Workplace friendship is a relationship established in a workplace that goes beyond normal expected working relationships. Both Elton Mayo

Elton Mayo

George Elton Mayo was an Australian psychologist, sociologist and organization theorist.He lectured at the University of Queensland from 1911 to 1923 before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, but spent most of his career at Harvard Business School , where he was professor of industrial...

 and Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow was an American professor of psychology at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research and Columbia University who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs...

 have long brought attention to the social needs of employees within an organization. Mayo claimed that socio-emotional factors of the workplace played a huge role in determining employee performance. Maslow defined social needs within his hierarchy of needs

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity...

 which can be applied to our lives both personal and professional.

Definition

Workplace friendship has two parts; first, it is considered voluntary (Rawlings, 1992). This idea is related to the friendship aspect of the term, as true friendships are voluntary actions. In the workplace, a person cannot choose their co-workers but they can chose which of their coworkers with whom to be friendly and to socialize. These relationships must be distinguished from regular relational roles as they extend past the roles within the organization. Friendships can be considered in society and within the workplace as on a spectrum; friendships range from “friends,” to “close friends” to “best friends,” (Sias, Smith & Avdeyeva, 2003) . Another similarity found by Sias and Cahill (1998) is that workplace friendships are influenced by individual and contextual factors. The extraorganizational contextual factors include life events, socializing and time. The workplace contextual factors exist only within the workplace and include shared tasks, physical work proximity, work related problems and slack time. Within workplace friendships, just as extraorganizational friendships there is a difference in perception of friendship by men and women. Men tend to perceive friendship as “a domain for sharing activities” while woman perceive friendship as a “domain for sharing feelings, emotions and information,” (Sias, Smith & Avdeyeva, 2003, p 324). Another similarity between friendships in and out of the workplace is the change in communication style as the friendship progresses. Sias and Cahill (1998) found that as relationships progressed, coworkers would increase their discussion of non-work topics. However, there is some difference between men and women and their time of increased intimacy. For example, women are more likely to report an increase in communication intimacy in the earlier stages of workplace friendships (Sias, Smith & Avdeyeva, 2003).

Significance in America

Workplace friendship is directly related to several other area of study including cohesion, job satisfaction

Job satisfaction

Job satisfaction describes how content an individual is with his /her job. The happier people are within their job, the more satisfied they are said to be. Job satisfaction is not the same as motivation or aptitude, although it is clearly linked...

, organizational commitment and intention to leave. Cohesion involves the melding of a group; it was found that a cohesive work environment is related to greater proportions of special peer relationships in the workplace (Odden & Sias 1997). It was found by Morrison (1994) that the perceived cohesiveness of a workplace was also positively related to opportunities for and actual prevalence for friendships in the workplace. This was found in the inverse as well, that climates perceived to have low levels of cohesion had low levels of friendships (Buunk et al. 1993). Job satisfaction, organizational commitment and intention to leave are all closely related constructs that were also found to be related to workplace friendship. Markiewicz et all (2000) found that career success and job satisfaction are both related to the quality of workplace relationships. A positive relationship was also found with job satisfaction and the friendship opportunity in the workplace (Morrison 2003). Organizational commitment had similar results. It has been found that employee’s perceptions of friendship opportunities have a direct effect on job involvement but an indirect effect on organizational commitment (Morrison 2003)). This can be explained by the mitigating factor of job satisfaction; the more opportunity for friendship, the more satisfied a worker is and the more likely they are to remain at their job.

Outside of the United States

While the United States has long been the focus of many communicative studies, the recent prominence of the East has shifted focus. Many social ties in China are social constrained or at least socially dictated. This applies to the workplace as well. According to Walder (1986), the workplace is “the locus of a worker’s social and political identity,” (p. 29). According to a study done in Tianjin on worker relationships, 76 % of workers include at least one coworker in their self identified social networks, which is twice the number as American workers. (Ruan 1993). These networks are also different in size, in the United States networks are about three people on average while in China this number is closer to five. This higher rate of workplace friendships may also be related to the higher rate of kin within the workplace for many Chinese citizens. However it is clear that workplace relationships are equally important in Chinese society as they are in the United States.