way, across major academic databases, and key factors, mechanisms and outcomes of engagement in hybrid contexts were identified. The results reveal that the decision to work flexibly involves a complex interplay between autonomy, leadership practices, digital work design and organizational support systems, and not only location flexibility. Moderating effects of hybrid intensity and contextual factors, including culture and role interdependence (Wang et al., 2021), are also highlighted in the synthesis. This review connects the dots of what we know about engagement and organizes it around a theme, making the insights more granular, while also adding to the theory of engagement in the context of hybrid work, with implications for organizations that want to build viable hybrid working models. The paper ends with discussion of the most important research gaps and directions for future research.