Organizing Relationships: Traditional and Emerging Perspectives on Workplace Relationships

"Organizing Relationships makes a contribution to the discipline in its treatment of this area from multiple perspectives, in its deliberate engagement/suggestions of future research directions, and its functional purpose of bringing together extant research on this important topic in a coherent and organized way. It adds cumulatively to our knowledge of organizational communication and relationships, it fits within the horizon of the established parameters of our field while opening new areas for engagement, and, moreover, it is a very interesting read. It will, no doubt, become a touchstone for the field of organizational communication."
--Janie Hardin Fritz, Duquesne University

"This book represents an important step to a relational approach to organizational behavior (communication) by pulling together many different areas/types of relationships. It will be a ′must′ book to anyone who teaches relationships in organization or broadly relational/applied organizational communication." --Jaesub Lee, University of Houston

The first book in the field to provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of workplace relationships, Organizing Relationships: Traditional and Emerging Perspectives on Workplace Relationships explores both negative and positive workplace relationships, including supervisor-subordinate relationships, peer relationships, workplace friendships, romantic workplace relationships, and customer-client relationships. Author Patricia M. Silas, a recognized scholar in the field, examines workplace relationships from multiple theoretical perspectives, including postpositivism, social construction theory, critical theory, and structuration theory. She helps readers understand the unique influences of the workplace on relationship processes and dynamics.

Key Features

• Examines the role of workplace relationships as information-sharing, resource-distributing, decision-making, and support systems and highlights their importance to both organizational and individual well-being
• Includes cases in each chapter that demonstrate the usefulness of approaching real-world workplace problems and issues from multiple perspectives
• Helps readers broaden and enrich the ways they think about workplace relationships and their roles in organizational processes
• Provides an innovative agenda for future research

Organizing Relationships is appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in Workplace Relationships, Relational Communication, Applied Interpersonal Communication, Organizational Communication, Communication Management, Operations/Human Resource Management, Organizational Psychology, and Organizational Sociology.

Author: Patricia M. Sias
Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc
Published: 10/01/2008
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781412957977

About the Author
Sias, Patricia M.: - Patricia M. Sias is Professor of Communication in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. Her research centers on workplace relationships. She has published articles in and served on the editorial boards of a variety of academic journals including Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, Management Communication Quarterly, Western Journal of Communication, Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. She served as Secretary and Chair of the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. She has won numerous awards for her research including the W. Charles Redding Outstanding Dissertation in Organizational Communication Award from the International Communication Association, several Top Paper awards from the National Communication Association, and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the Washington State University College of Liberal Arts.