The Relational Experience of Work: How Workplace Relationships Shape Adjustment, Growth, and Engagement

Abstract

Workplace relationships are central to how employees experience their work. Organizational research has largely treated relationships as stable resources that reliably predict outcomes, giving less attention to how relationships shape employees’ lived experiences of work. This dissertation advances a relational, experience-centered perspective by examining how relationships shape employees’ experiences of three consequential moments at work: disruption, challenge, and closeness. Across three papers, I show that relationships function as interpretive contexts that shape how employees make sense of workplace events and orient themselves toward work, with consequence for how they perform and whether they stay or leave. The first paper demonstrates that humble leadership facilitates employee adjustment following disruptive shock events, reducing turnover and enhancing performance. The second paper shows that leader responsiveness determines whether leader-initiated stretchwork is experienced as empowering, thereby enhancing performance. The third paper examines work spouse relationships, revealing that such relationships lead to both heightened engagement and social costs. Together, these studies highlight how relationships shape employees’ experience of work during critical moments.