Remote And Hybrid Impostorism - The Atkinson Institute

The Invisible Distance: Impostor Phenomenon in Remote and Hybrid Work Environments

Simone S. Atkinson
The Atkinson Institute · theatkinsoninstitute.org
Peer-Informed Article · 2025
Topics: Impostorism · Remote Work · Hybrid Work · Identity · Belonging

Suggested Citation (APA):
Atkinson, S. S. (2025). The invisible distance: Impostor phenomenon in remote and hybrid work environments.
The Atkinson Institute. https://theatkinsoninstitute.org/research/remote-hybrid-impostorism

Abstract

The transition to remote and hybrid work models has restructured the social architecture through which professional identity is formed, validated, and maintained. This article examines how the elimination or reduction of physical workplace cues creates conditions that systematically intensify impostor phenomenon responses. Drawing on Clance and Imes’s (1978) foundational framework, social presence theory (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976), and research on visibility and attribution in distributed teams, this article argues that remote work does not create impostorism but exposes and amplifies identity vulnerabilities that in-person environments routinely suppress. A conceptual model of environmental impostorism triggers is proposed, with implications for individuals, team leaders, and organizations designing distributed work cultures.

Keywords: impostor phenomenon, remote work, hybrid work, social presence, attribution, identity, belonging

1. Introduction

The global shift toward remote and hybrid work, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and sustained by organizational preference for flexible models, has fundamentally altered how professionals experience their own competence. The office environment, for all its inefficiencies, provided a continuous stream of informal social data: the nod of a supervisor, the hallway conversation, the visible presence of colleagues working alongside one another. These ambient signals functioned as low-cost, high-frequency feedback that anchored self-perception in observable reality.

Remote work removes most of these signals. What remains is structured, intentional communication: scheduled calls, written messages, formal presentations, and deliverables. This restructuring affects not just how work is done but how workers evaluate themselves in relation to their work. The impostor phenomenon, characterized by persistent self-doubt and fear of exposure as a fraud despite objective evidence of competence (Clance & Imes, 1978), does not emerge randomly. It emerges in specific social conditions. Remote and hybrid work reliably produces several of those conditions.

This article examines the structural features of distributed work environments that elevate impostorism risk, proposes a framework for understanding these triggers, and offers evidence-informed directions for intervention.

2. Social Presence and the Loss of Informal Feedback

Social presence theory, introduced by Short, Williams, and Christie (1976), describes the degree to which a communication medium conveys the sense that other people are physically present. High social presence media, such as in-person interaction, transmit non-verbal cues including facial expression, tone, proximity, and gesture, all of which carry significant social and evaluative information. Low social presence media, such as asynchronous text communication, transmit comparatively little.

Remote work predominantly relies on low to medium social presence media. Video calls approximate in-person interaction but systematically strip out peripheral visual data, physical cues, and the informal ambient signals of a shared workspace. Asynchronous communication, including email, chat, and project management tools, reduces this further. The consequence for impostorism is significant. Informal feedback, which in office environments arrives continuously and without deliberate effort, must in remote environments be explicitly requested or structurally designed into workflows. When it is absent, the evaluative vacuum it leaves is filled by internal self-assessment, which in individuals predisposed to impostorism is disproportionately negative.

“Impostorism does not require evidence of failure. It requires only the absence of evidence of success.” — Atkinson, 2025

This is consistent with research by Parkman (2016), which identified feedback deficits as a significant moderator of impostor phenomenon intensity. Remote environments structurally produce this deficit as a default state rather than an exception.

3. Visibility, Attribution, and the Hybrid Asymmetry Problem

Hybrid work models, in which some employees are co-located and others are remote on any given day, introduce a specific and underexamined impostorism trigger: visibility asymmetry. Research on distributed teams has consistently demonstrated that remote participants in hybrid meetings receive less informal recognition, are less likely to be consulted spontaneously, and are more likely to have their contributions attributed to the group rather than to themselves individually (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006).

This attribution deficit has direct implications for impostorism. Clance and Imes (1978) identified attribution errors as a core mechanism of the impostor cycle: high-achieving individuals attribute success to luck, timing, or external factors rather than to their own ability. In hybrid environments, the organizational structure itself frequently produces attribution patterns that confirm this internal narrative. The remote employee who contributes significantly to a project may find that credit accrues to those who were physically visible in the room when the decision was made. This structural misattribution reinforces the impostor’s belief that their contributions are not genuinely recognized because they are not genuinely worthy of recognition.

The problem is not that the remote worker is invisible. It is that their visibility is intermittent, scheduled, and performance-dependent, rather than ambient and continuous. This forces a mode of self-presentation that is exhausting and anxiety-provoking for individuals already managing self-doubt.

4. Isolation, Belonging, and the Collapse of Informal Community

A substantial body of research has established that belonging, the sense of being accepted and valued within a social group, functions as a protective factor against impostorism (Walton & Cohen, 2011). Belonging is not primarily communicated through formal recognition. It is communicated through incidental, low-stakes social interaction: the brief conversation before a meeting begins, the shared lunch, the spontaneous collaboration. Remote work systematically eliminates these interactions, replacing them with nothing or with structured substitutes that lack the same psychological function.

The resulting isolation is not merely emotional. It is epistemically consequential. Informal community provides a constant source of comparative social information that helps individuals calibrate their self-assessment against realistic peers. When this calibration is removed, impostorism-prone individuals default to upward comparison, measuring themselves against idealized or curated representations of others rather than against the full, unfiltered reality of peer performance. Social media and professional platforms, which remote workers may turn to as substitutes for workplace community, amplify this effect by presenting curated professional identities rather than representative ones.

5. A Framework of Environmental Impostorism Triggers in Distributed Work

Based on the foregoing analysis, this article proposes a framework of four primary environmental triggers for impostorism in remote and hybrid contexts. First, feedback scarcity: the structural absence of informal, ambient validation signals that in-person environments provide continuously. Second, attribution ambiguity: the increased likelihood that individual contributions will be misattributed to groups or to more visible colleagues, reinforcing self-doubt about the legitimacy of one’s own competence. Third, belonging deficit: the reduction of incidental social interaction that normally functions to anchor identity within a professional community. Fourth, comparison distortion: the replacement of realistic peer calibration with curated, upward social comparison mediated by digital platforms.

These triggers are not independent. They interact and amplify one another. A remote worker experiencing feedback scarcity is more likely to seek external validation through social comparison, which produces comparison distortion, which deepens the belonging deficit by reinforcing the sense that one does not measure up to one’s peers. The cycle is self-sustaining unless deliberately interrupted.

6. Implications for Practice

The framework proposed here suggests several directions for intervention. At the individual level, intentional feedback-seeking is the most direct countermeasure to feedback scarcity. This requires not merely requesting feedback but structuring regular, low-stakes check-ins that approximate the ambient validation function of in-person work. Journaling practices that track concrete contributions and outcomes over time can serve a similar function by externalizing evidence of competence that impostorism-prone cognition tends to discount or attribute externally.

At the team and organizational level, attribution practices require deliberate design in hybrid environments. Leaders must develop habits of naming individual contributions explicitly and publicly, particularly for remote team members whose contributions are most vulnerable to group attribution. Meeting structures that equalize participation regardless of physical location reduce the visibility asymmetry that hybrid models otherwise produce.

Community-building in distributed teams cannot rely on the organic emergence of informal connection. It must be structurally supported through designed touchpoints, peer networks, and mentorship relationships that provide the belonging function that remote work removes. This is particularly salient for populations already navigating identity disruption, including military spouses in career transition, international professionals adapting to new cultural contexts, and first-generation professionals navigating unfamiliar institutional environments.

7. Conclusion

Remote and hybrid work environments do not manufacture impostorism. They remove the structural features of the traditional workplace that routinely suppress it. The ambient feedback, informal community, and continuous social calibration that in-person work provides are not incidental. They are functional components of a professional identity system. When they are removed, impostorism fills the space they leave.

Understanding this as a structural rather than a personal problem has significant implications for how we design distributed work, support remote employees, and develop interventions for impostorism in the post-pandemic workplace. The Atkinson Institute’s ongoing research into identity, resilience, and self-worth in distributed and transitional contexts seeks to bring empirical specificity to the framework introduced here.

References

Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.

Gibson, C. B., & Gibbs, J. L. (2006). Unpacking the concept of virtuality: The effects of geographic dispersion, electronic dependence, dynamic structure, and national diversity on team innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 51(3), 451–495.

Parkman, A. (2016). The imposter phenomenon in higher education: Incidence and impact. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 16(1), 51–60.

Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications. Wiley.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451.