Emotional self-disclosure and workplace loneliness: Can encouraging employees to disclose their emotions help to combat the workplace loneliness epidemic?

Ph.D. Candidate Madison LaBella of the Management Department will be defending her dissertation proposal titled, “Emotional self-disclosure and workplace loneliness: Can encouraging employees to disclose their emotions help to combat the workplace loneliness epidemic?” on July 24, 2024.

Many thanks to Madison’s dissertation committee: 

• Committee Chair: Mary Mawritz - Associate Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Member: Lauren D’Innocenzo - Associate Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Member Christian Resick - Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Member: Liza Barnes - Assistant Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Member: Dejun “Tony” Kong - Associate Professor – University of Colorado

Abstract:

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Surgeon General declared loneliness to be an epidemic (Murthy, 2017) with drastic consequences for both individual health (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015) and workplace outcomes (Bowers et al., 2022). As a prevalent and pernicious phenomenon, workplace loneliness affects 80% of employees (Twaronite, 2022) and causes a multitude of negative outcomes at work (e.g., Ozcelik & Barsade, 2018). This dissertation responds to calls for identifying antecedents of and interventions for workplace loneliness (Ozcelik & Barsade, 2018; Firoz et al., 2021) by offering a theoretical integration of the theory of the need to belong and the interpersonal process model of intimacy. To address the question of how, why and when self-disclosure of emotions limits loneliness at work, the theory of the need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) points to bonds of caring with coworkers (which I capture as perceived team support) as an antecedent of workplace loneliness. The interpersonal process model of intimacy (Reis & Shaver, 1988) then explains that self-disclosure of emotions can create caring bonds. Thus, I hypothesize that perceived team support mediates the relationship between emotional self-disclosure and workplace loneliness. Following the interpersonal process model of intimacy, I also study the impact of interpretive filters. I hypothesize that social anxiety and one’s perceptions of the team’s task-focused bottom-line mentality (BLM) climate will impair the beneficial effects of emotional self-disclosure due to negative anticipation about oneself and the social situation. Finally, I hypothesize that general life loneliness predicts social anxiety, addressing the question of how loneliness outside of work affects relational processes relevant to workplace loneliness. Through a survey of working adults and an experiment with student teams, this dissertation contributes to literatures on workplace loneliness, self-disclosure at work, social anxiety at work and BLM climate.