Scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize that coworker friendships are integral to both individual- and organizational-level outcomes. At the same time, though, the rapid increase in virtual work has taken a principal source of adult friendships – workplaces – and drastically changed the way that individuals interact within them. No longer are proximity and extra-organizational socializing, two of the strongest predictors of coworker friendships in a co-located workplace, easily accessible. How, then, do employees become friends with each other when interacting mostly online? Once these virtual coworker friendships are forged, individuals must balance the often-conflicting norms of the friendship relationship with the coworker relationship. How, if at all, are these tensions experienced and managed when co-worker friendships are virtual? My dissertation seeks to answer these questions through a longitudinal, grounded theory study of virtual coworker friendship in a global IT firm. The emerging theory articulates the “barrier of virtuality” that challenges virtual coworker friendship formation, necessitating that individuals employ two sets of activities and one set of competencies to form friendships with one another: presence bridgers, relational informalizers, and relational digital fluency. The data also suggest that the coworker friendship tension process itself is largely similar to the previously articulated process in co-located contexts. However, the virtual context changed the frequency, types of shocks that elicited the tensions, and management of these tensions. My findings have numerous implications for the literatures on relationships at work, virtual work, and organizational tensions. They also suggest significant ways in which individuals and organizations can more effectively foster virtual coworker friendships while minimizing the potential harm of virtual coworker friendship tensions.

Scholarship and the popular press alike assert that, within the workplace and the world, there are distinct generational groups who are hallmarked by fundamental differences. Generational scholarship, undergirded by the priori assumption that generational differences must be managed, has become a well traversed field despite very little empirical evidence to substantiate the claims made about the attitudes, values, and beliefs of these purported generational cohorts. Scholars debate the veracity of generational characteristics, but few have taken critical approaches and noted the absence of theory and meta-discourse in the field. All the while, the over-simplified stereotypes are perpetuatued and employed in making fundamental decisions about the lives and work of the old and the young. In this dissertation, I present a grounded qualitative and phronetic study that offers a framework for a more nuanced approach to generational scholarship. Specifically, I employ qualitative methods and take a phronetic approach to examine young professionals’ (a) sensemaking of generational constructs and (b) identification/disidentification with generational archetypes. This dissertation reveals the ways in which participants made sense of popular generational archetypes as stereotypes or generalizations that exist in broad contexts of media and culture but are unconsidered in the workplace. Further, in the context of work, participants demonstrated very limited identification or disidentification with popular generational archetypes. Despite this, participants created and enacted generational differences in their workplaces based on age and tenure in the industry through the development of emergent archetypes. Methodologically, this dissertation demonstrates the utility of more emic approaches to generational scholarship and evidences the need for situated and needs based approaches. Theoretically, this dissertation demonstrates the utility of sensemaking and identification in generational scholarship. Moreover, the insights gleaned from these frameworks illustrate the need for the critical examinations in the field, and meta-discourse about our assumptions.

This dissertation develops grounded theory on how respect is received and internalized in organizations, and the personal and work-related outcomes of receiving respect. A company that employed inmates at a state prison to perform professional business-to-business marketing services provided a unique context for data collection, as respect is typically problematic in a prison environment but was deliberately instilled by this particular company. Data collection took place in three call centers (minimum, medium, and maximum security levels) and included extensive non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival documents. My sampling strategy focused on the experience of new employees as they went through the training and socialization process, a time when the experience of respect was particularly novel and salient to them. The emergent theoretical model suggests that receiving respect was experienced in two distinct ways, which were labeled generalized and personalized respect. These two types of respect were directly related to outcomes for the receivers' well-being and performance on the job. Receiving respect also changed the way that receivers thought and felt about themselves. The two types of respect (generalized and personalized) exerted different forces on the self-concept such that generalized respect led to social validation and identity security for social identities, and personalized respect led to social validation and identity security for personal identities. The social validation and subsequent identity security ultimately enabled the receiver of respect to integrate their conflicting personal and social identities into a coherent whole, an outcome referred to as identity holism. In addition to the direct effects of receiving generalized and personalized respect on individuals' well-being and performance, identity holism served as a partial mediator between received respect and individual outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as well as future research directions aimed to build momentum for research on respect in organizations.

Municipal courtrooms are brimming with a variety of positive and negative emotions from defendants who are primarily encountering the criminal justice system for the first time. Municipal court judges and bailiffs must work together and find ways to communicate important information about courtroom processes to up to 70-120 defendants a day. This dissertation investigates how municipal court judges and bailiffs from two municipal courthouses respond to three organizational challenges associated with emotion--defendant confusion about courtroom processes, handling high caseloads while treating defendants as customers of the court, and managing the serious and tedious emotional moods of the courtroom environment. Using qualitative methods of observation and informal and formal interviews, this dissertation analyzes how emotion cycles between judges and bailiffs help give sense to and break sense of defendants while simultaneously helping them navigate the challenges of their work. Findings detail the nature of work in municipal court--explaining the challenges associated with emotion that judges and bailiffs face on a daily basis. The data also describes the emotional roles that judges and bailiffs employ in the courtroom. The judges' emotional roles include tension relievers, order enforcers, and care takers. Bailiffs' emotional roles comprise rule enforcers, toxin handlers, and do gooders. The heart of the analysis explores how judges and bailiffs give sense to defendants when unexpected situations manifest in the courtroom and break sense of defendants who hold incorrect or less favored beliefs about courtroom procedures. The emotional displays and responses of judges, bailiffs, primary defendants (defendants before the judge), and third party defendants (those watching in the audience) enable sensegiving and sensebreaking to occur. The emotion cycles allow courtroom staff to impact the sensemaking process of defendants in a fast and efficient manner. Theoretical implications include extensions of emotion cycle research through a consideration of the displays and responses of primary agents, intermediate agents, and primary recipients of emotional displays. Practical implications describe how specific training practices and space for employee discussion could enhance the workplace wellness of judges and bailiffs.