ABSTRACT
When employees are unable to find the comfort, satisfaction, belongingness, and connection in the workplace, they may feel isolated from the social structure of their work environment, which ultimately may pose a threat to the effectiveness and efficiency of organizations. Therefore, addressing employee alienation as one of the dark sides of organizational behavior can help practitioners and theoreticians to gain more insights in understanding organizational behavior. In this chapter we will shed light on the issue of alienation in the organizational behavior studies. We begin by looking at the sociological and philosophical explanations made by influential scholars. Then, after the analysis of alienation in terms of its classification, operationalization, and dimensional constructs, we provide a review of empirical and theoretical studies in the extant literature and their results to show its relationship with other organizational behavior variables. Finally, we conclude our analysis with the implications for theory and practice.
