Can We Be Coworkers and Friends? An Inductive Study of the Experience and Management of Virtual Coworker Friendships

Scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize that coworker friendships are integral to both individual- and organizational-level outcomes. At the same time, though, the rapid increase in virtual work has taken a principal source of adult friendships – workplaces – and drastically changed the way that individuals interact within them. No longer are proximity and extra-organizational socializing, two of the strongest predictors of coworker friendships in a co-located workplace, easily accessible. How, then, do employees become friends with each other when interacting mostly online? Once these virtual coworker friendships are forged, individuals must balance the often-conflicting norms of the friendship relationship with the coworker relationship. How, if at all, are these tensions experienced and managed when co-worker friendships are virtual? My dissertation seeks to answer these questions through a longitudinal, grounded theory study of virtual coworker friendship in a global IT firm. The emerging theory articulates the “barrier of virtuality” that challenges virtual coworker friendship formation, necessitating that individuals employ two sets of activities and one set of competencies to form friendships with one another: presence bridgers, relational informalizers, and relational digital fluency. The data also suggest that the coworker friendship tension process itself is largely similar to the previously articulated process in co-located contexts. However, the virtual context changed the frequency, types of shocks that elicited the tensions, and management of these tensions. My findings have numerous implications for the literatures on relationships at work, virtual work, and organizational tensions. They also suggest significant ways in which individuals and organizations can more effectively foster virtual coworker friendships while minimizing the potential harm of virtual coworker friendship tensions.