Doing Qualitative Workplace Relationship Research: Current Trends, New Directions, and Quality Indicators

Workplace relationship research has expanded rapidly across multiple disciplines, yet qualitative approaches to studying workplace relationships often remain constrained by single-participant designs, organization-centered analyses, and lingering post-positivist assumptions about rigor. Responding to these limitations, this article offers a methodological and conceptual primer for qualitative workplace relationship research grounded in interpersonal, organizational, constitutive, and reflexive traditions. Drawing on recent scholarship, the article first reviews contemporary conceptualizations of workplace relationships and highlights trends in qualitative research over the past decade. It then advances three generative directions for future inquiry: dyadic and multiadic research designs that capture relational co-construction; sociomaterial analyses that attend to objects, documents, bodies, and spaces as relationally consequential; and topic-centered approaches that theorize emergent workplace phenomena from participant-centered perspectives rather than theory-down deduction. The article further addresses questions of quality and rigor by engaging Tracy's "big-tent" criteria and introducing the Qualitative Relationship Reporting Framework (QRRF-4), a relationship-centered reporting aid designed to support transparency and ethical accountability without reducing qualitative rigor to procedural compliance. Taken together, this article serves as both a practical resource and a theoretical invitation, supporting rigorous, reflexive qualitative research that illuminates the communicatively constituted, materially situated, and meaning-centered dynamics of contemporary workplace life.