Energizing Social Interactions at Work: An Exploration of Relationships that Generate Employee and Organizational Thriving

A company’s greatest asset is its people provided they are fully engaged. In our increasingly service-based economies, social relationships and swift coordination among employees are the means by which a lot of work gets done. Thus, whether organizations and their employees flourish or languish largely depends on the quality of the social connections they nurture. The quality of the workplace connections can be defined as life giving (high quality) or life depleting (low quality). Positive social interactions facilitate organizational learning, cooperation, effectiveness, and employee loyalty, among many other desirable outcomes. High-quality connections are brief, mutually beneficial, and dynamic dyadic interactions, which have the power to energize people with vital resources to do their work well. Positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship—the science of how people and organizations flourish—provides us with tools that can help bring about high-quality connections. This paper defines high-quality connections at work, examines the benefits of highquality connections, and provides a framework for building high-quality connections. The paper shows that high-quality connections are a pathway to build individual and organizational flourishing.