More Than Being Seen: A Taxonomy of Workplace Visibility Behaviors and Their Differential Effects on Career Outcomes

Visibility in the workplace is widely recognized by both scholars and practitioners as a key determinant of career success. Despite its importance for individual career advancement, visibility in most cases is operationalized as a binary distinction between being present or absent in the physical workplace. In this study, we argue that visibility is a more multifaceted construct containing different behavioral strategies that go beyond pure presence in the workplace. Drawing on a sequential mixed-method design, Study 1 utilized qualitative interviews (N = 18) with managers of two large German corporations to derive a taxonomy of visibility behavior strategies of employees. Study 2 (N = 240) quantitatively tested the differential effects of these strategies on two central indicators of career success—job performance and interpersonal success. Findings revealed that upward networking, disseminative capacity, and proactive behavior significantly predicted job performance, while helping behavior predicted interpersonal success. Pure workplace presence was unrelated to either outcome. These results advance a dual-pathway model of workplace visibility—performance-based and relational—offering theoretical refinement and practical guidance for managing visibility in increasingly hybrid organizational contexts. Theoretical and practical implications are outlined, along with limitations and directions for future research.