Team leaders’ strategies and employees’ professional isolation, burnout, and performance during COVID19

Abstract

Telework has progressively increased in the past decades, providing organizations and, consequently, leaders, with new challenges. The COVID19 pandemic not on-ly doubled the number of teleworkers, but reinforced these challenges, by forcing some organizations and employees to abruptly adapt to this new reality. In this manuscript, we aimed to explore the role of the strategies implemented by leaders to manage their teams in employees’ sense of professional isolation, burnout, and perceived performance. Thus, data was collected from 1149 teleworkers during the COVID19 pandemic, who answered an online questionnaire. At that time, 79% were working exclusively from home, and 91% had never had a previous experi-ence of working remotely. The results showed that the strategies implemented by leaders to manage their teams contributed to reduce employees’ sense of profes-sional isolation which, in turn, is associated with lower feelings of burnout and higher perceptions of performance. The study reinforced the role of leadership in the context of teleworking and, specifically, the importance of leaders being atten-tive to team members’ specific needs in order to help improving their wellbeing.