Lonely at Work: The Moderating Role of Leader–Member Exchange in the Association Between Workplace Loneliness and Perceived Task and Contextual Performance

The current study examined the moderating role of leader–member exchange (LMX) in the associations between workplace loneliness and employees’ perceived task and perceived contextual performance. Specifically, the study explored whether the negative associations between workplace loneliness and these two dimensions of performance were weaker at higher levels of LMX. Data were collected through a questionnaire-based survey of 352 white-collar employees from various sectors in Türkiye, and the hypotheses were tested using moderation analysis. Workplace loneliness was negatively associated with both perceived task and perceived contextual performance, in line with Hypotheses 1 and 2. Contrary to expectations, high-quality exchange relationships between subordinates and managers strengthened, rather than weakened, these negative associations for both perceived task and perceived contextual performance; H3 and H4 were therefore not supported. This pattern, which was not hypothesized a priori, points to a potential dark side of high-quality LMX and identifies LMX as an unanticipated boundary condition in the relationships between workplace loneliness and perceived performance. This pattern may be tentatively interpreted through a betrayal framework, whereby unmet relational expectations in high-quality LMX relationships may help account for the stronger negative association between loneliness and perceived performance. These findings extend the workplace loneliness and LMX studies by offering a possible betrayal-based interpretation of how relational quality may shape the loneliness–performance link and highlight the need for organizations to consider employees’ broader workplace relationships in addition to the quality of their relationships with supervisors.