The dark side of social relationships – the context of the video game industry
Katarzyna Czernek-Marszałek
Profil Orcid, Patrycja Klimas
Profil Orcid et Dagmara Wójcik
Profil Orcid 
Catégorie d'article: Empirical Paper
Publié en ligne: 30 janv. 2024
Pages: 89 - 107
Reçu: 01 août 2023
Accepté: 22 nov. 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ijme-2023-0025
Mots clés
© 2024 Katarzyna Czernek-Marszałek et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Paper’s objectives
The paper aims to explore the negative impacts of social relationships (SR) on business activity. As a research context, the video game industry (VGI) and the video game developers’ (VGDs) relationships are analyzed.
Design/methods
17 semistructured in-depth interviews and 1 focus group interview with Polish VGDs were conducted.
Findings
(1) support for five negatives of SR previously discussed in the literature (2) recognition of the four original negatives (i.e., employee turnover, buying up employees, inefficiency/termination of interorganizational cooperation, and confidential information leakage); and (3) recognition of the harmful results of SR as an industry-dependent issue.
Originality/value
(1) Analyzing the negative consequences of SR for business, which is less frequently considered compared to the positive consequences of these relationships for business; (2) identifying dark sides previously unidentified in the literature; and (3) using the VGI as the research context.