Development and Validation of the Workplace Friendship Questionnaire

Le résumé fourni par la source

Friendship at work is a well-documented positive effect of employment in a work organization. Although the two-dimensional Workplace Friendship Scale (WFS) measuring opportunity for, and prevalence, of friendships (Nielsen et al., 2000) has been widely used in empirical studies, there are several conceptual and empirical limitations of the WFS noted in the literature. Therefore, developing a well-rounded scale that accurately captures workplace friendship’s nature and construct domain is warranted. Under Pillemer and Rothbard’s theoretical framework (2018), we developed a 16-item Workplace Friendship Questionnaire (WFQ-16) comprising four dimensions: voluntariness, informality, communal norms, and socioemotional goals, to better understand interpersonal and social connections among employees in the workplace. A series of quantitative studies, along with multiple independent samples, were used to examine the psychometric properties of the WFQ-16. A nomological network was developed to determine how well the WFQ-16 would fit into a network of work-related outcomes (i.e., coworker support, job satisfaction, turnover intentions). Overall, the results showed that the WFQ-16 had satisfactory evidence of reliability and validity, indicating that the WFQ-16 is a practically recommendable and effective measurement instrument to assess different aspects of friendship quality in the workplace. We further discuss the theoretical constraints and practical implications of our results.

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