Örgütlerde Kirpi İkilemi: İşyeri Arkadaşlıklarının Olumlu ve Olumsuz Yönleri

Abstract

There are numerous studies about the benefits of workplace friendship in organizations. Therefore, it may be assumed that well-established friendships in organizations promote effective information sharing, communication skills, increase teamwork and workplace morale among employees at work. Additionally, workplace friendships have positive effects for the organizations such as lower turnover rates, employee burnout and lower levels of intention to leave. On the other hand, just like experiencing the hedgehog's dilemma, higher levels of workplace friendship or intimacy among group of individuals in organizations may lead to negative consequences such as the supervisor/subordinate friendship may raise the anger or feelings of unfair treatment by other individuals or may lead to untrue performance assessments. Besides, workplace friendships may cause failures to report misfits and counterproductive work behaviors accurately in the organizations. So, workflow might deteriorate and it may lead to conflicts in teamwork in organizations. In sum, in this conceptual paper, workplace friendship will be focused on and the advantages and the disadvantages of it will be outlined. Then, in the conclusion section, the recommendations will be made about how to reduce the negative effects of workplace friendships in organizations.

The honey‐trap of workplace friendship: Developing and testing a three‐way interaction model to understand when and why workplace friendship triggers employee withdrawal behaviour

“…Previous research has emphasised workplace friendship as a positive interpersonal relationship that can bring relational energy to individuals and emphasised the supportive function of workplace friendship (Cao & Zhang, 2020), concluding that it is always good and beneficial. Moreover, based on the perspective of roles of workplace friendships, previous qualitative studies have proposed that workplace friendships may cause negative effects, such as role conflicts, which unfortunately fails to be verified by quantitative studies (Biçer, 2020; Hommelhoff, 2019; Pillemer & Rothbard, 2018). Accordingly, we challenge the prevailing consensus that workplace friendship is always beneficial and propose that it may be a honey‐trap that can lead to potential negative effects.…”

“…Although traditional research on the consequences of workplace friendship focuses on the positives (Pillemer & Rothbard, 2018), increasing studies suggest that negative emotional and behavioural outcomes may occur due to the complexity of workplace friendship (Biçer, 2020; Choi & Ko, 2020; Hommelhoff, 2019), which has rarely been explored empirically. Specifically, workplace friendship as a complicated relationship contains conflicting and contradictory work expectations and friend expectations, triggering role tensions (Pillemer & Rothbard, 2018), which increases its maintenance difficulties and requires an investment of energy and effort to manage, resulting in emotional exhaustion and distraction, making it detrimental to employees' performance (Methot et al, 2016).…”