While it’s perhaps common for us to be concerned about how managers treat employees and the cultural impact of that relationship, it’s perhaps less common for us to be worried about how employees are treating each other.  New research from Columbia Business School explores how important our relationships with our peers are to how we feel about the workplace.

The study shows that we’re much less likely to show commitment to our workplace if we feel that our colleagues are disrespectful towards us.  The findings emerged after a few hundred volunteers were placed into a mock work environment and exposed to a range of positive, negative, or neutral treatment from their peers.

“We found that mistreatment from peers reduced participants’ willingness to engage in citizenship behavior,” the researchers explain. “Moreover, this suggests that peers’ mistreatment can reduce the positive effect managers elicited after making an unfair/unfavorable decision.”

Hostile culture

The research found that the attitude of employees towards their organization became worse when their interactions with their peers were negative, with this relationship especially strong when it involved comments on their performance.

By contrast, when the interactions were more positive, this resulted in a far more favorable attitude towards the organization.  What’s more, this positive attitude was also found to be an effective buffer against any negative treatment they may have received from their boss.

“When the peer’s treatment was inconsistent with theauthority’s treatment, it reduced the influence of the authority’s inter-personal fairness treatment,” the researchers say. “A disrespectful peer attenuated the senseof standing and organizational commitment elicited by a respectfulauthority, and a respectful peer mitigated the negative effects onthese same measures of unfair treatment from the authority.”

In a labor market in which non-financial factors are increasingly important, the ability to boost employee engagement via the social bonds that form between employees should be something that managers are increasingly looking at, especially as we begin to exit the pandemic and employee mobility is likely to rise again.