Good relationships can boost your career

New York : Sharing a good relationship with friends and family can boost confidence and keep you motivated to achieve greater personal goals, suggests new research.

The findings support the "I-through-We" perspective, which means the social tendency to connect with others, and the individual tendency to strive and grow as individuals, are not mutually exclusive and may augment and magnify each other. For the study, researchers used data from samples from the US and Japan to determine if personal growth is an outcome of an individual's traits or the positive relationships they have with others.

"The more supportive people judged their relationships to be, the higher their personal growth tendencies," said the study's lead author David Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University in the US. "In other words, relationships do not necessarily conflict with but help sustain one's personal growth," Oscar Ybarra, Professor at the University of Michigan, said in a statement released by the university.

In one experiment, about 200 participants were randomly assigned to one of three relationship conditions: supportive, non-supportive and neutral.