The Double-Edged Effect Of Workplace Friendship

In recent years,the trend of increasing competition and the challenges of economic recovery caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have undoubtedly put employees under extreme work pressure.In order to work more happily and comfortably or seek spiritual handholds and emotional solace in the workplace,employees under pressure often establish friendships with their work partners.Although workplace friendship can give employees a kind of emotional support under the pressure of competition,it can also cause problems such as infighting and cliques,which will cause bad consequences for both employees and enterprises.Therefore,workplace friendship is a double-edged sword.In this regard,how to effectively use workplace friendship to play a positive effect and,at the same time,avoid negative effects is an important issue for scholars and practitioners.Accordingly,based on multiple theoretical bases,this paper,from the perspective of individual emotions,resources and psychological perception,explores the mediating mechanism and boundary conditions of a double-edged role of workplace friendship,which provides scientific methods and theoretical support for enterprises to prevent and avoid the potential drawbacks of workplace friendship and effectively play the positive effect of workplace friendship.Following the logic of putting forward problems,analyzing problems and solving problems,this paper closely focuses on three research question and conduct research in turn:"whether workplace friendship can bring negative effects";"How can workplace friendships play a double-edged sword?";"why workplace friendships can be a double-edged sword?" First,in view of the potential drawbacks of workplace friendship,this paper initially explores the boundary conditions of the negative effects of workplace friendship,which provides a theoretical and empirical basis for further research on the double-edged sword effect of workplace friendship.Second,based on the perspective of resource gain and depletion,this paper investigates the double-edged sword effect of workplace friendship on employee voice behavior and its psychological resource mechanism,thus helping to understand the advantages and disadvantages of workplace friendship from a more balanced and dialectical perspective.Third,from the perspective of relationship motivation,this paper focuses on the motivational causes of the differentiated effect of workplace friendship and explores the different psychological perceptions of employees when they establish and maintain workplace friendships under different relationship motivations so as to have differentiated effects on organizational citizenship behavior and compulsory citizenship behavior.Then,the hypotheses of the three sub-studies are verified by survey and experimental methods.Finally,this paper puts forward the research conclusions and practical implications by summarizing the research results of the three sub-studies.The findings of this paper can be described as below:(1)workplace friendships are likely to be regarded as a role stressor,which can lead to negative emotions and withdrawal behavior of employees.Specifically,task interdependence and emotional reactivity are the blasting fuse and catalysts for the negative consequences of workplace friendship as a stressor.That is,in high task interdependence and high emotional reactivity,workplace friendship has a positive effect on employees’withdrawal behavior by stimulating negative emotions.(2)Workplace friendship positively affects both employees’ psychological safety and employees’ face concern,thus promoting or inhibiting employees’ voice behavior.(3)Competitive context is the boundary condition of the double-edged sword of workplace friendship.Specifically,in a lowly competitive climate,workplace friendship may promote voice behavior by improving employees’ psychological safety.In contrast,in a highly competitive climate,workplace friendship may have a stronger positive effect on employees’ face concern and a stronger indirect effect on inhibiting voice behavior.(4)Relationship motivation is a key boundary condition that leads to the differentiated(discretionary vs.non-discretionary)psychological and behavioral consequences of workplace friendships.Among them,driven by autonomous relationship motivation,workplace friendship can promote organizational citizenship behavior by improving employees’perceived insider status.In contrast,driven by controlled relationship motivation,workplace friendship will stimulate compulsory citizenship behavior by triggering employees’ felt obligation.The creativeness of this paper is described as below:(1)This paper breaks the research perspective of the consequences of workplace friendship by exploring the negative side and double-edged sword effect of workplace friendship.This study expects to help scholars and enterprises have a more comprehensive and scientific understanding of the complexity and duality of workplace friendship to cultivate the workplace friendship relationship between employees strategically.Meanwhile,this study also promoted the study of workplace friendship from a single perspective of"focusing only on the positive and negative aspects" to a new dialectical perspective of"focusing on both sides simultaneously."(2)Based on various theories,this paper explores the different mediation mechanisms of workplace friendship,which expands the theoretical framework of workplace friendship research and tries to apply relationship motivation theory to friendship at work for the first time.(3)From the multiple perspectives of organizational context,team characteristics and personality traits,this paper strengthens the understanding of the boundary mechanism of negative effects of workplace friendship.(4)Based on the perspective of resource gain-loss concern,this study deepens the understanding of the relationship between workplace friendship and employee voice behavior,expands the research on the influence of workplace friendship on voice behavior,and reminds scholars and managers to pay attention to the role of the face in interpersonal relationship.(5)The combination of the survey method and experimental method not only helps solve the problem that the existing measurement scale of workplace friendship cannot fully reflect the intimacy of workplace friendship but also breaks the limitation of only using the survey method to explore and investigate workplace friendship at present,providing the rich scenario-based experimental paradigm for the follow-up study of workplace friendship.