Who Experiences Better Workplace Relationships? Marital Status, Job Designation, and Researchers’ Relational Experiences

This study examined differences in the quality of work relationships among researchers working in an agricultural research institution in Punjab, Pakistan. Drawing on a sociological perspective of workplace relationships as socially and organizationally embedded experiences, the study investigated whether researchers’ perceptions of their relationships with immediate supervisors and coworkers varied according to marital status and job designation. Data were collected from 329 researchers using a stratified sampling technique. Quality of work relationships was measured through three items assessing satisfaction with relationships with immediate supervisors and coworkers and feelings of being valued in interactions with supervisors. The measure demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties, including strong factor loadings, reliability, and acceptable variance inflation factors. Descriptive statistics, Welch’s ANOVA, and Games–Howell post hoc tests were used for analysis. Results showed significant differences in quality of work relationships across marital-status categories. Single researchers reported significantly higher scores than both married and divorced researchers. Significant differences were also found across job-designation categories. Scientific officers reported significantly higher quality of work relationships than senior scientists and principal scientists. The findings demonstrate that workplace relational experiences are differentiated by researchers’ social and organizational positions.