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.

This dissertation develops grounded theory on how respect is received and internalized in organizations, and the personal and work-related outcomes of receiving respect. A company that employed inmates at a state prison to perform professional business-to-business marketing services provided a unique context for data collection, as respect is typically problematic in a prison environment but was deliberately instilled by this particular company. Data collection took place in three call centers (minimum, medium, and maximum security levels) and included extensive non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival documents. My sampling strategy focused on the experience of new employees as they went through the training and socialization process, a time when the experience of respect was particularly novel and salient to them. The emergent theoretical model suggests that receiving respect was experienced in two distinct ways, which were labeled generalized and personalized respect. These two types of respect were directly related to outcomes for the receivers' well-being and performance on the job. Receiving respect also changed the way that receivers thought and felt about themselves. The two types of respect (generalized and personalized) exerted different forces on the self-concept such that generalized respect led to social validation and identity security for social identities, and personalized respect led to social validation and identity security for personal identities. The social validation and subsequent identity security ultimately enabled the receiver of respect to integrate their conflicting personal and social identities into a coherent whole, an outcome referred to as identity holism. In addition to the direct effects of receiving generalized and personalized respect on individuals' well-being and performance, identity holism served as a partial mediator between received respect and individual outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as well as future research directions aimed to build momentum for research on respect in organizations.