The impact of workplace friendships on organizational commitment and intention to leave

Abstract

Friendships play a role in different aspects of our life. These friendships within organisations might hinder or facilitate both the organisational and employee functioning. There are various degrees of friendships found in organisations. The different degrees have different roles in functioning of the organisation. Therefore, this paper tries to find out the different degrees of friendship that exist in organisations and their effect on the employee’s job commitment and intention to leave. The different levels of friendships studied in this paper are “work spouse, special peer, collegial peer and information peer”. The study aims to find out the prominent types of friendships that exist in the workplace and to determine the influence of different types of friendships on the employee’s job commitment and intention to leave. A questionnaire was constructed using a friendship scale, commitment scale and intention to leave scale. The samples for the study are professionals who are working in the service industries. Snowballing and convenient sampling technique was used to collect data.