Abstract
What explains friendship at work? The answer according to the homophily principle is that friendships are more likely among individuals who are similar. Classic work on homophily assessed similarity in terms of both demographic indicators and underlying cognitive perceptions. Organizational researchers, however, have tended to rely on a narrower, structural interpretation of homophily, one that assumes that perceptions of similarity can be bypassed because demography is a good proxy for these underlying perceptions. Using data from an organization located in North America, we open the black box of homophily and submit this assumption to empirical test. There was no support for the idea that the relationship between gender and friendship choice is mediated by underlying cognitive perceptions of similarity. We found, instead, that similarity in gender and perceptions of similarity were independently related to friendship choice. We also found evidence of heterophily when it comes to self-monitoring personality: the greater the difference in the self-monitoring scores of two individuals, the more likely they were to be friends. We close by discussing implications for theory and practice.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Understanding Workplace Relationships |
Subtitle of host publication | An Examination of the Antecedents and Outcomes |
Publisher | Springer International Publishing AG |
Pages | 369-389 |
Number of pages | 21 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9783031166402 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783031166396 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 20 Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.