Heaphy, Emily D.Kim, Gihyun2024-12-202024-12-202024-0910.7275/55254https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/55254Workplace socializing—friendly social interactions among employees—plays a crucial role in fostering camaraderie, cultivating work relationships, and contributing to social cohesion within organizations. However, the advent of the global COVID-19 pandemic interrupted these informal exchanges through a sequence of disruptions in work arrangements. Three changes in work arrangements constitute the areas of my study: first, the forced shift to remote work in March 2020 due to the pandemic, which I will refer to as mandatory work-from-home; second, initial pressure from organizational leaders on employees to return to the office as COVID-19 ebbed, which I will refer to as a request to return-to-office; and third, pressure from organizational leaders on employees to increase their amount of time in the office, which I will refer to as tightening return-to-office requests. Despite many scholarly works investigating work arrangement shifts in organizations, there exists a paucity of insight into the experiences of employees engaging in workplace socializing subsequent to significant disruptions at work. This knowledge gap may account for the persistent challenges faced by organizations in reinstating socializing within the workplace and revitalizing work relationships following a disruption in work arrangements. To delineate and investigate this underexplored phenomenon, I initiated an exploratory inquiry (Study 1) employing an open-ended survey method to capture employees’ experiences of workplace socializing before and after a mandatory work-from-home policy. Then, through an abductive process of developing hypotheses based on qualitative data of a novel phenomenon, I developed hypotheses using temporal comparison theory and appraisal theory of emotion. I quantitatively examined my theoretical model of how disrupted workplace socializing and temporal comparison jointly impacted either longing or relief, which in turn predicted approach-oriented or avoidance-oriented work relationship behaviors. A scenario-based experiment (Study 2), a time-lagged critical incident methodology (Study 3), and a three-wave survey (Study 4) were conducted, each investigating a piece of my theoretical model. Together, this dissertation contributes to the literatures on workplace socializing, work relationships, social networks, and human resource management by exploring individuals’ cognitive and emotional mechanisms of navigating disrupted workplace socializing. Additionally, this dissertation offers managerial implications for organizations experiencing a palpable void in workplace socializing and a crisis in connection following prior or ongoing changes to their work arrangements.workplace socializing, work relationships, temporal comparison, longing, relief, relationship craftingDissertation (Open Access)https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0412-2430