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Journal of Applied Organizational Systems and Behavior

2022 Volume 2 Issue 1

Hybrid Work and the Remaking of Organizational Attachment


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  1. Department of Organizational Behavior and Work Design, Faculty of Business, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
  2. Department of Hybrid Work and Organizational Attachment, Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Abstract

Hybrid work has loosened the historical coupling between organizational attachment and routine presence in a common workplace. This shift creates a conceptual and practical problem: employees may remain formally connected to an organization while experiencing discontinuities in identity, reduced access to consequential voice, weakened relational proximity, or intensified work–nonwork permeability. This integrative review examines how organizational attachment is remade across recurrent movement among offices, homes, and third spaces. It combines heterogeneous quantitative, qualitative, longitudinal, experimental, theoretical, and methodological evidence across four domains: identity continuity, employee voice, belonging, and boundary control. The synthesis indicates that attachment is not uniformly strengthened or weakened by spatial flexibility. Instead, it is reconfigured through the quality of work design, access to identity-supporting cues, the visibility and safety of speaking up, relational responsiveness, and employees’ capacity to control boundaries and availability. The literature converges on the importance of organizational enactment and managerial interpretation, but conflicts over whether flexibility produces autonomy or autonomy pressure, connection or isolation, and visibility or marginalization. These conclusions remain conditional because work arrangements, constructs, occupations, national contexts, and time horizons are inconsistently defined and frequently examined through self-report or short-term designs. The review contributes an original Organizational Attachment Reconfiguration Framework that integrates the four domains without treating it as a validated causal model. Longitudinal, multilevel, comparative, and arrangement-specific research is required before stable organizational effects or universal design prescriptions can be inferred.


How to cite this article
Vancouver
Wilson E, Jong FD, Peters L. Hybrid Work and the Remaking of Organizational Attachment. J Appl Organ Syst Behav. 2022;2(1):36-45. https://doi.org/10.51847/ghA5cd6q08
APA
Wilson, E., Jong, F. D., & Peters, L. (2022). Hybrid Work and the Remaking of Organizational Attachment. Journal of Applied Organizational Systems and Behavior, 2(1), 36-45. https://doi.org/10.51847/ghA5cd6q08

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