The Structure Of Workplace Friendship And Its Related Research

From the point of view of individual life experiences growing up, friendship plays a vital role at each stage of the corporal development. During school, you may build friendships with classmates or the teacher, and after working, you may establish friendships with colleagues. All these friendships will meet the emotional needs of the individual, and make us get the necessary support and assistance, even encourage us to better cope with the tough situation at work or in life.Researchers from various fields has been interested in the discussion of the subject of friendship all the time. But the research on the friendship established in the workplace began in the 1970s. After 40 years of research and study, the field has accumulated fruitful research results.As a workplace relationship, workplace friendship have a certain impact on the organization and individual. Studies have shown that workplace friendships have positive and negative effects on the individual or the organization. If we can give full play to the positive side of workplace friendships, individual or organization is more good than harm. From a domestic perspective, research on workplace friendships are rare, in addition to foreign research literature review on workplace friendships and revision of the scale, relevant empirical studies has just started.From the perspective of the characteristics of the workplace friendship,the questionnaire based on the Chinese cultural was worked out. For the purpose, some standard research methods, such as literature review, personal interviews, survey and other methods, were used in the research. On the basis of the pre-study, the questionnaire items were selected to form a formal questionnaire. Almost 700 employees from 6 cities in China were surveyed. Through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factory analysis (CFA), the study reveal the characteristic structure of the workplace friendship. The results show that:First, under the Chinese culture, the characteristic structure of the workplace friendships includes four dimensions, namely voluntary, dual character, deepening friendship and the rupture of friendship. The four factors are fitting better in theory model. Moreover, the reliability and validity of the questionnaire both meet the requirements of psychometric.Second, the research of factors affecting the workplace friendship suggests that the Big Five Personality and its three factors(extraversion、agreeableness and conscientiousness) has significant prediction to workplace friendship; the self-disclosure has no significant prediction to workplace friendship.Third, the research discussed the relationship between workplace friendship and its consequence. The results show that workplace friendship has a negative impact on work stress and a positive impact on promotion opportunity. Specifically, voluntary has a negative impact on work stress and a positive impact on promotion opportunity; The rupture of friendship has a positive impact on work stress and has no significant impact on promotion opportunity; The dual character and deepening friendship have no significant impact on work stress and promotion opportunity.Fourth, the research discussed about the demographical variable’s effects on workplace friendship. The demographical variable included age, sex, education, working year, working nature and position. We found that the employees of different ages% different working nature% different positions don’t have significant differences; the employees of the different sex have significant differences on the rupture of workplace friendship; the employees of different working years have significant differences on dual character and deepening friendship; the employees of different education have significant differences on deepening friendship.Finally, the corresponding management recommendations、the shortcomings and problems to be solved in this research have been discussed.