Consensual Relationship Agreements

Consensual relationship Agreement

Introduction

It has been 35 years since respective authors' published seminal articles on the formation, impact, and management of workplace romances. A workplace romance is a consensual relationship between two members of an organization that entails mutual sexual attraction. Since 1977, workplace romance research has examined a formation factors such as motives and organizational climate. There are some impact factors such as job performance, workgroup functioning and harassment. However, little research has examined the management of workplace romances. This lack of management research is noteworthy considering that estimates indicate nearly 10 million workplace romances develop annually in the U.S. Moreover, there is no consensus regarding best managerial practices. From a human resource (HR) management standpoint, organizations struggle with deciding whether they should have a romance policy and, if so, what stipulations to include. According to a survey of HR professionals, about 70% of responding organizations did not have a workplace romance policy. For those that did, 25% permitted, 66% permitted but discouraged, and 9% prohibited workplace romances. Therefore, a thorough research is needed in this regard and all the aspects related to the topic will be discussed in detail.

Discussion

Organizations that discourage or prohibit workplace romances, concerned about sexual harassment lawsuits and thus have legal-centric HR practices. Despite organizations' fears, relatively infrequent harassment lawsuits stem from workplace romances. Consequently, researchers have recommended that HR leaders should shift their focus from using a legal-centric approach to an organizationally sensible approach for managing workplace romances. An organizationally sensible approach would not focus on the potential for harassment claims at the expense of other work criteria. Given the recommendation that HR leaders should adopt an organizationally sensible approach, a key question is: What types of romance policies and procedures are sensible for organizations? As a first step toward addressing this question, people examine individuals' perceptions of different types of romance policies and consensual relationship agreements. A romance policy, consists, of general guidelines and rules, whereas a relationship agreement is a contractual method used to manage employees who are participating in a workplace romance (Boyd, 2010, 338).

As a first step toward developing organizationally sensible romance policies, and, procedures, a key perspective, to consider is fairness perceptions. It would not be sensible for organizations to implement policies, and, procedures, perceived as unfair. According to organizational justice theory, individuals' perceptions of justice, socially constructed based on subjective assessments of (a) the fairness of outcome distributions (distributive justice), (b) the fairness of procedures used to determine outcome distributions (procedural justice), and (c) the quality of interpersonal treatment people receive when procedures gets implemented (interactional justice). Interactional justice consists of the following two types of interpersonal treatment, the latter of which is relevant herein: informational justice and interpersonal justice. Interpersonal justice is the perceived degree to which people, treated with politeness, dignity, and respect by those involved in implementing procedures or determining outcomes (Casper, 2004, 410).

Some of the researchers posit that coworkers evaluate the distributive and procedural justice of managerial interventions regarding workplace ...