The More You Know: The Impact of Personal Knowledge on Interpersonal Treatment at Work

Abstract

Employees often receive conflicting advice about sharing personal information in the workplace. They are told to “bring your whole self to work” but also to keep it professional and not share too much personal information with colleagues. Research has been equivocal in its overall guidance about sharing personal information at work: it may be either beneficial or harmful for work relationships. These inconsistencies are likely driven by the types of questions posed. Specifically, existing research has studied the impact of a particular piece of personal information and the specific details of what is learned, not what all of these pieces of personal information amount to. Instead, this paper takes a new vantage point to understand how the amount of personal knowledge (the quantity of information that one person knows across many aspects of a colleague’s personal life) influences positive interpersonal dynamics at work by humanizing the known colleague. Through a full-cycle research approach, I establish causal support experimentally and then replicate support for my hypotheses in the field, demonstrating a positive, persistent effect: having more personal knowledge—regardless of whether that knowledge conveys value incongruence or life-to-work interference—leads to a more humanized perception of the known colleague, resulting in increased responsiveness toward that colleague. These findings resolve an existing puzzle in the literature and also contribute to a more nuanced understanding of work relationships and interpersonal learning at work. Funding: This work was supported by Washington University in St. Louis (faculty research funds) and the University of Michigan (doctoral research funds). Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15606 .