A Career Stage Perspective on the Impact of Fully Remote and Hybrid Work: Pathways to Engagement and Exhaustion
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Fully remote and hybrid work have increased in recent years; however, the extent to which these work arrangements impact employees based on their career stage remains relatively unexplored. The majority of research has examined hybrid employees, leaving much to be understood about the experience of fully remote workers. Drawing on job demands-resources theory (Demerouti et al., 2001) and career stage theory (Super, 1957; Super et al., 1988), this study assessed the extent to which fully remote employees, compared to hybrid employees, perceived role ambiguity and learning opportunities. Additionally, this study examined the extent to which role ambiguity and perceived learning opportunities related to exhaustion and engagement directly, in addition to examining the moderating effect of a person’s career stage (operationalized via occupational tenure). A survey-based study of 520 working adults with an average age of 39 years (SD = 10.2) recruited from Prolific (258 hybrid workers, 262 fully remote workers) was conducted to test the hypotheses. The results failed to show a significant relationship between a person’s work arrangement and perceived learning opportunities, and while a significant relationship was found between work arrangement and role ambiguity, the result was in the opposite direction than expected. Both perceived learning opportunities and role ambiguity were positively related to engagement and exhaustion, respectively, as hypothesized. Moreover, although work arrangement was not indirectly related to engagement via perceived learning opportunities, it was related to exhaustion via role ambiguity such that fully remote workers tended to be less exhausted as a result of experiencing less role ambiguity. Additionally, no evidence was found for a moderating effect of career stage when operationalized as occupational tenure. However, exploratory analyses revealed a significant interaction between age and role ambiguity. Finally, in addition to examining the psychometric properties of the Adult Career Concerns Inventory – Short Form (Perrone et al., 2003), exploratory analyses suggested that fully remote workers may experience less role ambiguity due to lower levels of job complexity. This study contributes to the literature by providing insight into the differences between fully remote and hybrid workers and examining the reliability and validity of an alternative to time-based proxies of career stage.