Moving Beyond a Legal-Centric Approach to Managing Workplace Romances

By: CHARLES A. PIERCE AND HERMAN AGUINIS

The goal of this article is to encourage human resource (HR) leaders to think more  strategically about managing workplace romances. The traditional legal-centric management approach focuses on minimizing risks of workplace romances. We advocate embedding the legal-centric approach within a broader and more strategic organizationally sensible approach that provides a balanced focus on minimizing risks and maximizing rewards of workplace romances. Drawing from the empirical workplace romance literature, we derive a set of organizationally sensible best-practice recommendations that HR leaders can adopt to manage risks and rewards of romantic relationships in organizations. Implementing our more strategic recommendations should provide the added benefi t of elevating HR professionals’ roles as organizational leaders. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.