Issues at home are now issues at work (e.g., your child participating in a video conference call), and struggles at work now easily flow into home life (e.g., the lack of a commute to “cool off” from a rough day at work). Because the COVID-19 pandemic, and more directly remote work, has blurred the boundaries between home and work life, struggles and difficulties now seamlessly drift between the two domains, with loneliness and its associated negative outcomes being far from an exception (Beutel etal., 2017;Ozcelik & Barsade, 2018). Because of this disruption in cognitive processing, researchers should seek to investigate how pandemics influence individuals’ relational expectations for coworkers and colleagues. [...]research has yet to explore how loneliness influences work outcomes over time, or how loneliness experienced during a specific period of life might have long-term ramifications in the workplace.
What about the lonely? Bridging loneliness, pandemics, and I-O psychology