Leadership Communication Practices for Enhancing Performance in Hybrid Project Teams

Abstract

The increasing use of hybrid work arrangements has altered how project teams interact, communicate, collaborate, and perform. Hybrid project teams, where some team members work remotely and others on-site, present both opportunities and challenges for leadership effectiveness. Leadership communication is essential for ensuring alignment in these environments. As it helps maintain clarity, enables collaboration, and drives team performance. While hybrid work is becoming more important, there are still few studies that have empirically focused on how leadership communication practices enhance team performance and the mechanisms driving this relationship. This research mainly aims to examine the impact of leadership communication practices for enhancing performance in hybrid project teams. This study gives special attention to trust, communication and collaboration and their contribution to hybrid team performance. The study is based on transformational leadership theory, transactional leadership theory, leader–member exchange theory, media richness theory, and team effectiveness theory. The main focuses on key concepts such as leadership communication practices, trust, communication and collaboration, and hybrid team performance. A quantitative method using a cross-sectional design was applied in this study. The study collected data from the employees working in hybrid project teams within a single organization in Bangladesh through a structured online survey. The survey used a five-point Likert scale to assess the main variables several times. Data analysis was collected using SPSS. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, and mediation analysis to assess the relationships among the variables. The results suggest that leadership communication practices have a significantly enhances trust and communication and collaboration. Trust was found to have a strong positive effect on communication and collaboration and is the key predictor of hybrid team performance. Although both leadership communication practices and communication and collaboration did not remain significant predictors in the full regression model when trust was included. Moreover, the mediation analysis suggests that trust plays a complete mediator role between leadership communication practices and hybrid team performance. Overall, the study concludes that leadership communication is important in hybrid teams, but its effect on performance is mainly indirect and driven by trust. When leadership communication is strong, it builds trust, reduces uncertainty, supports better communication and collaboration, and improves overall team performance. This study advances the understanding of hybrid leadership by identifying trust as the main pathway through which communication practices lead to team performance.