A critical review of Basford & Offermann 2012, "Beyond leadership: The impact of coworker relationships on employee motivation and intent to stay", Journal of Management and Organization, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 807-817.

Relationships between coworkers have a great influence in people’s lives. While the importance of interpersonal relationships is widely supported by psychological literature, the specific impact of relationships between coworkers has been carried out by too few studies. The present study of Basford & Offermann (2012) was aimed to put an addition to the small but growing interest of researchers on coworker relations. Basford & Offermann (2012) conducted the research to study whether positive employees outcomes may derive from good peer relationship, while negative outcomes obtain from poor coworker relationships. The major aim of this research was to investigate the impact of coworker relationships on the two specific outcomes - employee motivation and intent to stay.

In this article, it was comprised of two main parts. First, the examination of whether the relationships of coworkers could, beyond supervisor and senior manager support, become a unique influence on other employees’ motivation and intent to stay. Three relationships, namely supervisory versus coworker relationships, importance of coworker relationships and concurrent examination of coworker and supervisory relationships were taken into examination. Second, the test of the generalization of these findings was conducted in order to explore whether employee job status moderates these relationships.

In the first main part of the article, Basford & Offermann raise three relationships to examine a unique impact on coworker motivation and retention. The first issue, the authors clarified that relationships between supervisors and employees are quite different