Hybrid work weakens the historical overlap between being physically present, being observable, and being judged as contributing. The organizational problem arises not because reduced presence necessarily lowers performance, but because evaluators may receive fewer, different, or selectively produced cues about work. This Original Propositional Model Article develops a proposed Visibility–Trust–Signaling Model separating actual task contribution, evaluator-accessible evidence, and managerial interpretation. The model introduces observational discontinuity as a proposed mismatch between contribution and accessible evidence, performance-inference uncertainty as the resulting interpretive condition, and monitoring anxiety as anticipatory concern about judgment through incomplete, invasive, or low-control evidence. It proposes that employees respond through artifact, responsiveness, interactional-presence, and relational-endorsement signals. Prior trust, task observability, interdependence, relationship history, role demands, career stage, monitoring design, and expectation clarity are treated as boundary conditions. Signal diagnosticity is proposed to determine whether increased visibility improves evaluation calibration or creates visibility–performance decoupling, in which trace production becomes more legible than contribution. Implications concern evidence architecture, proportional monitoring, expectation-setting, relational access, and contestability rather than universal prescriptions. The model remains non-empirical and unvalidated. Its mechanisms require construct development, longitudinal employee–manager data, independent performance criteria, multilevel designs, and tests permitting null, reversed, nonlinear, and adverse relationships. It does not establish organizational effects or decision readiness. The contribution is a falsifiable vocabulary for examining how hybrid employees become visible without treating visibility as performance.
