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During the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) has become the norm for many employees and their families in Germany. Although WFH has been suggested as a form of flexible work to foster work–life integration (especially for workers with greater care responsibilities), studies have also pointed to its risks when the boundaries between these two life spheres become blurred. To help disentangle these inconsistent findings in relation to work–family conflict, this study focuses on two main concerns: the relevance of additional forms of flexibility for those who work from home (i.e., temporal flexibility, job autonomy, fixed rules about availability) and the implications of WFH for employees’ social relationships with co-workers and supervisors. Based on linked employer–employee data collected in the spring of 2021, the study examined work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC) among a sample of 885 employees who worked from home. The results indicate that three factors – temporal flexibility, job autonomy, and fixed rules about availability as a way to set boundaries between work and family life – are important predictors of fewer work–family conflict. This equally applies to employees with caring obligations who overall experience more work–family conflicts while WFH. For those who cared for relatives, autonomy contributed even to fewer work–family conflicts. Supportive relationships with supervisors and co-workers are certainly directly beneficial when it comes to avoiding conflict, but they also reinforce the positive implications of flexible work, whereas poor relationships counteract the benefits of such flexibility. Thus, employers need to provide additional forms of flexibility to employees who work from home and should pay attention to social relationships among their employees as a way to support families and other individuals.

As workplaces and relationships evolve with increasing complexity, co-worker dynamics have become a key concern for HR managers and scholars. An important yet overlooked aspect of co-worker dynamics is gratitude. This paper adopts a relationship-specific conceptualization of gratitude and explores its influence on prosocial behaviors within co-worker dyads. The proposed model also suggests structural-relational factors under which these relationships are affected.

The conceptual paper draws insights from personal relationships to consider an alternative side of gratitude’s prosocial action tendencies, thereby highlighting two: risk-oriented and opportunity-oriented. These assumptions are then situated within the affect theory of social exchange to predict gratitude’s influence on prosocial behaviors within co-worker dyads.

The proposed model illuminates the importance of studying relationship-specific gratitude within co-worker relations by illustrating its effects on two types of prosocial action tendencies – opportunity-oriented and risk-oriented and varying prosocial behaviors (from convergent to divergent). Structural-relational factors, such as positional and physical distance between co-workers, are considered to affect these relationships.

While the study of gratitude in the workplace is emerging, little research has examined its influence on the nature of prosocial behaviors within co-worker relations. This paper advances the notion that gratitude serves an adaptive function in co-worker dyads, thereby highlighting the risk-oriented and opportunity-oriented continuum, and its implications for the type and scope of prosocial behaviors exchanged.

The purpose of the study is to evidently examine how employee cynicism mediates the relationship between co-worker relationship and employee turnover intentions in organizations in Ghana.

Using a cross-sectional survey of employees from both public and private organizations, the authors tested our hypotheses with a sample of 288 employees by means of structural equation modelling (SEM) using maximum likelihood estimation with LISREL 9.2 and bootstrapping procedures.

Findings showed that co-worker relationship is negatively associated with employee cynicism. The findings further revealed that employee cynicism is positively associated with employees' intention to leave. Additionally, employee cynicism negatively mediated the relationship between co-worker relationship and employee intention to leave their organizations.

The work recommends that organizations become aware of employee cynicism which can adversely affects co-worker relationship and consequently organizational performance. Therefore, organizations ought to reduce employee cynicism and rather encourage positive co-worker relations through interpersonal relationship and support for employees.

An investigation of co-worker relationship in organization and employee intentions to leave or turnover is a significant micro-level analysis for contemporary Human Resource Management (HRM) research. This study gives us a scarce opportunity to understand how employee cynicism negatively mediates the relationship between co-worker relationship and turnover intentions of employees.

Although employee relations are recognised as important mechanisms for initiating organisational competitiveness and output, existing research has focused primarily on how these relations embed employees’ job and performance, rather than on the declining outcomes from such relations. This paper aims to integrate research on co-worker relations at workplace and cynicism with social exchange as a theoretical grounding to propose a process model that focuses on how employees’ positive relationship at workplace impacts negatively on their cynical behaviours in organisation leading to their intention to stay rather than their intention to leave.

This study offers a conceptual analysis and a review of the literature to explain employees’ behavioural intentions which may lead to their psychological threat or psychological safety in work organisations.

This work positions cynicism as psychological threat that moderates and predicts the likelihood that negative relations at workplace will actively engage employees’ intention to leave the organisation. Similarly, the model positions job satisfaction and commitment as psychological safety that predicts the likelihood that positive relations at workplace will engage employees’ intention to stay. The outcome of this study is the creation of a model which provides a comprehensive methodological framework for conducting behavioural research.

This is a conceptual paper.

This study has major implications for managing and communicating with workers, as well as organisational socialisations and practices related to co-worker relations for effective human resource management practices from both managerial and practitioner perspective.

This work has been able to create a theoretical framework that provides an understanding for management to learn from its end-state competencies and contributions. By this, the model created would enable research to examine the empirical relationship between co-worker relations, cynicism and intention to leave. Thus, the contribution of this paper identifies the roles that management and organisational leadership can play in the practice of employee behavioural intentions.

Not much is known about the conditions under which the negative relationship between co-worker undermining and employee outcomes may wax or wane. This study seeks to address this issue by analysing the role of leadership in mitigating the negative impact of co-worker undermining on employee outcomes. Drawing on expectancy violation theory (EVT), the study proposes that servant leadership will alleviate the association between co-worker undermining, emotional exhaustion and consequently organisational commitment.

Two-wave time-lagged data were collected from a sample of 345 nurses working under 33 supervisors in a large public hospital in Malaysia. To account for the nested nature of the data, generalised multilevel structural equation modeling (GSEM) in STATA was used to test the hypotheses.

After controlling for transformational leadership, co-worker undermining was indirectly related to organisational commitment via emotional exhaustion, and this indirect relationship was weaker when servant leadership was high.

Organisations need to invest in interventions that help reduce co-worker undermining and put emphasis on promoting servant leadership.

The study extends the literature by introducing EVT as a new theoretical lens to analyse the consequences of co-worker undermining on employee outcomes. The study also addresses calls for research on the role of leadership in ameliorating the negative consequences of co-worker undermining.

In the last decade, researchers have suggested relationships between negative mentoring (NM) and undesirable work interactions, termed co-worker undermining. Existing evidence has shown that both NM and group identity positively influence this set of negative co-worker behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to expand the domain by including two additional influences, such as newcomer’s learning (T1) as a mediator between NM (T1) and co-worker undermining (T2), and (low and high) group identity moderation (T1).

The authors collected time-separated data, with a final sample of 303 employees of various Spanish organizations.

As hypothesized, the results indicate that newcomer’s learning mediates the relationships between NM and co-worker undermining. The conditional effect of newcomer’s learning was strong and significant at lower levels of group identity, and it was weaker and non-significant when group identity was higher. Thus, the mediated moderation analyses performed support the study’s main hypothesis.

Because of the self-reported approach, the results can be affected by common method variance. But the design with time-separated data enables stronger confidence in the inferences drawn from the study than permitted by a cross-sectional study design.

The paper includes implications for employee’s careers and for counseling practitioners.

This paper is relevant because it shows that group identification can protect newcomers from the consequences of negative events during the organizational entry phase. Additionally, practitioners could design more efficient intervention programs by taking novice employees’ affective experiences into account. Organizational and societal leaders may be well-served by knowledge about preventing both NM and co-worker undermining in order to protect newcomers from the destructive consequences linked to such relationships.

This paper focusses on a dysfunctional personnel situation, as co-worker undermining, in order to clarify their links with organizational and group processes. The existing research has tended to address NM, organizational socialization, co-worker undermining and group identification as separate phenomena. In contrast, this study is intended as a first step toward integrating the results of these processes, which interact in a series of complex relations.

This study aims to unpack the link between co-worker incivility and job performance, by detailing a mediating role of psychological detachment and a moderating role of psychological capital.

The research hypotheses are tested with three-wave, time-lagged data collected from Pakistani-based employees and their supervisors.

An important reason that disrespectful co-worker treatment curtails job performance, with respect to both in-role and extra-role work efforts, is that employees detach from their work environment. This mediating role of psychological detachment is less salient to the extent that employees possess high levels of psychological capital.

For organizations, this study pinpoints a key mechanism, a propensity to distance oneself from work, by which convictions that co-workers do not show respect direct employees away from productive work activities. This study also shows how this mechanism can be subdued by ensuring that employees exhibit energy-enhancing personal resources.

This study expands extant research on the dark side of interpersonal co-worker relationships by revealing pertinent factors that explain why and when co-worker incivility can escalate into diminished performance-enhancing activities.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the knowledge of how leadership concepts are embraced by leadership actors and perceived to influence relationships between leaders and co-workers. Specifically, the authors aim to investigate how leaders and co-workers discursively construct the concept of “communicative leadership” and its practices and perceive that communicative leadership influences relationships, work processes, and agency.

The authors analyzed interviews with leaders and co-workers in two Swedish business organizations about their understandings and experiences of leadership.

Communicative processes that enhance co-worker agency, defined as a capacity to act; include: facilitating autonomy, sharing responsibility, and mutual participation. Relational and discursive leadership processes such as responsiveness and dialogue were seen to enhance mutual participation in both organizations. Broader Swedish cultural macro discourses shaped the leader/co-worker relationship, making agency a relational accomplishment rather than an individual phenomenon.

This study relies on data from individual and focus group interviews, rather than direct observation of leadership processes.

Findings suggest that organizations would benefit from making explicit their goals and expectations for communicative leadership in their respective social and cultural contexts.

The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of leaders’ and co-workers’ discursive construction of a leadership concept; leadership communication research in the Swedish context; empirical research on communicative leadership as an empowering form of leadership communication; and how leadership communication discourse on a micro level is connected to organizational and macro-social cultural levels.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a causal model that explains the antecedents and mediating factors predicting the organizational commitment of healthcare employees in different work roles.

This study tests an integrative causal model that consists of a number of direct and indirect relationships for antecedents of organizational commitment. It is proposed that the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment is best understood by focusing on the three interrelated facets of job satisfaction, i.e. satisfaction with career advancement, satisfaction with supervisor, and satisfaction with co‐workers. However, the model also advances that these job satisfaction facets have different mediating effects for other antecedents of organizational commitment.

The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) path analysis showed that the job satisfaction facets of career advancement and satisfaction with supervisor had a direct impact on organizational commitment. Employee empowerment, job‐motivating potential, effective leadership, acceptance by co‐workers, role ambiguity and role conflict were also important determinants of organizational commitment. Interestingly, post hoc analyses showed that satisfaction with co‐workers only had an indirect impact on organizational commitment.

While there has been extensive research on organizational commitment and its antecedents in healthcare organizations, most previous studies have been limited either to a single employee group or to a single time frame. This study proposes a practical causal model of antecedents of organizational commitment that tests relationships across time and across different healthcare employee groups.

Collaboration and preference for teamwork play a fundamental role in strengthening practical completion of team tasks. An organizational culture should facilitate learning systems where knowledge creation occurs through socialization. The purpose of this study is to develop a moderated mediation model, investigating the conditional indirect effect of co-worker support on the relationship between preference for teamwork and communities of practice.

Questionnaire survey was conducted via Google Forms to collect data from 210 employees working in the private and public sector in India. Hayes PROCESS macro models were used for analyzing the mediation of personal interaction and moderation of co-worker support.

This study showed evidence regarding the mediating role of personal interaction on the relationship between preference for teamwork and communities of practice. Co-worker support moderated the relationship between personal interaction and communities of practice. It also moderated the conditional indirect effect.

The results approve the substantial role of preference for teamwork in influencing personal interaction and communities of practice. The mediating role of personal interaction on preference for teamwork and communities of practice can lead to creation and sustenance of communities of practice. Furthermore, the moderating role of co-worker support as a conditional indirect effect shows that social support and exchange can lead to social learning.

Theoretical explanations and analytical approaches provide insights into the relationship between the preference for teamwork and communities of practice through a conditional indirect effect, a one of its kind of a study.