By Krystal Duarte, Colleen Tolan, and Lisa Kaplowitz
Workplace relationships are key to a successful company. Healthy work relationships are linked to higher retention, improved mental health, and higher job prospects in leadership. For women especially, workplace relationships and peer networks offer critical support in environments where mentorship and sponsorship remain unequal. Our research from the Rutgers Center for Women in Business (CWIB) confirms this: friendships matter and peer support often acts as an important buffer to burnout and caregiving-work conflict, both of which disproportionately affect women.
Yet, there’s an important aspect of workplace friendships that often goes unacknowledged.
Friendships at work are effortful, and the emotional and cognitive labor required to obtain and sustain healthy work friendships can result in a critical tension for women. For one, women frequently serve as “the social glue” of their teams by performing relationship hygiene, the often invisible work of maintaining social connections (e.g., checking in on colleagues, planning events, welcoming new team members, and resolving interpersonal friction). This work is important as it fosters team cohesion, enhances collaboration, and reduces turnover. Moreover, having friendships at work makes employees 43% more committed and 27% more satisfied with their jobs. Yet, the importance of healthy work relationships for female success is often unrecognized, and therefore overlooked as a critical skill, despite the fact that women who take on relational roles at work report significantly higher stress levels than their male colleagues.
This creates a professional catch-22: the exact friendships that are vital to women’s success can become an added source of strain.
Differences in How Men and Women Form Friendships at Work
Part of the challenge occurs in the formation stage of relationships. Broadly speaking, research shows that men tend to form friendships through shared activities and group accomplishments and are often more comfortable with hierarchy in those relationships. Women, by contrast, tend to prioritize emotional support and equality, values that clash with workplace cultures of competition and scarcity.
When women display ambition or deviate from expectations of warmth and cooperation, they risk backlash and social penalties. Research reflects this cost of ambition: nearly 90% of women worldwide report being penalized or undermined because of their achievements at work. Unsurprisingly, women tend to avoid workplace friendships that feel competitive, viewing competition with peers as less acceptable. This creates a persistent tension between warmth and ambition, often resulting in unhealthy competition, exclusion, and cliques.
When we surveyed 638 working professionals, including 346 women, about the barriers they faced when trying to advance during the mid-career phase, a critical period for promotions and leadership growth, many cited issues directly tied to being on the outside of workplace cliques. For example, we heard responses like, “supervisors (who) already have in mind who they want to promote, like their friends,” and “subjective promotions and raises, with strong cliques that are difficult to overcome.” These responses highlight how relational and organizational dynamics intertwine to shape career trajectories.
Women’s Strategies for Navigating Workplace Relationships
To navigate these dynamics, women sometimes adopt “tend-and-befriend” strategies prioritizing harmony to mitigate stress and maintain belonging.
As a result, women frequently take on the emotional and relational labor required to maintain harmony at work (vital to team culture but often invisible and unrewarded).
This requires emotional labor and strategic impression management, requiring women to balance when and how to assert themselves without violating gendered norms of warmth, modesty, and likability.
It’s also essential to recognize that not all women experience these dynamics the same way. Women of color often bear compounded burdens, not just the expectation to maintain relational cohesion, but also the additional stressors from having to navigate microaggressions, cultural exclusion, and racialized dynamics. One primary example of this is code-switching, where marginalized groups try to adjust their language and self-presentation to fit into the dominant culture in an effort to meet narrow ideals of professionalism. This dual pressure leads to heightened emotional fatigue, making workplace friendships both more complex and more consequential.
These are not simply additive burdens but intersecting ones, shaped by overlapping identities, and as such, require nuanced responses from organizations.
The Advice: Reshape Workplace Culture
1. Recognize the Value of Relationships. According to our research at CWIB, healthy relationships are a key piece to keeping talented women in the workforce. Leaders should recognize their importance and encourage activities that foster healthy relationships like team-building activities and mixed mentoring groups. Specifically, it is important to design intentional collaborative efforts, where differences are valued and employees are rewarded for learning about one another’s strengths.
2. Value and Reward Connection. Formally valuing the relational work that sustains teams creates a company culture where healthy workplace relationships can thrive. To do this, discourage cliques, popularity contests, and favoritism as informal pathways to advancement. Instead, companies can encourage employees to build connections rooted in collaboration and mutual support. When organizations both curb exclusive dynamics and reward authentic relational labor, workplace friendships shift from a hidden burden to a supportive tether. Make this work visible and rewarded by incorporating relational contributions into performance reviews, leadership evaluations, and advancement pipelines.
3. Share the Care. Women don’t need to be the default social glue. It isn’t necessary that women be the ones to take on invisible labor or act as emotional caretakers in the workplace. Yet often, non-promotable tasks like organizing birthday celebrations, planning team outings, or tending to morale fall informally to women. While these skills are valuable, it adds to both cognitive labor (the thinking work) and emotional labor (the feeling work); when they overlap, they create the mental load—a constant cycle of anticipating and managing for others. Acknowledging this sort of work as valuable is the first step to redistributing it more equitably. Rotating responsibilities for workplace social upkeep and intentionally distributing this labor more evenly helps to create an equitable environment that doesn’t rely on, and unintentionally perpetuate, gendered expectations that contribute to burnout.
Breaking the Catch-22
The catch-22 of workplace relationships endures because opting out comes at a cost—mentally, emotionally, and financially. But when organizations begin to see relational labor as leadership, not just “extra work,” they create environments where connection and ambition can coexist.