Hybrid work in academic libraries: A scoping review of role stress, job control, service sustainability, and equity

Hybrid work is no longer an emergency accommodation in academic libraries; it is a work-design issue that shapes service delivery, staffing equity, and employee sustainability. This scoping review maps academic-library literature on hybrid, remote, and flexible work and interprets it through scholarship on role stress, job control, workload equity, and resource loss. Searches of Google Scholar, major library and information science journals, publisher platforms, selected reports, and citation trails were conducted from November 2025 through April 2026. Eligible sources substantively addressed academic-library hybrid or remote work, return-to-campus practice, remote management, service continuity, or related work-design consequences. The final mapped corpus includes 32 direct and closely related academic-library sources. The evidence shows that hybrid work can operate as a job resource when it expands schedule discretion, reduces commuting burdens, protects concentration, supports accommodation, and strengthens recruitment and retention. It can also operate as a job demand when it intensifies telepressure, technostress, coordination strain, visibility anxiety, and unequal access to flexibility. The review argues that hybrid work is distinctive not because it creates wholly new stressors, but because it redistributes long-standing ones across space, time, visibility, and service coverage. For academic libraries, sustainable hybrid work requires more than deciding where employees work. It depends on task fit, meaningful job control, boundary norms, workload equity, hybrid-aware evaluation, and explicit attention to service sustainability.