Return to the Office?! Exploring How Innovative Work Behaviours Differ in Office-Based and Remote Working Environments

Flexible work arrangements (FWA) have gained momentum in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting debates on whether employees should return to the office or continue working remotely. At the centre of this discussion lies innovative work behaviour (IWB), which involves generating, introducing, and applying novel ideas within organisations. Although many studies explore IWB, none has explicitly synthesised how IWB unfolds across office-based, hybrid, and remote working environments in the post-pandemic era. This paper addresses this gap through a systematic literature review of 60 peer-reviewed studies spanning organisational behaviour, information systems, and human resource management. The synthesis identifies key infrastructural factors (spatial and technological) and human-organisational factors (institutional, social, cognitive, and organisational) that drive or hinder IWB in working environments. Building on these insights, a framework of innovation-enabling work environments integrates the six factors with the three stages of IWB (idea generation, idea introduction, and idea application). The framework reframes the office-versus-remote debate as a question of proximity configurations, articulates a stage-differentiated logic in which cognitive and organisational dimensions emerge as the dominant direct drivers of IWB at specific stages while institutional and social dimensions operate predominantly as enabling conditions. It further extends Boschma’s (2005) proximity framework through technological proximity as an analytically distinct sixth dimension. Practical implications and a future research agenda anchored in these three contributions are discussed.