Getting Acquainted: How Knowing About Colleague's Personal Lives Impacts Workplace Interactions, for Better and Worse

Abstract

In my dissertation, I introduce the concept of personal knowledge, discuss how it is formed, explore how it is used, and examine potential boundary conditions of its effects. In Chapter 1, I motivate the need for this investigation by highlighting an unresolved workplace tension: the simultaneous deep need for human connection and fear of letting others know one’s self. In Chapter 2, I draw on theories of relational schema, person perception, and interpersonal dynamics to develop an understanding of how the quantity of personal knowledge acquired impacts the way the known colleague is perceived and treated. I argue that through blurring the work-life boundary, colleagues gain personal knowledge about one another, which changes the way they interact in both positive and negative ways. In Chapter 3, through three field studies across diverse samples of university staff, cross-industry dyads, and consulting teams, I demonstrate that having greater levels of personal knowledge leads to a more individuated, humanized perception of the known colleague, which results in increased responsiveness and decreased social undermining. Further, I show that this effect holds over and above alternative explanations including liking, trusting, respecting, relationship length, and perceived similarity. I also reveal that the positive effect of personal knowledge on responsiveness is not mitigated by perceptions of value incongruence or work-to-life interference. Finally, in Chapter 4, I discuss the theoretical implications of my dissertation for the relationships at work and work-life literatures.