Work friendships are great.
This is an
obvious statement, but it also happens to be a fairly popular subject of study
among organizational psychologists. Consider, for example, a recently published
meta-analysis in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that analyzed
26 studies on work and friendship and concluded that teams made up of friends
tended to perform better than teams made up of strangers. Twenty-six studies to
confirm the fact that, yes, work friendships are great.
Yet having and keeping friends at work can feel more complicated than
these studies let on. Say you’re leading a big project, and your friend’s
contribution to that project is a total mess. Or maybe your friend is lately
not doing her share of the work, which means you are too often doing it for
her. And there’s the rub: “If we befriend someone at work, it’s likely that we
also need to work with them,” said Jessica Methot, associate professor of human
resource management at Rutgers University.
