Sources of Coworker Relationships: Social Relations Modeling of Relational Models

Abstract

Relationships between coworkers are receiving increasing attention in organizational behavior research as drivers of a variety of important organizational phenomena, from motivation, leadership, and team dynamics, to turnover, helping, and performance. However, to date, the conceptualizations of relationships in management scholarship remain largely simplistic (e.g. tie/no tie, high/low quality). Here, we build on insights from Fiske’s Relational Models Theory (1992), which suggests that there are four fundamental relationship types and consider how different kinds of relationships emerge between coworkers. Specifically, we hypothesize three key sources of variance in relationships between coworkers: the general tendencies of individuals to perceive certain kinds of relationships (perceiver effects), the general tendencies of individuals to provoke certain relationship types from others (partner effects), and perceptions of relationship type that are specific to a particular coworker relationship, absent ...