Working on a lonely day: a dual-path model examining the effect of transient workplace loneliness on perceived performance and the cross-level moderator of self-identity orientations

Workplace loneliness is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in our daily organizational life. Although a nascent but growing body of literature on workplace loneliness has largely focused on the interpersonal consequences of loneliness in organizations, we lack a nuanced understanding of how employees’ transient workplace loneliness, varying on a day-to-day basis, impacts their daily work attitudes and outputs. Drawing on the cognitive-affective processing system framework, we develop an integrative model of how and when transient workplace loneliness influences employee perceived task performance on a daily basis. Utilizing an experience sampling method involving 84 full-time employees, we find that feeling lonely during a workday weakens employees’ daily perceived task performance through an affective path (i.e. more daily work frustration) and a cognitive path (i.e. less daily work engagement). Moreover, we find support for the buffering role of employees’ individual identity orientation: while individual identity orientation effectively mitigates the negative effect of loneliness on performance perception mediated by the cognitive path of work engagement, it does not moderate the effect through the affective path of work frustration. We discuss the implications for both theory and practice.