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Maintaining Peer Relationships

Like other interpersonal bonds, peer relationships remain healthy through the energy and effort you and your peers invest in maintenance. One important tactic that helps maintain your peer relationships is positivity, discussed in Chapters 9 and 10. A positive perspective and upbeat communication with your peers helps offset the stress and demands everyone faces in the workplace. Practicing positivity in the workplace means communicating with your peers in a cheerful and optimistic fashion and doing unsolicited favors for them.

Openness also plays an important role. Openness means creating feelings of security and trust between you and your peers. You can create such feelings by behaving in predictable, trustworthy, and ethical ways in your relationships with peers. This means following through on your promises, respecting confidences, and demonstrating honesty and integrity in both your personal and your professional behavior.

Two additional tactics will help you maintain your collegial and special peer relationships (Sias et al., 2002). Like assurances given to a romantic partner, assurances given to collegial and special peers help demonstrate your commitment to them. Since choice is what distinguishes close peer relationships from casual ones, a critical part of maintaining these relationships is routinely stressing to your collegial and special peers that your relationships are based on choice rather than professional assignment. This can be accomplished indirectly by inviting peers to join you in activities outside of the workplace, which implies that you consider them friends and not just coworkers. More directly, you can straightforwardly tell collegial and special peers that you think of them primarily as friends.

Second, collegial and special peer relationships grow stronger when the people involved treat one another as whole human beings with unique qualities and do not strictly define each other as just coworkers. Certainly, you’ll need to discuss work, but since your relationships with collegial and special peers are blended, remember to also talk about personal topics.