Is one the loneliest number? A within-person examination of the adaptive and maladaptive consequences of leader loneliness at work.

Abstract

Although leaders’ daily work is inherently relational, it is possible that leaders can feel lonely and isolated from followers. Integrating theoretical ideas from regulatory loop models of loneliness with evolutionary perspectives of loneliness, we posit that daily leader loneliness (i.e., feelings of isolation stemming from one’s followers) may prompt harmful self-perpetuating as well as beneficial self-correcting cycles of loneliness at work via different rumination processes. We expect that leader loneliness will relate to 2 forms of rumination after work—maladaptive affect-focused rumination and adaptive problem-solving pondering. We expect that each form of rumination will hinder or facilitate next-day work engagement and helping, which will then matter for subsequent leader loneliness. In a 10-day experience sampling investigation of 86 leaders, we found that daily leader loneliness exhibits a self-perpetuating pattern via affect-focused rumination because this type of rumination reduces next-day work engagement and helping. At the same time, daily leader loneliness exhibits a self-correcting pattern via problem-solving pondering, as this type of forward-thinking rumination facilitates work engagement and helping the next day. Furthermore, leader self-efficacy enhances the extent to which problem-solving pondering occurs when leaders feel lonely. In a supplemental experience sampling study with leaders and followers, we further show that daily leader loneliness is negatively related to followers’ perceptions of leader effectiveness above and beyond more generalized loneliness. In summary, our work sheds theoretical and empirical light on the complex nature of leader loneliness.

Reflecting on one's best possible self as a leader: Implications for professional employees at work

“…We study helping and visioning because these are positive leadership behaviors that may move employees closer to becoming their best possible leader self. Indeed, recent research conceptualizes helping as an important daily leader behavior that captures the task and social responsibilities of leadership (Gabriel et al, 2020), and daily vision communication is considered a hallmark of effective leadership (Venus et al, 2019).…”

Sharing is caring: The role of compassionate love for sharing coworker work–family support at home to promote partners’ creativity at work.

“…Instead of theoretically inferring the ordering of our variables, future research may want to empirically confirm the casual ordering of constructs that make up gain spirals as part of work–family facilitation. Furthermore, although self-reports of actor (e.g., work–family support provision) and partner (e.g., creativity) behaviors may have social desirability issues, our approach to group-mean center all predictors should address this concern because it effectively removes between-person confounds such as response biases (Beal, 2015; Gabriel et al, 2020). A second limitation is that although we followed established research convention to use a focal member of a couple as a starting point for research on work–family facilitation (Booth-LeDoux et al, 2020; Carlson, Thompson, Crawford, et al, 2019; Carlson, Thompson, & Kacmar, 2019), collecting all measures from both members of a couple would have allowed for a stronger test of our hypotheses.…”

Subordinate poor performance as a stressor on leader well-being: The mediating role of abusive supervision and the moderating role of motives for abuse.

“…However, the pattern of results remains consistent when these control variables are excluded. Finally, in line with prior recommendations, we modeled control variables as fixed in an effort to reduce model complexity (Gabriel et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2013). This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”