An Ethnography Approach to Workplace Friendship Deterioration Factors

The purpose of this study is identifying factors affecting workplace friendship deterioration. The study type is developmental and in order to extract factors, ethnography methodology that is a qualitative method was used. The sample population is a military unit that for security issues, the name of that unit is not mentioned in this study. Data were selected via 18 military man interviews, having the tendency for dialogue and interview. Also the data selection was done observing the daily interaction of those employees for data collecting process and writing that interaction specification by the researcher being part of the sample. Data were saturated according to the sample size. The researcher is a member of under study population, therefore data collecting and observation was easy. Braun and Clarke (2006) thematic analysis was used for data analyzing. After initial analysis, 38 initial codes were generated. These codes were categorized to three general factors. These general factors were individual, organizational and extra-organizational factors. The individual factors have 14 codes and 2 sub-themes. The organizational factors have 19 codes and 3 sub-themes and the extra-organizational factors have 3 codes and 1 sub-theme. After thematic analysis, thick description was presented and the factors were extracted and presented. The factors have individual, organizational and extra-organizational variables.