MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Are Your Team Members Lonely?
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- Constance N. Hadley, Mark Mortensen
- MIT Sloan Management Review
- 2020
Despite the prevalence of team-based collaboration in the workplace, many employees feel isolated on the job.
While loneliness is often thought of as a personal issue, it is an organizational issue as well. A lack of social connection — whether with friends, family members, or coworkers — can have serious consequences. It is associated not only with health problems,1 including heart disease, dementia, and cancer, but also with poor work performance, reduced creativity, and flawed decision-making.2 Quite simply, people who feel lonely cannot do their best work, which means that teams with lonely members are not operating at their peak levels either.
About the Author
Constance N. Hadley is an organizational psychologist and lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Mark Mortensen (@profmortensen), an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, researches and consults with organizations on collaboration. The authors contributed equally to this article.
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MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Are Your Team Members Lonely?