“Frenemies” Both Help And Harm Each Other At Work

By Emma Young Think about your relationships with your colleagues… I bet there are at least some who you’d call “frenemies”. Maybe there’s a co-worker whose sense of humour you love, say — but who also irritates you by failing to pull their weight. In fact, the workplace is the ideal breeding ground for relationships that are characterised by simultaneous, strong positive and negative feelings — so-called “ambivalent relationships” (or frenemies) — note the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology. It’s surprising, then, how little is known about how frenemies behave with each other, write Shimul Melwani at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Naomi Rothman at Lehigh University. So the pair ran a series of studies to find out. In the first, groups of 3 -6 students who’d been assigned a joint task were asked 2.5 weeks into the project to rate how positively and/or negatively they felt about each other. About a month later, they all reported on the extent to which they’d received help (support in a discussion, say), or harm (a verbal attack, perhaps), from each other. Unsurprisingly, the students gave more help to team members they liked and enacted more harmful behaviour towards those that they disliked. But the data also showed that frenemies both helped and harmed each other. In a second study, the researchers used variations of a standard lab technique for developing closeness between...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Occupational Social Source Type: blogs