Chance Made Us Colleagues, Fun and Laughter Made Us Friends: Exploring the Formation and Development of Workplace Friendships Between Co-workers

Workplace friendship, while common within organisations, remains an underexplored area within organisational psychology. This thesis delves into the formation and development of workplace friendships between co-workers through the creation of a theoretical model. I highlight and link cognition, affect, and behaviour involved in these co-worker relationships to understand the antecedents of workplace friendship formation and development, emphasise the role of affect, and investigate the interpersonal behavioural outcomes of experienced affect from a co-worker interaction. A core component of this model is workplace friendship behaviour in which the literature is currently lacking an existing measurement that properly captures this concept. Therefore, I also designed a measure that examines constructive and destructive workplace friendship behaviour between co-workers. A total of six studies were conducted to develop and validate the newly developed Workplace Friendship Behaviour Measure (WFBM). These studies also involved testing a condensed version of our theoretical model that consisted of appraisal (goal congruence and goal relevance), affect (positive and negative), organisational norms (cooperative and competitive), attachment style (secure, counterdependent, and overdependent), and workplace friendship behaviour (constructive and destructive) and their potential outcomes (co-worker satisfaction, affective organisational commitment, turnover intention, and team identification). The results supported some of the hypotheses, demonstrating a variety of direct and indirect effects. The significant findings include the positive relationships of goal congruence with positive and negative affect as well as the positive relationship between goal relevance and positive affect. The moderated mediation results demonstrated that the relationship between co-worker satisfaction and goal congruence through negative affect and destructive workplace friendship behaviour was significantly stronger at high levels of counterdependent attachment style than at low levels, and significantly weaker at high levels of overdependent attachment style than at low levels. The theoretical discussion and empirical evidence aim to enhance the awareness and understanding of workplace friendships between co-workers, leading to potential knock-on effects including a greater quantity and quality of these interpersonal relationships within organisations.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Lawrence, Amy Grace

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Jiang, Lixin
• Cheung, Gordon

• workplace friendship
• workplace friendship behaviour
• co-worker relationships
• organisational psychology

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/72979

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/72979