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Leader Interpersonal Emotion Management And Workplace Loneliness Amid Societal Crises
Conference proceeding

Leader Interpersonal Emotion Management And Workplace Loneliness Amid Societal Crises

Liuba Belkin, Michele Williams, William J. Becker and Sarah Tuskey
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, Vol.2026(1)
07/2026
DOI: 10.5465/AMPROC.2026.238bp

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Abstract

Many employees report heightened emotional strain and a growing sense of loneliness amid a volatile social landscape marked by recurring local and global crises and always-on media connectivity that amplifies and carries these events into daily work. Against this backdrop, leaders’ attention to and management of employee emotions— i.e., interpersonal emotion management (IEM), may be especially consequential for how connected or isolated employees feel at work. In this multi-study investigation, we examine how two leader IEM strategies, reappraisal encouragement and suppression encouragement, relate to employee loneliness through two psychological pathways: emotional exhaustion and organizational identification. Drawing on four different employee samples (N = 1,850) collected in the United States and the United Kingdom at the onset of three distinct crises, we find that reappraisal encouragement is consistently associated with lower exhaustion, stronger identification, and less loneliness, whereas associations for suppression encouragement are more context dependent. Our paper reframes employee workplace loneliness as a dynamic leader-influenced experience, underscoring the importance of subtle leader behaviors in times of disruption and heightened uncertainty and positioning organizational identification as a relational resource.

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