Collaborative Conflict: Relationships at the Interface of Collaborative and Conflictual Networks

Abstract

The purpose of this symposium is to present emerging work that seeks to expand understanding of the interface between the bright and dark sides of employee social networks. Together, these papers illuminate the complex ways in which employees develop and manage relationships across multiple boundaries such as maintaining friendships despite task conflicts, sabotaging enemies while developing shared knowledge systems, undermining demographically similar employees and including or excluding co-workers based on social differences. Such relational complexities suggest that the ways in which employees elect to erect, enforce, and span relational boundaries are influenced by the duality of personal and professional concerns. This symposium offers a platform through which theories at the intersection of competition, conflict, and complementarity in employee networks may be developed, extended, or bounded.