Love and Loneliness at Work: An Inspirational Guide for Consultants, Leaders and Other Professionals

Love and loneliness, in both their presence and absence, are key aspects of our lives – including our working lives.

Love and Loneliness at Work offers an accessible and practical starting point for understanding the connections between emotions, individual working life and organizations, focusing on love and loneliness. The book begins with an engaging chapter-length case study that illuminates the themes discussed. Taking a psychodynamic perpective, Bonnerup and Hasselager examine love and how it influences our feelings about tasks, organizations and participation, as well as uniquely exploring pairs in working life. The book explores loneliness as an inner state of mind, as an aspect of the professional role and as a group dynamic experience, and assesses the psychological burden of feeling lonely in an organization. Bonnerup and Hasselager also provide an overview of key theoretical concepts, including the unconscious, anxiety, libido, projective processes, and the concepts of inner and outer self, providing the tools required to examine, understand and work with the emotional strength and vulnerability of an organization.

This book provides unique insights into how understanding these feelings can help leaders, decision makers and employees contribute to healthier and happier workplaces. It will be an essential guide for coaches in practice and in training, as well as leaders and managers, human resources (HR) and learning and development (L&D) professionals and consultants within organizations seeking to expand their understanding of organizational dynamics. With its strong theoretical base, it will also be of interest to academics and students of coaching, coaching psychology, psychodynamic consulting, organizational psychology, leadership and management and organizational change, and to anyone seeking an insight into the emotional dynamics of working life.

Birgitte Bonnerup and Annemette Hasselager are psychologists and qualified supervisors in organizational psychology. They are partners in Bonnerup & Hasselager, where they work as organizational psychologists and therapists with individuals, groups and organizations. They are external lecturers at Roskilde University, Denmark, and they write books and articles on organizational psychology. Their website can be found at www.bonnerup-hasselager.dk.