Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

Methot defines trust as “the willingness to be vulnerable to another party with the expectation that the
other party will behave with the best interest of the focal individual.” 33 In essence, in the workplace, we
eventually learn how to make ourselves vulnerable to our coworkers believing that our coworkers will do
what’s in our best interests. Now, trust is an interesting and problematic concept because it’s both a function
of workplace relationships and also an outcome. For coworker relationships to work or operate as
they should, we need to be able to trust our coworkers. However, the more we get to know our coworkers
and know they have our best interests at heart, then the more we will ultimately trust our coworkers.
Trust develops over time and is not something that is not just a binary concept (trust or no trust). Instead,
there are various degrees of trust in the workplace. At first, you may trust your coworkers just enough
to tell them surface level things about yourself (e.g., where you went to college, your major, your hometown),
but over time, as we’ve discussed before in this book, we start to self-disclose as deeper levels as
our trust increases. Most coworker relationships will never be intimate relationships or even actual friendships,
but we can learn to trust our coworkers within the confines of our jobs.
Relational Maintenance
Kathryn Dindia and Daniel J. Canary write that definitions of the term “relational maintenance” can be
broken down into four basic types:
1. To keep a relationship in existence;
2. To keep a relationship in a specified state or condition;
3. To keep a relationship in a satisfactory condition; and
4. To keep a relationship in repair. 34
Methot argues that is a difficult task in any context. Still, coworker
relationships can have a range of negative outcomes if organizational members have difficulty maintaining
their relationships with each other. For this reason, Methot defines maintenance difficulty as “the
degree of difficulty individuals experience in interpersonal relationships due to misunderstandings,
incompatibility of goals, and the time and effort necessary to cope with disagreements.” 35 Imagine you
have two coworkers who tend to behave in an inappropriate fashion nonverbally. Maybe one coworker
sits there and rolls his eyes at everything his coworker says, or perhaps she uses exaggerated facial
expressions to mock her coworker when he’s talking. Having these types of coworkers will cause us (as
a third party witnessing these problems) to spend more time trying to maintain relationships with both
of them. On the flip side, the relationship between our two coworkers will take even more maintenance
to get them to a point where they can just be collegial in the same room with each other. The more time
we have to spend trying to decrease tension or resolve interpersonal conflicts in the workplace, the less
time we will ultimately have on our actual jobs. Eventually, this can leave you feeling exhausted feeling
and emotionally drained as though you just don’t have anything else to give. When this happens, we
call this having inadequate resources to meet work demands. All of us will eventually hit a wall when it
comes to our psychological and emotional resources. When we do hit that wall, our ability to perform
job tasks will decrease. As such, it’s essential that we strive not only to maintain healthy relationships with
our coworkers ourselves, but also to foster an environment that encourages our coworkers to maintain
healthy relationships with each other. However, it’s important to note that some people will simply never
play well in the sandbox with others. Some coworker relationships can become so toxic that minimizing
contact and interaction can be the best solution to avoid draining your psychological and emotional
resources.
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