Content area
Full Text
The relationship between bureaucracy and workplace friendship remains largely unknown in the organizational literature on workplace friendship. Competing hypotheses for that relationship were proposed. On one hand, bureaucracy's characteristics indicate bureaucratic organizations' attitude is unfavorable to, and thus detracts from, workplace friendship. On the other hand, those characteristics lead to employees' negative feelings at work and thus promote their workplace friendship. Data collected via a questionnaire survey of 408 employees in the medical, education, governmental, and banking sectors show that bureaucracy is negatively related to workplace friendship. Our finding provides an organizational perspective, a different angle from the factors of employees' perspective in the extant literature, from which to view and manage the issue of the decrease of workplace friendship in the organization.
Keywords: bureaucracy, workplace friendship, hierarchy, bureaucratic procedures/rules, workplace impersonality.
Workplace friendship is defined as informal and person-related interactions in a workplace setting (Berman, West, & Richter, 2002). Workplace friendship has positive functions, such as support and information sharing (Kram & Isabella, 1985), and enhances important job attitude variables, including job satisfaction (Markiewicz, Devine, & Kausilas, 2000; Winstead, Derlega, Montgomery, & Pilkington, 1995), job performance (Ross, 1997), job involvement (Riordan & Griffeth, 1995), organizational commitment, and reduced turnover intention (Nielsen, Jex, & Adams, 2000). By contrast, when an employee lacks workplace friendship, that employee's job ability will be reduced, and this will affect job progress (Sias, Heath, Perry, Silva, & Fix, 2004). Although workplace friendship has negative functions (e.g., gossip and favoritism) (Song, 2006), managers regard these negative functions as being manageable by company policies. Therefore, managers generally support friendship among employees in the workplace (Berman et al., 2002). Many scholars have focused on studies of workplace friendship (Mao, 2006; Tse & Dasborough, 2008) and indicated that future studies should emphasize factors influencing employees' workplace friendship (Nielsen et al., 2000) because workplace friendship will help raise employees' job performance, which in turn is beneficial for enhancing organizational performance.
Factors influencing workplace friendship can be classified as personal or contextual. Personal factors include sex composition (Sias, Smith, & Avdeyeva, 2003), personality (Sias et al., 2004), and similarity (Sias & Canili, 1998). Contextual factors are divided into workplace and external factors. Workplace factors include division of labor (Lincoln & Miller, 1979), level of position...