Abstract
Building rapport may benefit organizations and employees. One study in Organizational Behavior Management has evaluated rapport-building. Curry et al. (2019) found that building rapport resulted in increased productivity and discretionary effort. The potential benefits of rapport-building warrant additional research. The purpose of this study was to systematically replicate Curry et al. (2019) and extend the research on rapport-building. The study utilized an alternating treatments design with undergraduate students. Performance was measured during a check processing task and a direct measure was used to assess participants’ preference. In Experiment 1, we found that participants completed more checks when working with the researcher with whom rapport was established and preferred working with the rapport researcher. In Experiment 2, participants underwent the same procedure with an additional exposure to all phases to control for possible threats to internal validity; variability across and within participants for performance and preference results were observed.