raised, you might think they’re mocking you.” You misinter-
pret their body language. “So in a business negotiation … if
the person is lonely, you can forget about a deal for the day.”
THE LONELY OFFICE SPACE
So does this “lonely brain” impact our ability to get things
done at work? Ozcelik and his study co-author, Sigal Barsade of
Wharton University of Pennsylvania, took UCLA’s Loneliness
Scale and tweaked it for the workplace, asking employees to
agree or disagree with statements such as, “There is no one I
can turn to in this organization.” For their “laboratory” they
used two large organizations in Sacramento — both a private
company (in tech services) and a public municipality, which
ensured a broad range of professions. Their study spanned 672
employees across 143 work groups that included engineers,
truck drivers, managers and top-level executives.
Ozcelik and Barsade isolated two key variables: loneli-
ness and job performance. Levels of loneliness were deter-
mined through self-assessments (using a modified UCLA
Loneliness Scale) and peer-assessments (asking people if
their coworker “seems to be lonely at work”). Productivity
was measured by a top-down analysis of managers evaluat-
ing staff. Ozcelik found a “strong correlation” between the
two, even after controlling for other variables like age, gen-
der, education and organizational tenure (though notably
not compensation).
The lonelier the employee, the worse he or she performed.
Specifically, the “effect size” — a measure that statisticians
use to gauge the impact of one variable on another — was 0.3,
meaning that the impact was, in plain English, “medium to
high.” And it wasn’t due to chance. Yet was it casual? That’s
a higher bar for researchers to hurdle. They time-lagged the
study, meaning that they first measured loneliness, and then
job-performance six weeks later. “We cannot confirm causal-
ity,” Ozcelik and Barsade caution in the study. “There is a pos-
sibility, for example, that poorer performance leads employees
to be isolated from their coworkers, leading to greater loneli-
ness, although we would argue that the preponderance of past
theory and empirical work operates in the other direction.”
Ozcelik attributes the drop in performance to two distinct
mechanisms. The first is anchored around the psychological
theory of “social exchange.” In the Sacramento study, they also
measured employees’ “affective commitment” to an organiza-
tion. (Do they feel emotionally connected to the group?) Lone-
lier employees were less engaged. Imagine that you work for a
company with 10,000 employees, where you feel alienated from
the eight coworkers in your department. As Ozcelik explains
it, “Simply because those eight people are not close to you, you
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April 2019 | comstocksmag.com
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