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The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential influence of friendship on entrepreneurial teams (ETs) and on venture formation and development. The theoretical framework is built on the literature around friendship ties, the interaction of friendship ties and professional ties, and ETs.

Taking an interpretative methodological approach, the authors carried out qualitative interviews with ten business founders in Paris, France.

The authors identified different four profiles or types of ETs according to how friendship ties interact with professional ties among team members, which the authors designate as “fusion” and “separation”, and describe the orientation of this interaction, which the authors label as “affective” or “strategic”. These profiles affect the emergence of the idea and the choice of members in the formation of teams. They also shape the functioning of teams in terms of decision-making processes, recruitment and investment.

The findings underline the difficulties of studying friendship in ETs empirically and recommend longitudinal approaches for further research.

Findings offer insights in to why and how ETs based on friendship ties approach the pre-launch, launch and development phases of businesses as well as in to the interactions between professional and friendship ties, which is helpful to both practitioners and academics. The authors also discuss the consequences and implications of the different team types in terms of their risks and strategies for mitigating these risks.

This is one of the first empirical studies to examine how friendship and professional ties may combine and evolve in ETs, and their influence on the entrepreneurial process as it relates to venture formation and development.

This chapter is concerned with the social relationships and communities that families engage with while playing Pokémon Go. The chapter begins by considering the release of this hybrid reality game (HRG) in the summer of 2016, and the extent to which it seemingly lends itself to communities and the development of social relationships through play. Following this, we demonstrate that while the evidence for Pokémon Go facilitating new relationships is apparent, the kind of relationships in question are not explicitly explicated through extant literature. Accordingly, we develop the theoretical framework that undergirds the exigency of the chapter. This includes Granovetter's (1973) taxonomy of social ties among people in social networks – strong, weak and latent ties – and the suggested effect these categories have on the sharing of information. Having outlined the implication of this taxonomy for comprehending social relationships forged through Pokémon Go, we introduce Gerbaudo's (2012) ‘liquid organising’ to explore how weak ties have been enhanced through social media, which raises pertinent question in the context of familial locative play. Critically, then, this chapter looks to understand what kind of social ties can be formed when the playing of Pokémon Go is itself performed in the context of the family unit, using the theoretical frameworks outlined above. This chapter is driven by the following research questions. First, what kinds of social relationships have developed for the families that play Pokémon Go together? This includes whether intergenerational players have made new friends, as well as strengthened current relationships. Second, has this HRG facilitated friendships for the children that play Pokémon Go? In other words, is a community of players still a salient feature of playing this HRG, in the same way that it was shortly after its release in the Summer 2016?

Underpinned by affective events theory (AET), this paper examines the effect of coworker friendship on coworker incivility in family-style restaurants. Furthermore, this paper seeks the mediation effect of positive workplace gossip.

Using a time-lagged approach, 83 headwaiters and 326 servers at family-style restaurants located in Port Said and Ismailia responded, and their responses were analyzed using AMOS v. 24.

Multigroup analysis findings proved that coworker friendship increased positive workplace gossip in favor of the server sample. At the same time, the latter decreased coworker incivility in favor of the headwaiter sample. Besides, positive workplace gossip partially mediated the coworker friendship–incivility association in favor of the server sample. Furthermore, incivility levels increase between married coworkers and their peers in favor of the server sample.

From the AET lens, this paper offers valuable insights into affective and emotional reactions to closest coworkers' judgmental behavior in the restaurant industry.

The present study aims to clarify how online friendships between local residents and tourists are made in a hospitality exchange network, one of the not-for-profit sharing economy platforms. Specifically, the study empirically examines three topics: the properties of dyadic relationships in the platform; the effect of face-to-face interactions on online friendships in the platform; and the role of locals in building host-guest relationships in the hospitality exchange network.

Social networks data in CouchSurfing.org were collected and analyzed using a social network analysis (SNA) program. Along with the descriptive analysis of the actors in the online hospitality network, several SNA indicators, including the degree of centrality, density and centralization, were measured to explore the nature of the network and identify the gatekeepers.

Findings suggest that latent ties between tourists and hosts are likely to be manifested through face-to-face events. In particular, local people play central roles in establishing host-guest relationships.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge on the sharing economy in hospitality by synthesizing two areas in the literature, the host-guest framework and the online hospitality networks.

The social psychological aspects of the sharing economy have yet to receive attention from hospitality scholars. In addition, studies have largely focused on profit-driven models in the sharing economy (e.g. Airbnb). This study fills this gap by examining the host and guest behavior empirically in one of the not-for-profit hospitality sharing economy platforms.

Due to the unintentional or even the intentional mistakes arising from a survey, the purpose of this paper is to present a data-driven method for detecting students’ friendship network based on their daily behaviour data. Based on the detected friendship network, this paper further aims to explore how the considered network effects (i.e. friend numbers (FNs), structural holes (SHs) and friendship homophily) influence students’ GPA ranking.

The authors collected the campus smart card data of 8,917 sophomores registered in one Chinese university during one academic year, uncovered the inner relationship between the daily behaviour data with the friendship to infer the friendship network among students, and further adopted the ordered probit regression model to test the relationship between network effects with GPA rankings by controlling several influencing variables.

The data-driven approach of detecting friendship network is demonstrated to be useful and the empirical analysis illustrates that the relationship between GPA ranking and FN presents an inverted “U-shape”, richness in SHs positively affects GPA ranking, and making more friends within the same department will benefit promoting GPA ranking.

The proposed approach can be regarded as a new information technology for detecting friendship network from the real behaviour data, which is potential to be widely used in many scopes. Moreover, the findings from the designed empirical analysis also shed light on how to improve GPA rankings from the angle of network effect and further guide how many friends should be made in order to achieve the highest GPA level, which contributes to the existing literature.

The paper addresses the effect friendly and friendship relationships among members of innovation teams on the performance of the teams.

The members of innovation teams may develop friendly and friendship relationships over time. In our study, we focus on the effect of the frequency of such non‐work relationships on team performance. For this research, we collected full network data on non‐work relationships in a sample of 44 innovation teams and investigate how these “friendly and friendship networks” affect the performance of innovation teams.

As result turns out that the frequency of friendly ties has positive as well as negative consequences on team performance, whereas the frequency of friendship ties positively relates to the performance.

The results indicate the importance of informal relations for the performance of innovation teams. Further, it is shown that friendly and friendship relations have different theoretical and practical implications. Future research can overcome the limitations of the presented research by concentrating on larger sample sizes and longitudinal research designs.

Building on the results of the study managers can better orchestra innovation teams focussing not only on formal but also on informal contacts. The main practical implication is to strive for friendship contacts and to avoid too strong friendly contacts.

The study adds knowledge to the research on informal relationships and performance two‐fold. First, the findings testify that friendly and friendship contacts are different and not part of the same dimension, and there is strong evidence for the importance of informal contacts.

This paper aims to explore the role of personal relationships (friendships) in mitigating knowledge hiding behaviour between managers.

This study uses a phenomenological methodology by studying seven UAE-based firms. Furthermore, 30 semi-structured (15 dyadic) interviews with senior managers are undertaken. The senior managers were chosen from multiple industries including plastic, frozen food, logistics, etc.

Based on 30 semi-structured interviews and comprehensive data analysis, results reveal that the development of personal relationships between managers results in higher interpersonal trust, mutual loyalty, higher cooperation, strong mutual goals and cultivation of reciprocity. The result further states that these factors diminish knowledge hiding behaviour between them.

This study has some limitations. First, this study explores behavioural patterns concerning the United Arab Emirates culture only. Second, the results presented in this study should be quantitatively tested to demonstrate their generalizability.

Firms can use this study’s findings to understand how and why personal relationships between managers within firms diminish knowledge hiding behaviour.

There is a dire need for research exploring how knowledge hiding can be mitigated in firms. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the role of personal relationships in the knowledge hiding literature.

Despite the recent increase of segregated neighborhoods and schools (Schmitt, 2001), many children find themselves playing with others from different racial and/or ethnic background (Nieto, 2000). Within social science literature, there are a number of studies that explore social interactions and youngsters’ friendship groups (Adler & Adler, 1998; Corsaro, 1985; Eder, 1995; Rizzo, 1989). While instructive, too few analyze what occurs among and to students of color (for exceptions, see Fordham, 1993; Goodwin, 1990, 1998; Grant, 1984). As a consequence, intragender distinctions remain misunderstood and White girls’ group dynamics often eclipse or trivialize the cultural happenings of their racial opposites – African-American girls.

The qualitative study examines the development of purposely created interpersonal relationships in an intercultural context. Contact with a local host is a way of helping expatriates deal with the challenges of an international assignment. Since the quality of contact with the host is pivotal to benefit most from this experience, the purpose of this paper is to examine which factors influence contact quality.

The authors conducted a case study analysis of 33 expatriates and ten accompanying partners who were put in touch with a local host, with whom they undertook a broad range of activities during a period of nine months.

Nine factors influenced the development of the contact (similarities, motivation, benefits, anxiety, expectations, busy schedules, suboptimal timing, communication breakdown, and cultural differences). Key factors were similarities, motivation, and benefits.

While some of the factors (e.g. similarities) are predictable according to the Social Penetration Theory, four factors were uniquely applicable to purposely created relationships such as contact with a local host: motivation, expectations, anxiety, and suboptimal timing.

The study provides suggestions that could stimulate the contact with a local host, making the intervention more valuable for organisations who wish to support their expatriates in this way.

This longitudinal study is one of the first to examine in detail the process of development of purposely created interpersonal relationships in an intercultural context. Furthermore, the study is new because it also examines unsuccessful relationships.