Relationship between job position, job attributes, and workplace friendship: Taiwan and China

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between job attributes, job position, and workplace friendship. This paper also attempts to expand the ontology of workplace friendship. Design/methodology/approach – The independent variables consisted of five job attributes and a category recorded by anticipant's self‐response. The dependent variable is workplace friendship. The hierarchical polynomial regression is conducted to test the independent variables, dependent variable, and control variables. This paper adopts two‐way analysis of variance which is conducted to test the relationship between job attributes, job position, and workplace friendship to address the two research problems. Findings – There are two research findings, first, within a particular job attribute, this paper shows that supervisors have better workplace friendship than subordinates. Second, this paper proves that with a particular job attribute, supervisors/subordinates from Taiwan have better workplace friendship than those from Mainland China. Research limitations/implications – In this paper, there are two research limitations. The first limitation is that the data are only collected from the eastern coastland of China. This means that the data may not be able to truly reflect the situation of every company in China. The second limitation is that the questionnaire is filled in by self‐reporting participants. Practical implications – The development of workplace friendship is mainly based on the requirement of team work in an organization. The higher demand of team work corresponds to better development of workplace friendship. There are differences in workplace friendship in Taiwan and China due to different regional cultures and individual cognitions of job attributes which are eventually affected by individual and organizational elements. Originality/value – The major contribution of this paper is that it expanded the ontology of workplace friendship. Furthermore, this paper verifies workplace friendship difference in an organization which is affected by different job positions and job attributes and also compares the nature of the relationship in Taiwan and Mainland China.