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Work Friendships Are Mostly Amazing and Sometimes Messy

A conversation with Nancy Rothbard and Julianna Pillemer

It’s great to have colleagues who are also friends. They can make coming to work more fun and engaging and can even make a ho-hum job more tolerable. It’s a good feeling when we have someone to cheer us on, to confide in, be straight with, to cry in front of. But they also involve challenges, like maintaining those friendships when you become a boss or trying to tone down a relationship that’s just too draining.

Nancy Rothbard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Julianna Pillemer, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, are researchers who have studied work friendships. Women at Work cohosts Amy Bernstein and Nicole Torres sat down with them to discuss how friends can set boundaries and get past stressful moments at work.

NICOLE TORRES: One question we hear a lot is where “work friendship” separates from “real friendship.” From what you see in your research, where are the boundaries?

NANCY ROTHBARD: There are a lot of things that set workplace friendships apart from other types of friendships. But I also want to say that work friendships can be real friendships also; they’re just slightly different. One of the key differentiators is that work relationships are sometimes not voluntary. Often, you have to see this person every day, whether you like them or not. In other types of friendships, you are usually free to choose whether you associate with them. A second differentiator is there’s an expectation that work has a formality to it, whereas in friendship relationships, informality is often central. Another is that the key goals for a friendship are not instrumental or task-oriented—they’re socioemotional goals. Finally, the norms at work for how we interact with one another are more exchange-based and less communal than in typical friendships.

NICOLE: What have you learned in studying workplace friendships? What are the good things that come from them and what are the bad things, if there are any?

JULIANNA PILLEMER: We’re always very careful to say that we don’t think work friendships are bad. We came at this research thinking that friendships at work are inevitable, and Nancy raised questions about the kind of tensions that can occur when a work friendship comes up against the requirements of being a good employee. One example is when you are in a meeting and you want to support your friend, but you actually disagree with them. What are the ways in which that can play out? You have to consider your role as a friend versus your role as an employee. Another thing is the impact your friendship can have on others. You may be thinking, “Oh, wow—I feel really great in this friendship. It’s so great to have this emotional support.” But in our research, we look at the way that that friendships like this can affect the people outside of those relationships and make them feel really excluded and left out.

NANCY: There are a couple of key outcomes that we look at. One is the individual outcomes: If I’m friends with somebody at work, there are some positive things that happen for me individually. I feel less lonely, I feel more connected, I have a lot more socioemotional support, and those are all good things. But it can also lead to the risk of me being distracted from my tasks at work. And if I’m getting a lot of socioemotional support from my friend, I’m probably having to reciprocate that socioemotional support. That might be distracting at certain key moments when I might need to be focusing on other parts of my job.

A second piece, which is related to what Julianna talked about earlier, is that when we’re friends with somebody in the same work group, we may feel uncomfortable disagreeing with them, even when it’s necessary for the betterment of the organization. To hash out the details of a problem, the team may need divergent viewpoints.

NICOLE: Can you give us some practical advice for how you manage conflicts that arise in your work friendships? How do you handle these tensions that you talked about? What are some effective strategies for managing them so you preserve your friendships but you also don’t feel like you’re giving up something at work?

JULIANNA: Just awareness that downsides can occur, just having those conversations very early on in the friendship, even before conflict can arise—that alone can help to mitigate some of those threats.

NANCY: That could look like Julianna and me talking about how I’m there for her but that I also really need my space to focus sometimes because that’s how I need to work. It’s almost like setting up a contract or an expectation with your friend up front about what your priorities are and what you need in order to be able to get your work done effectively.

If you are in a hierarchical friendship, it is also important to be transparent about the decision-making processes. Julianna was my doctoral student, and we’re friends. There’s a hierarchical divide there, so how do we navigate that? How do I make sure that the other PhD students, who know that we’re friendly, don’t think that I’m favoring Julianna? Those are the kinds of things that were on our minds as we were writing this paper.

NICOLE: So how did you navigate that hierarchical difference? How did you make sure that none of your other students felt like you were playing favorites?

NANCY: I don’t know. Was I successful, Julianna?

JULIANNA: I don’t know if you were successful. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know. It’s impossible, I think.

NANCY: We think we were successful, but it would really be the other people who would have to tell us. What I would say is I kept to very high standards of expectation about the work that she was producing. Also, she had a co-adviser on her dissertation. So that really helped too, I think, to make sure that people knew that it wasn’t just me who was evaluating her.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So one of our listeners sent us this question, and I’d love to share it with you and get your thoughts. She says, In my current job, I learned the hard way about being a manager and befriending an employee. I grew extremely close to an employee, opened up personally as well as professionally, and built her up to rise the corporate ladder with me. I had her back when others didn’t and fought for her. I even welcomed her into my home. She ended up putting in her two weeks’ notice via email to me, and I was crushed. I learned quickly that in a new managerial role, I could not get too close to my employees and had to take the emotion out of it. What are your thoughts on that?

JULIANNA: This makes me think of some research we have seen that looks at the emotional help managers give. Managers may view this as really putting themselves out there, while employees sometimes can view the same interactions as “You’re doing your job as a manager.” So there’s some complexity here around the employee simply feeling like the manager was doing her job in mentoring her. From her point of view, she was still within her rights to do what was best for her from a career perspective.

This gets at interesting hierarchical dynamics, but it also speaks to the fuzzy boundary and uncertainty around where your work friendship ends and where your role as employee or mentor begins. I would encourage the writer to perhaps adjust her expectations or try to understand this employee’s perspective, that he or she might not have thought that this was a friendship or not been sure about the nature of that relationship. There is always that uncertainty around relational definitions when they occur at work.

NICOLE: We also got some questions from listeners about not having friends at work and even losing friends at work. We heard from incredibly close friends who had to work through one of them leaving their job and so no longer working together. Could you talk to us about coping with loneliness, whether it’s because you don’t have friends at work that you’re close to or whether it’s because someone—a close friend of yours—at your job has left, and all of a sudden you’re alone and don’t have that workplace friend. How do you deal with that?

NANCY: Our colleague Sigal Barsade has a paper on loneliness at work called “No Employee an Island.” And one of the things that she finds is that a key predictor that reduces loneliness at work is having at least one friend at work. You don’t have to have a lot of friends at work, but you should have somebody that you feel connected to deeply on some additional level. And what happens when that person leaves? So it’s probably important that you have more than one friend at work so that you can guard against that loneliness really hitting you at that point.

JULIANNA: And if there’s not that opportunity at work, just being sure that you have the support around you in your life to cope with that. I think there’s always going to be a challenge for people who want to find these close relationships at work, because there might be someone who they think is really great who just doesn’t value work friendship as much or thinks, “Yeah, of course when I leave, I’m not going to stay in touch with you.” With people spending more and more time at work, it’s easy to get your whole identity wrapped up in that. Being sure that you maintain some of yourself that’s outside of that domain is really important. Psychologists call this “self-complexity.” If you put all of your eggs in this work basket from a relational standpoint, that loneliness is going to hit you a lot harder.

NICOLE: What happens when a work friendship goes off the rails? You’re too distracted or it’s too emotionally draining, and those things are getting in the way of your job—you need to cut this friendship off. Have you ever experienced that? And what do you do?

NANCY: A lot of times where I’ve seen that happen has been where a hierarchical difference has arisen, where people were peers and then one of them is promoted and the other person has a really hard time dealing with that. And they can’t necessarily leave. So the way people deal with it is through a lot of silence, simmering.

AMY B.: Cold war. What about getting a work relationship back on the rails after there’s a rupture? How do you do that?

NANCY: It’s really hard. One of the things that the trust literature talks about is that trust is really easy to lose really hard to regain. It takes a lot of work to rebuild a ruptured relationship, but sometimes you can do it out of necessity. You see that person all the time and you know what you have to do is lay what happened out on the table and try to be open to what their perspective is on it. When any relationship goes wrong—and this certainly applies to workplace relationships—it’s often the case that we are really thinking about our own perspective on the situation and the other person is thinking about their own perspective. You each have to acknowledge that you had a part in it too and be willing to acknowledge that you did something wrong as well. Otherwise you can’t restore that relationship.

Usually there has to be a pretty strong incentive to do so, like you are going to be on a consulting team and you’re going to spend the next eight weeks with this person every day. It’s hard to ghost them when you have to work with them and see them every day like that.

JULIANNA: I think Nancy’s point about being real and putting it all on the table is interesting. This idea of, How much of your “authentic self” do you want to bring to work? How much of your “whole self” do you want to bring to work?

This is a domain that I’m researching, and I think that there’s a way to sort of be “boundedly authentic.” You’re not totally unfiltered, but enough so that people respect it, even if they’re not happy with the honesty it entails. This can help avoid some of the tacit misunderstandings, where you did something and someone interpreted it in a certain way and no one ever talked about it again. I agree with Nancy’s strategy of owning up and checking in, perhaps even when you feel just a kernel of something that might be wrong. A few times I’ve thought, “Hmm, I’m not sure if this person is upset with me, but I’m going to preemptively say, ‘Hey, listen, I’m really sorry that I couldn’t make it to this event that you invited me to. I really wanted to, but this is what happened, and I hope … ’” I’ve done that so there wasn’t any opportunity for that small kernel of dissatisfaction to turn into something more.

Adapted from “Work Friendships Are Mostly Amazing and Sometimes Messy,” Women at Work podcast season 4, episode 4, November 4, 2019.