Feeling Included in a Remote Working World: The Role of Leaders’ Virtual Collaboration Behaviors

Abstract

This study focuses on contextual factors influencing employee inclusion at work by examining how remote work shapes employees’ experiences of inclusion and highlighting the role of leader behaviors. Given the unique challenges remote work presents for both employees and leaders, we investigate its potential side effects on employee inclusion. Building on sociometer theory, we argue that remote settings hinder the successful signaling of inclusionary cues, thereby introducing a barrier to perceived inclusion (i.e., belongingness and authenticity) for employees. Furthermore, we examine leaders’ virtual collaboration behaviors as a potential lever for mitigating adverse effects. Employing correlated random effects models, we test our hypotheses with 500 employees of a large German company who participated in four online surveys over the course of nine months. Our results show effects of remote work on belongingness but not authenticity. We observed a negative within-person main effect between remote work intensity and belongingness. However, leaders’ virtual collaboration behaviors moderate this effect, and the negative relationship only persists when leaders display a low average level of such behaviors. These findings suggest that working more remotely is not necessarily associated with lower inclusion and that a separate examination of belongingness and authenticity is necessary to fully understand workplace inclusion. Our results have strong practical implications and highlight the importance of leaders in maintaining inclusion within teams, especially in remote work settings.