Workplace Loneliness Through the Lens of Management Research: A Bibliometric and Thematic Exploration

The World Health Organisation has declared loneliness a significant health threat, and it equates to mortality with fifteen cigarettes a day. The workplace is also not devoid of this menace; it is an essential factor for employees' well-being and affects performance. With the growing attention to loneliness, there is a need for a systematic understanding of its conceptual evolution and intellectual structure from the management perspective in academic articles. The survey used the PRISMA methodology to extract articles from the Web of Science and conduct a bibliometric analysis of peer-reviewed articles on workplace loneliness within management and organisational research between 2000 and 2025. The survey used 940 articles for analysis using the Bibliometrix R package. Results reveal three dominant research clusters: (1) Loneliness, Satisfaction, Emotional Impact, (2) Performance, Measurement, Empirical Scaling, and (3) Health Effects and Niche Measurement Studies; the study identifies leading authors, institutions, journals, and countries contributing to this field. Thematic evolution indicates a paradigm shift toward understanding loneliness in the context of hybrid work environments and virtual collaboration.