Quartz: There’s a dark side to friendships at work

Originally found at Quartz at Work, by Lila MacLellan

If you follow the popular online advice column “Ask a Manager,” you’re familiar with a few of the ways friendships at work can get hairy.

I’ve been covering for a friend’s work mistakes,” one reader complained recently. Another described her pal as an awful coworker, angry all the time and running a private labor strike. “She’s my friend and I feel terrible about this, but it’s incredibly frustrating,” she confesses. And, yikes: “The friend who I recommended for a job in my office is secretly job-searching after just a few months.”

Julianna Pillemer, a doctoral candidate at the Wharton School of Management, noticed a few years ago that, pervasive as it seems to be, this genre of workplace crises was little-covered by scholarly research. Together with Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard, she addresses that gap in a new paper, “Friends Without Benefits: Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship,” just published in the Academy of Management Review.”

Continue reading article at Quartz at Work.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Julianna Pillemer, Wharton School of Management
• Nancy P. Rothbard, University of Pennsylvania