THE adoption of hybrid workplaces has changed the practice and performance of leadership as well as teamwork. This is particularly true when it comes to considering the effects of various leadership styles on performance. Within this emerging framework, leadership is not limited to a fixed area as it now involves remote work, self-governance and digital mediation.
Leadership styles of empowering, democratic, autocratic and laissez-faire are said to not only affect motivation at personal and individual levels but also affect the team level in a hybrid setting where members work partly physically and partly virtually.
Therefore, to sustain and achieve desired levels of productivity, innovation and engagement in business, it is imperative to appreciate the impacts of different leadership styles exercised in hybrid work environments.
Empowering leadership is one of the most hybrid-friendly styles of leadership and it features delegation, autonomy and shared responsibility.
Empowering leadership has a strong direct impact on adaptive performance. This is particularly when it is mediated through knowledge sharing and employee agility.
In hybrid work settings, the contextual distance between leaders and employees tends to slow down real-time feedback and tangible supervision. This forces employees to self-manage, make independent decisions and adjust to rolling challenges on their own.
Empowering leaders tend to cherish these constraints by aiming to provide motivation and trust that is more intrinsic. This leadership style meets the psychological needs of competence and interpersonal connection.
According to the self-determination theory, these are essential for performance and active engagement. Self-directed agile teams led by empowering leaders are not only more adaptable but they are also more innovative as members are encouraged to actively participate and take responsibility.
Leadership that empowers tends to improve collaboration within a team through the process of sharing informative knowledge.
In hybrid teams, where face-to-face knowledge transfer is mostly limited to informal interactions, fostering cultures of deliberate proactive knowledge transfer becomes important.
Empowering leadership actively solicits the donation and collection of knowledge through reciprocal social exchanges among employees. This phenomenon, grounded in social exchange theory, fosters team integration and overall achievement.
Under these conditions, team members are more willing to help one another, cover absent skills and respond to difficult problems in a coordinated manner when they are granted autonomy and trust.
Contrary to that, certain researchers have focused on the effects of autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire leadership styles on motivation in hybrid contexts.
Their study indicated that democratic leadership had a strong positive impact on employee motivation and engagement, which reinforces team performance.
Democratic leadership fosters active team communication as shared goals and personal values are integrated while psychological safety is maintained. This is particularly important for hybrid teams because they suffer from miscommunication and social isolation.
The likelihood of participation, contribution of creative ideas and responsibility towards achieving shared goals increases when team members are actively engaged throughout the entire process. On the contrary, autocratic leadership is least useful in hybrid contexts because such settings tend to promote control at the centre, which curbs initiative and flexibility.
It has been reported that autocratic styles tend to have lower motivation because of lack of participation and higher levels of distrust. This is especially true for leaders who try to distance themselves and then manage everything closely.
Although productivity may rise in the short term from an autocratic style applied to repetitive and routine tasks, it hampers the formation of team synergy, multilateral adaptability and innovative problem-solving capabilities. These attributes are essential to thrive in the intricacy brought about by the hybrid work environment.
This leadership stems from the assumption that leaders should not intervene or make decisions at all. In hybrid settings, this approach is linked with poor to unfavourable motivational outcomes.
Direction and support missing may result in fragmented teams, ambiguity of roles and poor performance. Under this form of leadership, teams appear to have a low level of coordination as well as definable clarity, which in turn diminishes productivity and collaboration.
Such a hands-off attitude only makes an already challenging situation much worse due to time differences, distance and lack of synchronous communication.
In traditional office environments, leaders have the benefits of witnessing behaviours and managing them in real time. Frequent social check-ins, observatory metrics and structured interactions become increasingly crucial in hybrid arrangements.
The hybrid paradigm is also contingent upon the leader’s capability to stimulate employee agility, that is, the capacity to foretell, adjust and actively address change.
Some researchers have found that agility alongside strategic leadership styles and adaptive performance are interdependent. Exercising team agility can be said to resolve prioritisation, tool selection and workflow ambiguity issues within hybrid systems.
The hybrid model brings new elements of leadership to the forefront, which is extremely interesting. The effectiveness from flexibility of hybrid teams combined with the holistic leadership multi-strategy integration responds well to the changing moments and phases of the team.
Unlike many other domains within organisational balance, flexibility stands out in a hybrid configuration. Team alignment, task interdependence and level of infrastructure available are important. This is because function does not always follow form.
For example, it can be said that democratic leadership may be more effective within creative consensus teams. On the other hand, empowering leadership would take precedence where personal responsibility is deemed to be critical.
In this hybrid framework, the combination of different leadership styles is what strongly drives team performance. When a leader shows empowering leadership, it can be said that a higher level of self-initiative is endorsed.
On the other hand, democratic leadership is where trust is given within collective efforts. Practically speaking, it improves visibility, oversight, communication and social disconnection that characterise the hybrid workplace.
The participation gap can be explained well as coming from leadership that does not have cohesion. This results from overriding autocratic or laissez-faire styles. Having structure and flexibility, control and trust as well as direction and freedom can improve team work within a hybrid setting.
The author is from the Faculty of Management and Hospitality at Spectrum International University College. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
