Employee Engagement in the Hybrid Work Era: Exploring the Relationship between Leadership Styles and Workplace Productivity

Abstract

The rapid, largely involuntary shift toward hybrid work arrangements has reopened a long-standing question in organizational behaviour research: whether leadership style meaningfully shapes employee engagement and, through it, workplace productivity, under conditions where face-to-face supervision is no longer the default mode of leader-follower interaction. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature connecting leadership style, employee engagement, and productivity, synthesizing foundational engagement theory and the Job Demands-Resources model with the transformational-transactional leadership tradition and the more recent e-leadership and virtual-team leadership literature that emerged specifically to address technology-mediated supervision. The review further incorporates large-sample empirical evidence on remote and hybrid work productivity, including field-experimental and personnel-analytics studies conducted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, to evaluate whether the engagement-productivity relationship established in traditional workplace settings generalizes to hybrid contexts. Particular attention is given to how transformational leadership behaviours, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration, translate, attenuate, or require adaptation when delivered primarily through digital communication channels rather than physical co-presence. Comparative tables map leadership style dimensions onto their engagement mechanism, contrast documented in-person versus hybrid-context leadership effectiveness evidence, and set specific hybrid-work productivity moderators against the leadership practices the reviewed literature associates with addressing each. The paper concludes that transformational leadership's engagement-building effect persists in hybrid contexts but operates through a narrower and more deliberately exercised behavioural repertoire than in co-located settings, and identifies the measurement of engagement itself under hybrid conditions as a central future research priority.