Friendship is a voluntary relationship, it involves an emotional bond, and the emotional attachment between friends is reciprocal. Friendship evolves where there is a “setting and an audience to express unique aspects of [our] personality” and generates trust, reciprocity and a sense of belonging.
Business friendships are friendships that coincide with a business relationship, which we recognize as either competitors, buyers or suppliers in a market, co-workers within an organization, or actors that occupy similar positions in different organizations or markets and may therefore provide each other with useful business information.
WHY ARE BUSINESS FRIENDSHIPS HARD TO MANAGE?
People embedded in a business friendship face conflicting demand. The emotional bond between colleagues may not overwhelm the competition they face over who will get promoted.
Let’s analyze the challenge of managing business friendship
One fundamental conflicting demand associated with business friendship is between the basic motives for belonging and for maintaining a positive self-concept. It is inevitable that people seek social belonging through business friendships.
Belonging enables people to survive, thrive and insure them to gain acceptance ... Nevertheless, business friendships bring not only belongingness benefits, but also potential threats to one’s self concept.
For example, you and your work colleague have been on the same team for multiple projects. You became friends and spent a significant amount of spare time together. However, this year, your colleague got promoted, but you didn’t. How would you feel?
Would you maintain the friendship?... How would you handle the conflict of being friends and competitors for promotion at the same time? (Proverbs 18:24 , Proverbs 22:24-25)
And so, your affective concerns may motivate you to develop the friendship and ignore the potential competition, but your instrumental concerns may motivate you to forgo the friendship and to outperform your colleague.
In business friendship, your promotion, victory and elevation are enjoyed with by your partner(s).
That is, the success of one is enjoyed by all. The degree of conflict when a person is in a relationship that encompasses both affective and instrumental concerns can be substantial.
Despite such limitations, friendships continue to be valued and the meanings of friendship emerge in the relationships between people. Friendship permeates both personal and work spheres.
Research in organizational behaviour suggests that business friendships are common and that they establish mechanisms of trust, empathy, and sympathy as well as common grounds of values, beliefs, and interests (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).
The friendship that arises from business relationships has been found to result in instrumental benefits for careers and improved organizational performance; personal contacts and the sharing and exchanging of information that can lead to decisions regarding strategic activities of the firm.
That is in business friendship the other party should be capable, great and strong enough in all aspect to lift the other when loses occur.
Kind regards,
AMBASSADOR WILLIE,
+233 241 393 471
SOF STUDENT,
E-mail: thisiswamonkwandoh@gmail.com