The Leadership Challenge of Remote and Hybrid Work: Leveraging Organizational Identity

Remote and hybrid work challenges leadership in knowledge-intensive organizations to find new ways to maintain workers’ organizational identification when traditional structures that support leader sensegiving—such as the office—have lost much of their resonance. We suggest that leaders vary in their understandings of and desire to tightly control the organization’s boundaries as characterized under so-called “open-system” perspectives of organization, and we use this variance to articulate different leadership approaches to leveraging organizational identity to maintain employee-organization connections. We theorize a new, open-system approach that leaders may use to shift their view of remote and hybrid work from risk to benefit and propose how this leadership may build organizational identification in ways that ultimately enhance creativity and innovation. However, these advantages come with tradeoffs: leaders will be less able to blueprint in advance the value workers will create and may be less able to detect counterproductive behaviors. Our framework suggests many new directions for research aimed at understanding leadership of remote and hybrid work in knowledge-intensive organizations.