The Hidden Structures of Hybrid Teams: The Emergence and Effects of Co-Location Imbalance

Hybrid work has reshaped when and where employees interact, fragmenting co-presence and altering the structural conditions for team collaboration. Drawing on structuration theory, we examine how co-location imbalance (CLI)—defined as the disparity in co-location across team members—emerges, shaping hybrid team relational dynamics. Across two simulation studies, we explore CLI as both a consequence of structural constraints and a generator of teams’ relational asymmetries. Study 1 exhaustively analyzes all possible weekly attendance configurations in a five-person team to show that CLI increases three relational structures: subgroup separation, marginalization, and power asymmetry. Study 2 includes agent choices and structural constraints to examine four different antecedents of CLI: resource scarcity, expertise seeking, and sequential and reciprocal interdependence. We find that sequential and reciprocal interdependence as well as expertise seeking reduce CLI, while resource scarcity amplifies it. These findings extend structuration theory to hybrid teams by illustrating how patterns of office attendance recursively produce structural conditions that shape—and are shaped by—agent choices, which are constrained by the organizational and team environment.