Does Capacity for High Quality Connections Drive Team Resilience in the Adversity of a Hybrid Corporate Landscape? A Case Study in a Greek Consulting Firm

The new post covid corporate work environment resurfaced the need to transform traditional work settings and explore temporal teamwork structures, as we experience a rise in the need for “project capable workforce” (Cooke in Developing a project capable workforce: the number one task for project-based organizations. Paper presented at PMI Global Congress 2012—North America, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute). But what happens to teams in case of adversity, such as the recent covid lockdowns? And more specifically to project teams that are bounded by strict deadlines, change and ambiguity? Our research investigates the capacities of high-quality connections and swift trust, as factors that drive team resilience in project teams that work in hybrid work settings. A qualitative methodology was used, with semi-structured interviews conducted with 23 consultant professionals, and the data extracted was analyzed using the method of thematic analysis. The conclusions that emerged were related to the contributors of the capacity of high-quality connections determined through the lenses of the second order factors that characterized such relations (Dutton and Heaphy in Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003), and the normative action components of swift trust that revealed team resilient behaviors as per (Kroeger et al., Cambridge J of Economics 45:129–150, 2021). In addition, discussions revealed social etiquette matters of virtual settings and virtual skills that are reported mandatory for hybrid work models. The present study advances the knowledge on hybrid work environment and project teams.