Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to telework have exacerbated workplace loneliness. Despite growing research on the effects of workplace loneliness on employee attitudes and performance, empirical studies on how lonely employees behave remain limited. This study proposes that workplace loneliness adversely affects employees through work redesign (i.e., job crafting) and develops a moderated mediation model to test this assumption. The findings demonstrate that workplace loneliness directly undermines job crafting and indirectly diminishes it by lowering employees' organization-based self-esteem. Lonely employees may question their competencies and worth within the organization, reducing their motivation to proactively reshape their tasks, relationships, and cognitive approach to work. Furthermore, self-rated performance moderates the relationship between organization-based self-esteem and job crafting. Specifically, when self-rated performance is high, the positive influence of organization-based self-esteem on job crafting becomes more pronounced. These findings suggest that workplace loneliness limits employees' ability to regulate negative emotions and improve their well-being through job crafting. In promoting employees' job crafting, organizations should not only highlight the importance of self-esteem among employees who feel loneliness but also implement fair and transparent performance evaluation systems. Moreover, maintaining both the quality and quantity of employees' workplace relationships is essential to preserving their organization-based self-esteem and supporting their proactive behaviors.