Impact of demographic characteristics of personnel on the quality of employee relationships: The case of Poland

Abstract

This research paper fills a significant gap in the literature in the field of the influence of demographic characteristics of employees on the quality of interpersonal relationships at work (QR). There are no comprehensive research results concerning this problem. The research objective is to describe how selected characteristics of employees (sex, age, education, type of job, and length of service) influence QR. This goal was achieved through the use of survey methods (online, direct and auditory) conducted in 2018 and 2019 on the sample of 1,336 active employees in Poland. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics application. The findings prove that the quality of interpersonal relationships at work is differentiated by sex (men tend to rate the quality of relationships higher as compared to women), age (respondents belonging to younger groups tend to rate the quality of relationships higher as compared to older respondents), education (respondents with higher education tend to rate the quality of relationships higher as compared to less educated respondents), and type of job (managers tend to rate the quality of relationships higher as compared to the blue-collar workers). It was not possible to determine explicit trends in assessing the quality of relationships depending on the term of work. According to obtained results, special attention should be paid to the following categories of staff: women, older, less educated and blue-collar employees.