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When I assumed the editorship of The Bottom Line last year, I never dreamed it would be only for three issues. Frankly, three issues is simply a very brief introduction to the editing of a journal. But, of course, I never expected to be changing jobs either! Yet both things have happened. On January 3, 1994, I will become Chief Consultant for School Media Programs for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, a job that will have me traveling the entire state—one that will make it impossible for me to continue to direct the necessary time and energy into editing a quality publication.

As you leaf through the pages of this new issue of The Bottom Line, you will see reprints of two very important documents, the American Library Association's Annual State of the Nation's Libraries report and President Bill Clinton's Technology Plan for his administration. Why devote so many pages to these two documents? First, and most obviously, so that library administrators have a copy of record of both these major pieces of information that so affect our budgets. But second, and more importantly, because they are and will be two of the keystones that will help shape our futures as professionals and institutions.

Communication potential abounds: e‐mail zips from office to office; electronic calendars search a building of people, coming up with a common date, and scheduling it for the masses; acquaintances from across the state or nation no longer play telephone tag—they “talk” at their convenience via the Internet. But are we really communicating? Are we breaking down barriers or constructing more substantial ones—ones that are being made impenetrable because we no longer are able subconsciously to analyze body language or casually change the subject when tensions mount?

As workplaces and relationships evolve with increasing complexity, co-worker dynamics have become a key concern for HR managers and scholars. An important yet overlooked aspect of co-worker dynamics is gratitude. This paper adopts a relationship-specific conceptualization of gratitude and explores its influence on prosocial behaviors within co-worker dyads. The proposed model also suggests structural-relational factors under which these relationships are affected.

The conceptual paper draws insights from personal relationships to consider an alternative side of gratitude’s prosocial action tendencies, thereby highlighting two: risk-oriented and opportunity-oriented. These assumptions are then situated within the affect theory of social exchange to predict gratitude’s influence on prosocial behaviors within co-worker dyads.

The proposed model illuminates the importance of studying relationship-specific gratitude within co-worker relations by illustrating its effects on two types of prosocial action tendencies – opportunity-oriented and risk-oriented and varying prosocial behaviors (from convergent to divergent). Structural-relational factors, such as positional and physical distance between co-workers, are considered to affect these relationships.

While the study of gratitude in the workplace is emerging, little research has examined its influence on the nature of prosocial behaviors within co-worker relations. This paper advances the notion that gratitude serves an adaptive function in co-worker dyads, thereby highlighting the risk-oriented and opportunity-oriented continuum, and its implications for the type and scope of prosocial behaviors exchanged.