2014- Working Papers: Organizational Behavior and Human Resources

Research on friendship in organizations has tended to treat this relationship as a single category, assuming that all organizational friendships are identical. In this article, I argue and demonstrate that different types of friendships exist in organizations and that "not all friends are created equal". I propose and test a dimensional model that distinguishes friendships along affective, cognitive, behavioral, and instrumental dimensions. Moreover, I develop and validate a 16-item measure of friendships – the Friendship Types Scale (FTS) – using four studies. In Study 1, qualitative methods are used to investigate the types of friendships that staff members have with their colleagues. In Study 2, I utilize the findings from Study 1 to develop items for a FTS scale and use a sample of 844 US employees for construct development. In Study 3, a new sample of 679 employees is used for measure validation. In Study 4 evidence for convergent and discriminant validity is obtained. The results indicate the new scale has satisfactory psychometric properties and construct validity. Future empirical investigations using the newly developed typology and scale are detailed.