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This paper aims to explore “rotting” in the workplace, characterized by antisocial hibernation, where employees become isolated and disengaged. The study examines underlying factors and provides actionable insights and practical interventions to address “rotting” and restore a healthy work environment, empowering readers with the means to make positive changes.

The research integrates various theories of employee behavior, including Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Herzberg’s two-factor theory, the job demands-resources model, cognitive load theory, distraction-conflict theory and engagement theory. By connecting these frameworks with practical HR strategies, the paper ensures a comprehensive understanding of employee isolation, instilling confidence in the research’s depth.

Employee isolation and disengagement significantly challenge organizational health and productivity. The study identifies key factors such as poor management practices, lack of social support, high job demands and inadequate communication channels. Addressing these factors through supportive environments, effective communication and mental health support can enhance engagement and reduce isolation.

This paper offers an innovative perspective on employee rotting by integrating multiple theoretical frameworks and practical HR strategies. It emphasizes the urgent need to address employee isolation, especially with increasing remote work and digital communication.

With the spread of COVID-19, governments have initiated lockdown procedures and forced organizations to switch to remote working. Employees working remotely in isolated and confined situations are experiencing great stress and uncertainty. This study aims to investigate how remote workers perform during lockdowns.

Drawing on social information processing theory, this study developed and tested hypotheses linking professional isolation, cynicism and task performance. This study was comprised of 497 remote workers in the financial industry in China.

The findings revealed that professional isolation is positively related to cynicism, and cynicism is negatively related to task performance. Cynicism mediates the relationship between professional isolation and task performance. The results indicated that psychological hardiness moderated the mediation effect of professional isolation on task performance through cynicism.

This research offers implications for managers and practitioners on reducing employees' feeling of isolation through effective communication, collaboration and support via online platforms and preventing and reducing cynicism by introducing clear organizational policy and practice to balance job demands and job resources. Meanwhile, managers can develop commitment, control and challenge components of employees' psychological hardiness to enhance job performance.

This study extends the remote working literature in a crisis situation and fills the gap in the cynicism literature by understanding the role played by cynicism for remote workers. The current study also adds to the literature by highlighting the importance of psychological hardiness for remote workers during the pandemic.

In light of the increasing popularity of telecommuting, this study investigates how telecommuters' organizational commitment may be linked to psychological and physical isolation. Psychological isolation refers to feelings of emotional unfulfillment when one lacks meaningful connections, support, and interactions with others, while physical isolation refers to physical separation from others.

An online survey was used to collect data from 446 employees who telecommute one or more days per week.

The results of this study indicate that telecommuters' affective commitment is negatively associated with psychological isolation, whereas their continuance commitment is positively correlated with both psychological and physical isolation. These findings imply that telecommuters may remain with their employers due to perceived benefits, a desire to conserve resources such as time and emotional energy, or weakened marketability, rather than emotional connections to their colleagues or organizations.

Organizations wishing to retain and maximize the contributions of telecommuters should pursue measures that address collocated employees' negative assumptions toward telecommuters, preserve the benefits of remote work, and cultivate telecommuters' emotional connections (affective commitment) and felt obligation (normative commitment) to their organizations.

Through the creative integration of the need-to-belong and relational cohesion theories, this study contributes to the telecommuting and organizational commitment literature by investigating the dynamics between both psychological and physical isolation and telecommuters' organizational commitment.

Executive isolation, also known as workplace loneliness, its factors and impact are major issues for organizational development, future of work for leadership and learning culture. The purpose of this study is to examine the Executive isolation phenomenon where relationships between power distance, organizational culture and executive isolation of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are analysed on how it is considered by their teams. The same is contextualized through the inputs received through interviews conducted with CEOs and employee surveys.

The qualitative in-depth interviews of five CEOs, and survey across 34 of the 50 employees, were undertaken over the course of two phases of this study. The investigation focused on identifying executive isolation of CEOs and perspectives of employees that can impact the leadership and learning progress of organizations based on work culture, power distance and decision-making; awareness and experience of executive isolation; workplace friendliness and rejection; and management development initiatives to minimize the impact of executive isolation. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using MAXQDA 2022 (Verbi Software, Berlin, Germany), which is a qualitative data analysis software.

The findings highlight and expose the significant gap between understanding and analysing of the factors due to which the CEOs undergo executive isolation. It also extends to providing details related to the lack of awareness of the teams’ actions contributing to the CEOs’ isolation. It further highlights the fact that the difference of perspectives between the CEOs and teams leads to the organization slowing in its learning activities due to the leaders’ own challenges of executive isolation The findings also provide immense need of developing knowledge assets and management development initiatives for learning interventions, to help understand, analyse and mitigate executive isolation, in the interest of the organizational learning and development.

Earlier research work have contextualized the executive isolation impact on CEOs ability to be a leader. This study extends it to include the implications of leadership and learning culture on the teams that are affected by organization culture, power distance, decision-making and analysing the gap between the understandings about executive isolation of the CEOs. Eventually, it interprets how CEOs courting the executive isolation impacts the overall developmental culture of the organization. This will help in asserting the serious need of new learning frameworks needed to minimize the impact of CEO-level executive isolation.

The study aims to examine the dark side of teleworking and tests the various factors which lead to employee exhaustion while teleworking. The study examines two key variables, i.e. initiated interdependence and professional isolation, as antecedents of emotional exhaustion amongst employees who are teleworking. The study further investigates the mediating role of psychological detachment in these relationships.

Survey data were collected from 307 employees who were teleworking for more than three months. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The study found that initiated interdependence and professional isolation positively impact emotional exhaustion. These findings suggest that employees whose work is designed such that others depend on them will experience high emotional exhaustion while teleworking. Also, employees who experience professional isolation because of a lack of connection while teleworking will experience emotional exhaustion. The study also revealed the mediating role of psychological detachment in these relationships.

The study has insights for policy-making concerning telework practices.

It is one of the first studies examining the impact of teleworking in a context when it is not a choice exercised by the employees but has been imposed upon them. This study is particularly relevant in the context of the decision made by some organizations to move to telework as a permanent work format.

Guided by the job demands-resources model, this study aims to investigate the underlying mediation mechanisms through which vertical relationship conflict between employees and their supervisors and horizontal relationship conflict between employees and their colleagues escalate into work disengagement. It proposes exhaustion and workplace social isolation as the mediators and explores the relative importance of vertical and horizontal relationship conflicts in influencing work disengagement through the distinct impacts of the mediators.

Data collected from a three-wave study of 181 online-questionnaire respondents are used to test the research model using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

Vertical relationship conflict has an indirect effect on work disengagement via exhaustion, whereas horizontal relationship conflict has an indirect effect on work disengagement via workplace social isolation. Compared with horizontal relationship conflict, vertical relationship conflict exerts a stronger effect on work disengagement.

This study addresses a void in the literature on relationship conflict by investigating work disengagement from the perspective of both vertical and horizontal relationship conflict as well as from the perspective of both strain- and resource-centric mediators (i.e. exhaustion and workplace social isolation, respectively), providing a comparatively detailed analysis.

The world of work is constantly changing. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced working from home, and there is an increasing demand for flexibility regarding the workplace. There is little empirical evidence on the mechanisms and factors that influence employee outcomes, such as productivity and turnover intention, at the workplace and at home. In addition, it is unclear whether the workplace characteristics that influence employee outcomes vary between different nations due to country-specific circumstances. The paper aims to address these two issues.

The research model applied in this study is based on the job demands-resources (JD-R) and environmental demands-resources models using German (n = 429) and USA (n = 507) survey samples. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to analyse the influence of workplace characteristics (isolation, family–work interference, equipment/facilities and skill variety) on employee outcomes (satisfaction, burnout, productivity and turnover intention). Additionally, a multi-group analysis is used to explore group differences in the factors influencing satisfaction, burnout, productivity and turnover intention between employees in Germany and the USA.

The results reveal that significant determinants of productivity and turnover intention include isolation, family–work interference, equipment/facilities and skill variety. Isolation and equipment/facilities are identified as the most important demands and resources of the home workplace. Some significant differences are found between Germany and the USA. The positive effect of isolation on burnout is significantly stronger in the USA than in Germany, whereas the positive effect of family–work inference on burnout is stronger in Germany than in the USA. The negative effects visible for the relations between burnout and satisfaction, and satisfaction and turnover intention are stronger in Germany than in the USA. The positive effect of burnout on turnover intention is stronger in the USA compared to Germany.

The study adds empirical evidence to the JD-R theory by analysing the influence of the home workplace characteristics on employee outcomes in different countries for the first time using a multi-group analysis. In addition, the study reveals new insights into the differences between the knowledge workforces in Germany and the USA by uncovering how key factors influence employee outcomes such as productivity and turnover intention, partially carried by varying length of experience in work from home between both of these countries. Insights from this study can support corporate real estate managers to make better decisions on the design of employees’ home workplaces and the integration of work from home into the company’s workspace concept.

The purpose of this study is to analyse perceived physical and social isolation and how they are linked in various places of work.

A nationwide study was conducted involving 3,352 Estonian office workers in spring 2021. Physical isolation was measured in terms of what proportion of time a person works away from co-workers (0%, 1%–25%, 26%–50%, 51%–75%, more than 75%). Social isolation diverged into two factors: lack of contacts and lack of meaningful connections. The different places of work the authors considered in the study included working from home with and without a dedicated room and different types of offices (private office, shared-cell office, activity-based office and open-plan offices of various sizes).

The results show that the negative consequences of physical isolation in the form of perceiving social isolation start to show when a person works 51% of the time or more away from others. However, the authors revealed the dual nature of social isolation in that when a person experiences a lack of contacts, the connections they do have with their colleagues are actually more meaningful.

The originality of the study comes from the fact that the authors uncovered the paradoxical nature of social isolation. This reveals itself in various places of work depending on the conditions at home and the type of office. Therefore, the authors move away from the simplified distinction of home vs office and take into account the level of physical isolation (what amount of time a person actually works away from colleagues).

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model describing psychological states and behavioral outcomes experienced and exhibited by older generation interpersonal helping behavior (IHB) recipients in Chinese organizations.

The paper draws upon relevant literature and develops a theoretical model.

The analysis suggests that the extent of IHB that older generation Chinese employees receive from younger generation employees will lead to loss of mianzi, which will then result in reduced perceived generational guanxi, increased intended social isolation, and reduced intention to share task-related knowledge with the younger generation employees. The paper also proposes that perceived generational guanxi and intended social isolation will mediate the relationship between loss of mianzi and intention to share task-related knowledge with younger generation employees.

Because mianzi is an important cultural feature in Chinese societies, this paper provides four implications. First, younger generation employees could preserve and/or enhance older generation employees’ mianzi using less powerful messages. Second, younger generation employees should initiate task behaviors involving seeking opinions and expertise from older generation employees before exhibiting IHB. Third, mangers could reduce the negative impact of generational differences by establishing generational mentoring relationships between younger and older generation employees. Finally, younger generation employees could preserve and/or enhance older generation employees’ mianzi by playing the role of an informal subordinate rather than a problem solver when exhibiting IHB.

This paper is the first study exploring consequences of IHB from the perceptive of older generation IHB recipients in the Chinese context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine differences in work‐life balance (WLB) support, job satisfaction, and inclusion as a function of work location.

Web‐based survey data were provided by 578 employees working at one of four locations (main office, client location, satellite office, and home). Multiple regression analyses were used to identify differences in WLB support, job satisfaction, and inclusion across employees working at the four locations.

Results showed that main office and home‐based workers had similar high levels of WLB support and job satisfaction. Main office workers reported higher levels of WLB support than satellite and client‐based workers. Additionally, main office workers reported the highest levels of workplace inclusion.

Data were originally gathered for practical purposes by the organization. The research design does not allow for manipulation or random assignment, therefore extraneous variables may have impacted the observed relationships.

Allowing employees flexibility in choosing their work locations is related to positive outcomes. The authors suggest several practices for the effective implementation of alternative work arrangements.

This paper is among the first to examine the outcomes of telework across locations. It uses a large single organization and a quasi‐experimental design, enhancing the validity of the findings.