Social distancing and workplace relationships in South Korea: exploring changes in negative and positive affective exchanges at work before and during COVID-19

Many organisations introduced social distancing to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since social distancing is designed to reduce personal interactions, it can impact workplace relationships. This paper explores how and when social distancing influences workplace relationships. Drawing on the affect theory of social exchange and the social cognition literature, we argue that when employees have more negative affective relationships with their co-workers (before COVID-19), social distancing helps improve such negative affective relationships (during COVID-19), especially when the co-worker is warm and competent. We collected data on relationships that individual employees in South Korea have with their co-workers before and during COVID-19. Our hierarchical linear modelling results show that social distancing indeed reduces the negative affective relationships that employees have with their co-workers when those co-workers are viewed as warm and competent. Conversely, social distancing does not hurt employees’ positive affective relationships. These findings suggest that contrary to view that social distancing and remote work causes misunderstanding and conflict, social distancing helps to improve employees’ workplace relationships. We therefore draw implications for human resource development professionals in facilitating high-quality relationships in remote settings.