Having a racially diverse group of friends outside of work may boost your performance at work, a new study suggests.
People with diverse friend networks in their personal lives tend to build similarly diverse networks in their workplaces, researchers said.
"Your friends outside of work actually have this connection to how you behave in the workplace, through the shaping of your relationships on the job," said co-author Steffanie Wilk, associate professor at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business in US.
"They're more likely to see their ingroup - the people they most identify with - as a broader group of people which includes those of different racial backgrounds. And we tend to help people in our ingroups," Wilk said.
"That means they are being helpful to more of their work colleagues. Supervisors notice that," she said.
The study involved 222 people who worked in customer service centres at a financial institution. These employees worked with customers to fix problems and sell products.
The company encouraged employees to get to know each other so that they could share information and help each other with questions.
Employees were asked to list up to five people in their personal network of friends and list each person's race. They were also asked to select up to 10 people who were in their network of friends at the company.
These people could be within or outside of their immediate work group. The researchers used data from the company to determine the race of all the workplace friends.
Results showed that people who had more different-race friends outside of work also had a more diverse group of friends among their co-workers - even after taking into account how many different-race colleagues they had in their immediate work group.
Supervisors rated their employees on how much they created team spirit and went beyond their roles to help the company.
For example, one question asked supervisors to rate their employees on a scale of 1 to 5 on "This person has done more work than required."
Workers with more friends of different races outside of work scored higher on these scales, Wilk said. The reason was that these were the same employees who created more diverse friend networks on the job and thus who had a broader ingroup of people to help.
The researchers also found that employees who had a racially diverse group of friends were more likely to trust supervisors who also had a diverse friend network.
The study was published in the journal Organisation Science.
