Resumen de The dark side of co-worker friendship in the restaurant context:: roles of gender and promotion focus Open Access

Muhammad Haroon Shoukat, Kareem M. Selem, Mukaram Ali Khan, Ali Elsayed Shehata

• Purpose This paper investigates the focal role of close co-worker friendship in reducing incivility. Furthermore, this paper examines negative workplace gossip as a mediator and gender and promotion focus as moderators.

  Design/methodology/approach Using a time-lagged approach, 553 full-service restaurant front-line co-workers in Greater Cairo responded. Further, the data were analyzed using SmartPLS v.4.

  Findings Promotion focus weakened close co-workers’ friendships, causing them to speak negatively about each other with other co-workers. Multi-group analysis showed that males were more likely to spread negative gossip about their close co-workers and thus were subjected to incivility-related behaviors by their co-workers.

  Originality/value This paper is an early attempt to explore the focal role of promotion focus in the full-service restaurant context. This paper adds to affective events theory (AET) with a limited understanding of explaining and predicting co-worker incivility.