Exploring why and when workplace friendship has a differentiated effect on relationship norms and helping behavior: A relationship motivation theory approach

Abstract

Although scholars have begun to focus on the complexity of workplace friendship as a collection of exchange relationships and communal relationships that contain conflicting exchange norms and communal norms (Pillemer & Rothbard, 2018), unfortunately, our elaborated understanding of whether the differentiated effects of workplace friendship on organizational citizenship behavior or not due to such complexity and, especially, boundary conditions for their differentiated influence are limited. Our purpose is to develop a motivational framework that reveals when and how differentiated helping is driven by workplace friendship via different relationship norms considering perceived relationship motivations. To do so, we argue that workplace friendship can lead to proactive helping and reactive helping through adherence to communal norms and exchange norms, respectively, and such a differentiated effect of workplace friendship hinges on employees’ perceived partners’ relationship motivation. Using multi-wave survey (Study 1) and experiment (Study 2) methods, we found that when employees perceive others are driven by autonomous relationship motivation, workplace friendship is positively related to communal norms, enhancing proactive helping, whereas when employees perceive others are driven by controlled relationship motivation attribution, workplace friendship is positively related to exchange norms, enhancing reactive helping. Our study contributes to the literature on workplace friendship and relationship motivation.