The uniqueness of hybrid work lies in the specific combination of onsite and remote settings (cf. Parker and Grote, 2022; Rigotti et al., 2024; Ong and Johnson, 2023). Xie et al. (2019) identified boundlessness, multitasking, demand for constant learning, and non-work-related interruptions as specific hybrid work characteristics but did not differentiate between supervisors and employees. However, research indicates that work characteristics of supervisors differ from those of employees, for instance in terms of access to resources, intensity or quantity of stressors (Herttalampi et al., 2022; Skakon et al., 2011; Zimber et al., 2015). However, while new constellations of different hybrid work characteristics are likely (Fan and Moen, 2023; Parker et al., 2017), a comprehensive assessment of supervisors’ work characteristics is still lacking.

To explore work characteristics of supervisors in hybrid work settings, we rely on the classification of job demands and resources as outlined by the JD-R model (Demerouti et al., 2001). Job demands are challenging and require continual effort, whereas the resources are empowering and motivating aspects of the work (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007). The main propositions of the model include a motivational and a strain path. The first explains how job resources are related to motivation and, consequently, to favorable outcomes, whereas the second describes how job demands that persist over a time can lead to strain and unfavorable outcomes (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007). In a comprehensive review, the authors of the JD-R discuss extensive empirical evidence and additions to the model (Bakker et al., 2023). As it provides a framework for a basic classification of work characteristics, the JD-R model seems suitable for exploring the job demands and resources in hybrid settings as a starting point for work design research in this context. In our study, we will therefore draw on JD-R to examine the following research question (RQ):

Leadership demands are specific job demands that are associated with the responsibilities of the leader or supervisor role. Some are formalized in job descriptions, but others are more a set of varying expectations toward the supervisor that they are not always aware of (cf. Cloutier and Barling, 2023). The uniqueness of a leadership demand lies in its bidirectionality, as it is relevant both as a job demand for the supervisor and as an action directed toward the employees. Furthermore, as previous research has shown, performing leadership is not independent of the work characteristics of supervisors (Stempel et al., 2023). According to the conservation of resources theory (COR, Hobfoll et al., 2018), job resources can stimulate cycles of resource gain that provide supervisors with the necessary reserves to handle leadership responsibilities (cf. Stein et al., 2020; Stempel et al., 2023). For instance, a high degree of autonomy in hybrid settings might help a supervisor to engage in strategic planning for communication with her or his team. In contrast, a lack of resources or the threat of a resource loss can trigger resource loss cycles (Hobfoll et al., 2018). As Sherf et al. (2019) show, managers who were confronted with a high workload tended to treat their employees less fairly. The example by Sherf et al. (2019) indicates that the implementation of leadership demands requires an investment of resources or effort from the supervisor and can therefore be considered a demand in terms of the JD-R model (Dóci et al., 2020; Stempel et al., 2023).

Examining leadership demands from a work design perspective is a novel approach. It provides specific opportunities to shape leadership tasks in response to rapidly changing work characteristics (Herttalampi et al., 2022; Nayani et al., 2018). Hybrid work might evoke a demand for specific leadership. For example, increased flexibility is often linked to indirect forms of control that depend more heavily on management by objectives. These systems must be carefully designed to prevent negative consequences (Deci et al., 2016).

To comprehend and systematize the variety of leadership demands in a hybrid environment, it seems helpful to organize them along the three mechanisms through which supervisors exert influence. First, supervisors influence their employees by designing their work characteristics, such as offering autonomy, organizing work or distributing work tasks (Nielsen and Taris, 2019; Stempel et al., 2023; Vincent-Höper and Stein, 2019). Research indicates that the indirect influence via the design of work characteristics might have been underestimated in the past (Arnold, 2017; Schaufeli, 2015; Vincent-Höper and Stein, 2019; Yizhong et al., 2019). In comparison, there is extensive prior research on the second mechanism: the direct interactions between supervisors and their employees. This relational aspect predominately focuses on leadership behaviors like transformational or destructive leadership (e.g., Arnold, 2017; Mackey et al., 2021; Montano et al., 2023). And third, supervisors are role models for their employees, providing orientation and conveying the norms and expectations of an organization (Koch and Binnewies, 2015; Kranabetter and Niessen, 2017; Stempel and Siestrup, 2022). The latter presupposes that they reflect on their own leadership role, their expectations as well as the goals and norms of their team and organization (Haslam et al., 2011). While there is a wealth of research findings on all three mechanisms, the extent to which the specific leadership demands are shaped by a hybrid context remains largely unexplored. Given this gap, we structure our second research question along these mechanisms to explore whether specific leadership demands are linked to hybrid leadership:

We chose a qualitative approach and conducted semi-structured interviews to map the experiences of the supervisors in hybrid work settings, because comprehensive findings on work characteristics and leadership demands are still lacking. The interview guide contains general questions about hybrid work settings and the understanding of the own leadership role as well as a systematization of work characteristics based on the recommendations of the World Health Organization (2022). To analyze the data, we conducted a content analysis according to Kuckartz and Rädiker (2022).

Before the start of the project, we submitted our research project to the university’s ethics committee and received approval for the study. Participation was voluntary, and we informed the participants about the purpose of the study, the procedures, and the anonymization of the data obtained. Additionally, supervisors consented to the interviews being audio-recorded and received no incentives or compensation for their participation. Recognizing that flexible time and location models are not possible or common in every industry, we intentionally approached supervisors who lead hybrid teams. Nevertheless, the participants of our study stem from diverse industries. We aimed to acquire a comprehensive picture of work settings that allows a certain degree of generalization across industries. Additionally, we only included supervisors who had direct leadership responsibilities and, therefore, regularly interacted with their employees. We stopped the acquisition once we considered the variety of industries and positions sufficient (in terms of data saturation) to provide insights into diverse work characteristics of supervisors in hybrid work settings.

We conducted expert interviews with 17 female and 16 male supervisors in Germany resulting in an overall sample of 33 participants. The supervisors were between 24 and 63 years old with an average of 40.39 (SD = 8.84) years. They had various occupational backgrounds, such as engineering, health care, or environmental protection (see Appendix A for supplementary materials). On average, the supervisors reported an overall leadership experience of 8.15 (SD = 6.08) years, a tenure in their current position of 4.90 (SD = 4.68) years, and responsibility for on average 13 to 14 employees (M = 13.58, SD = 19.49).

Our research team comprises the (first) author as a senior researcher in work and organizational psychology, three master’s students in psychology and one master’s student in sociology. Before beginning data collection, the research team familiarized themselves with the literature on hybrid work and the interview guidelines. The guidelines were tested in a trial interview and checked for comprehensibility and adequacy. The four master’s students collected data between May and August 2022 contacting supervisors for one-to-one meetings via private and university professional networks. The interviews were conducted either through video call or in-person, based on the interviewees’ preference. The average duration of the interviews was 43 min, and the video image was not captured. All interviews were audio recorded, anonymized, and content transcribed by the research team. The coding of the material was undertaken by all members of the research team and included the number of the interview transcript, the initials of the interviewer and the marked beginning of the sequence in the MAXQDA 2022 file (VERBI Software, 2021; e.g. A1_SK_5).

The structure of the interview guidelines (see Appendix B for supplementary materials) was based on general recommendations for work characteristics, including psychosocial risk assessment (Dettmers and Krause, 2020; World Health Organization, 2022). The first part of the guidelines ensured a standardized introduction of the topic, terminology, and the proceedings. Additionally, demographic (age, gender) and organizational background variables (industry, tenure of supervisor in current position, overall tenure leadership, number of employees supervised) were collected before the audio recording started. The following part addressed general questions about the perceptions of the hybrid work situation, which was often linked to the circumstances of the (post-)pandemic situation due to the timing of the interviews.

After exploring general views on the hybrid work situation, the supervisors were asked about their understanding of their own role and leadership demands as supervisors of hybrid working teams. The next section dealt with questions about conducive and hindering work characteristics for themselves and for their employees. We used established guidelines from the World Health Organization (2022) and Dettmers and Krause (2020) to structure the interview questions around work content, work organization, working hours, social relationships, and work environment.

Participants completed an interactive ranking task at the end of the questionnaire that was not relevant to this study. Finally, we asked the supervisors about open points, additions, and their current state of mind. We informed them about the further procedure of the research project and the overall length of the interview was noted.

The transcribed material was coded by the author and the research assistants (see Appendix C for the original quotations in German and their English translations). They coded the material based on sense sections (passages that form a self-contained meaning), whereby text passages could be assigned several codes. In the initial review of the study material, we coded work characteristics based on the deductive categories provided by Dettmers and Krause (2020) and Table 1 for conceptualization and anchor examples. Additionally, it was possible to derive and suggest initial inductive categories based on the material not covered by the classification of work characteristics by Dettmers and Krause (2020) and Figure 1.

In the following, results of leaders’ job demands and resources in hybrid settings are reported along the deductive categorization system and the inductive category with anchor examples listed in Table 1 highlighting work characteristics linked to hybrid work with *.

Below, the results for research question 2 are reported along the three mechanisms of leadership: work design, direct interaction. and role modeling. Anchor examples are listed in Table 2.

Our findings provide new impulses for the theoretical discussion on the work characteristics of supervisors. First, we notice difficulties taking a look at the clear classification of job resources and job demands as proposed by JD-R (Bakker et al., 2023), because the individual appraisal seems to be decisive (cf. Ma et al., 2021; Mitchell et al., 2019). In our interviews, supervisors appraise a lack of job demands sometimes as a job resource or vice versa. For instance, supervisors in our interviews appreciated a well-functioning information flow as a job resource, particularly for their work in hybrid settings, whereas others described a lack of information or information overload as a classical job demand. This contrasts with the statement by Bakker et al. (2023) that “a low score on a job demand is not a resource” (p. 42) even though the authors acknowledge that different occupations have different job demands and resources. The challenge-hindrance framework addresses this problem of classifying job demands by offering a differentiation based on the valence of the job demands (Cavanaugh et al., 2000; Sonnentag et al., 2023). Nevertheless, in our study the appraisal not only concerns the nature of job demands but also job resources or a lack thereof. This finding aligns with a study on work characteristics and health, which demonstrated that low demands can reduce the health risk while low resources increase it (Dettmers and Stempel, 2021). Overall, we assume that not only occupations differ in their job demands and resources (Bakker et al., 2023), but also that work arrangements such as hybrid work or the supervisor position are composed of a specific pattern of high or low demands and resources (e.g., Parker and Grote, 2022; Rigotti et al., 2024; Xie et al., 2019). Thus, an analysis of working condition profiles in different work settings or roles might be a sensible approach to estimate consequences and initiate targeted work design (cf. Ong and Johnson, 2023). This is particularly relevant, because supervisors’ capacity to perform leadership is closely linked to their job demands and resources (Sherf et al., 2019; Stempel et al., 2023).

By investigating our second research question on leadership as a demand for supervisors in hybrid settings, we add another layer to the theoretical discussion on job demands and resources. Within the framework of the JD-R theory, leaders and leadership are primarily discussed as a potential resource or demand for employees (Bakker et al., 2023). Shifting the focus to leadership responsibilities as a job demand for supervisors reveals their bidirectional nature. Providing adequate leadership might be a resource for employees while constituting a demand for the supervisors because the associated tasks tie up their resources (Dóci et al., 2020; Stein et al., 2020; Zwingmann et al., 2016). However, in line with the proposed gain spirals in COR and JD-R theory (Bakker et al., 2023; Hobfoll et al., 2018), we assume that over time well-designed leadership tasks can also be a resource that feed back into the supervisors’ personal and conditional resources. In general, the work design perspective so far has been insufficiently considered in leadership research. However, as our results show, it is becoming increasingly important, especially in hybrid contexts. The development of an integrative leadership theory that encompasses the various mechanisms of leadership would enable a more holistic research approach.

Our study on leaders’ work characteristics in hybrid work settings highlights the importance of work design for leaders. Future research should investigate the interplay of (hybrid) work characteristics and leadership demands in relation to outcome variables like health, motivation or performance. For instance, our results suggest that hybrid work characteristics are likely to have a profile of job demands and resources that might differ from non-hybrid settings. We agree with Parker and Grote (2022) that testing the impact of a certain constellation of job demands and resources might deliver important insights regarding the optimal work design for different work arrangements. Here, it would be important to operationalize the precise arrangements of hybrid work accordingly (e.g., spatial/temporal distance, location; Hill et al., 2022). Additionally, time aspects could be considered by conducting longitudinal studies testing the gain or loss cycles that have been theoretically proposed (Bakker et al., 2023; Hobfoll et al., 2018; McClean et al., 2019).

Moreover, our research shifts the focus from leadership as a resource or demand for employees to its significance as a job demand for supervisors. This new perspective raises many questions, such as for instance how explicit leadership demands are spelled out, how conscious supervisors are about their tasks or what are the consequences for supervisors and employees when neglecting them.

Addressing these questions could help to identify specific tasks and competencies associated with hybrid leadership that could be incorporated in leadership development programs to provide supervisors with adequate development possibilities. To tame the chimera of hybrid work in practice, an in-depth analysis of the actual work characteristics of supervisors and employees—specifically, for the different locations and configurations that constitute hybrid work—might provide a good basis for adjusting job demands and resources accordingly. However, based on our results, we would recommend including organizational context factors like change processes and demands associated with leadership (e.g., on work design). Building on such an analysis, organizations could provide job resources that are tailored to the needs of their supervisors. Additionally, our findings indicate that organizations should offer a clear orientation on expectations and responsibilities regarding the role and tasks of supervisors in hybrid work settings to reduce ambiguity and insecurities.

Our study is based on data obtained in expert interviews with 33 leaders. Even though the insights stem from a range of occupational backgrounds and demographics, future studies are needed to quantify and generalize the findings. In addition, the readiness to participate in a study on hybrid work might have led to a self-selection of supervisors that are, for example, particularly interested in the topic or have rather positive experiences. Furthermore, despite the semi-structured interview guidelines, the interviews were conducted by four different interviewers with personal differences in interview styles and focus that might have influenced answers of the participants.

For the deductive classification, we used the job demands and resources as categorized by the World Health Organization (2022) respectively by Dettmers and Krause (2020) to get a comprehensive overview of the hybrid work characteristics. Nevertheless, there are work characteristics based on other systematizations that are not covered in this classification. In addition to the theoretical problems, we discussed above regarding appraisal, the valence of the audio-recordings and the transcripts was not always clearly determinable. Multiple codes could be assigned to one text segment that additionally could be of differing length. For that reason, we decided not to report the number of codes for each category but still weighted the statements in terms of content based on their prominence across the interviews. That means, for instance, that some aspects were reported by almost all supervisors whereas others were only named by a few. Similarly, clearly assigning the leadership demands along the theoretical mechanisms of work design, direct interaction, and role modeling based on the statements was not always possible because they linguistically overlapped. Furthermore, the interview material is extensive, and we limited our scope to two research questions that we applied to the text. Thus, the focus is on work characteristics and leadership demands not taking personal variables on demographics or occupational background factors into account.