Beyond where we work

Lütjens, Dorothee; Felfe, Jörg

doi:10.3390/admsci16020063

Beyond where we work

Daily informal communication, knowledge sharing, and commitment in hybrid teams

Publication date

2026-01-27

Document type

Forschungsartikel

Author

Lütjens, Dorothee

Felfe, Jörg

Organisational unit

Arbeits-, Organisations- und Wirtschaftspsychologie

DTEC.bw

DOI

10.3390/admsci16020063

URI

https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/handle/10.24405/24023

Project

Digital Leadership & Health

Publisher

MDPI

Series or journal

Administrative Sciences

ISSN

2076-3387

Periodical volume

16

Periodical issue

2

Article ID

63

Peer-reviewed

✅

Part of the university bibliography

✅

Funding(s)

Publikationsfonds der HSU/UniBw H

Language

English

Keyword

Hybrid work

Team communication

Team commitment

Informal communication

Knowledge sharing

Daily diary study

dtec.bw

Abstract

Hybrid work not only redistributes where employees work; it also reshapes how they stay connected to their colleagues. Drawing on Communicate–Bond–Belong (CBB) theory, we examine how daily work location shapes employees’ team commitment in hybrid work environments through informal communication and knowledge sharing, and how these daily links depend on task interdependence. Using a daily diary study with 219 employees who work at least one day a week from home and one day a week in the office (1655 day-level observations), we applied multilevel structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.8 to capture within-person day-to-day fluctuations. Our findings show that on days when employees worked from home rather than in the office, they reported less informal communication and less knowledge sharing with colleagues, which in turn related to lower team commitment. These indirect effects suggest that it is not physical distance per se, but the loss of cue-rich, relationship-building and task-related exchanges that erodes commitment on remote days. We further show that task interdependence differentially qualifies these daily relationships: for informal communication, the positive association with commitment is stronger when task interdependence is low and weaker when interdependence is high. In contrast, the positive association between knowledge sharing and commitment becomes stronger at higher levels of task interdependence. Together, the results advance understanding of social dynamics in hybrid work environments and offer actionable guidance for leaders and organizations.

Description

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Version

Published version

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