Published on: July 8, 2025 at 3:51 pm
Understanding the possible downsides of workplace friendships can help employees avoid problems for themselves, their departments, and their organizations, according to Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania. She said that many managers have an overly optimistic and simplistic view of workplace friendships.
In addition, connecting with colleagues on social media may amplify some of the problems, according to “Friends Without Benefits: Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship,” coauthored by fellow AOM Scholar Julianna Pillemer of New York University and Rothbard.
Friendships at work provide undeniable benefits, but also can bring troublesome downsides, such as the following 10 pitfalls:
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1. Distractions
“When you enter a friendship with a coworker, part of what you care about is your emotional connection with this person, not just the tasks and work that needs be done. This feels great and there can be wonderful benefits to having a person who can provide a support system at work. You love to see them in the morning and hear about their weekend. But these kinds of relationships can also be distracting and actually get in the way of what has to be done at work. Compared with an acquaintance, someone who you call a friend at work can actually be interrupting and taking away from your work goals and tasks.,” Pillemer said. “The friend may have had a horrible argument with their spouse or their kid is doing something or they’re texting you—there are all kinds of things that can disrupt your focus at work.”
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2. Closeness
“All friendships are not created equal,” Pillemer said. “There are different levels of closeness. And the closer you are to someone, the more likely and the more distracting these interruptions will be. That’s because you care more about this person. So if someone you really care about is upset at work, not only is it the time you spend with them, it’s also the emotional energy. It will be even harder to bring yourself back into your work.”
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3. Reverse Goldilocks for closeness
“A very casual friendship or a deep friendship is better than being in the middle in terms of closeness,” Pillemer said. “It’s the toughest thing to navigate. It’s the opposite of Goldilocks. It’s easy when you’re bumping into acquaintances in the hallway or dealing with a best friend and you know each other completely. In the middle, you’re developing a friendship and you don’t always know where you stand.” Misunderstandings can be common, Rothbard Longstanding friendships enable people to take risks and disagree with each other without disrupting the relationship.
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4. Roles
Workplace friends have two roles: friend and coworker. “Sometimes those two things can coexist, but sometimes they might be in conflict. When people have workplace friendships, they’re more likely to experience being conflicted. Workplace friends might expect you to behave in a certain way that might not be appropriate,” Pillemer said.
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5. Decision-making
“When I go into a meeting, am I trying to get the task done or am I worried if Jenny, Joe, and Bob like me or not? Compared to people who aren’t friends, friends have this additional concern about liking people and being liked and connecting with people,” Pillemer said. “A lot of research has shown that when there are complex decisions to be made, a diversity of perspectives helps people come up with creative solutions. But when friends get together to make complex decisions, their similarities and focus on liking their friends will be detrimental to the outcome. They’re going to prepare less and deliberate less. They’re going to go into this meeting saying to themselves, ‘Hey, it’s just my friends. I’m not worried about this.’ They’re more likely to agree with each other and avoid disagreeing to disrupt the relationships.”
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6. New friends
Longstanding friendships enable people to take risks and disagree with each other without disrupting the relationship. “More mature friends are more likely to overcome problems,” Pillemer said.
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7. Organizational status
“If a high-ranking individual frequently has lunch or goes out for drinks after work with a subordinate, other subordinates may notice and suspect preferential treatment given to that subordinate,” the authors wrote, leading the other subordinates to question if employees are being treated fairly. “This is the classic problem where people feel as though someone is the teacher’s pet,” Rothbard said.The wider the status gap between friends at work, the more people will notice and question organizational fairness, Pillemer said. For example, a friendship between an employee and his or her direct report will not attract as much attention as a friendship between the summer intern and the CEO.
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8. Cliques
“Some managers encourage friendships within the organization, saying ‘We should be a community,’ or ‘We should be friends,’ or ‘We’re a family.’” This can result in the formation of cliques, “like in a middle school cafeteria,” Pillemer said. Cliques can make “coworkers feel ostracized and form their own subgroups, creating silos and reducing communication between groups,” the authors wrote.
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9. Visibility on social media
While social media brings people together, it can also have the opposite effect for workplace friendships. “Social media is really exacerbating the visibility of cliques. You might not see people at work interacting as friends, then you see they posted a picture together. You might say to yourself, ‘I thought Veronica and I were pretty good friends,’ then you see a picture of her out with Jane and you realize you and Veronica never went out for a drink together,” Pillemer said. “Then you might be less likely to share information with her because you’re not in that inner circle. Social media doesn’t just create blurred boundaries, it creates transparency.” “If an employee sees their boss disclose something personal on a colleague’s Facebook wall or even comment on or ‘like’ a colleague’s disclosure, this personal attention might be perceived as favoritism,” the AOM scholars wrote.
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