Fortune address “Dangerous Liaisons,” office romances at small businesses.
Ellyn Spragins writes (excerpt):
Those who study the subject say office romance is on the rise and—apart from boss-employee relations and extramarital affairs—is becoming more respectable. Two-thirds of managers and executives surveyed last year by the American Management Association said it’s okay to date someone from work. Of the 30% who have dated colleagues, half added that those dates led to marriage or a long-term relationship. Workplace relationships rose to about ten million last year, up from eight million in 1998, estimates Dennis Powers, a business-law professor at Southern Oregon University and author of The Office Romance: Playing With Fire Without Getting Burned. (Powers established the 1998 figure in a survey he conducted with U.S. News & World Report and calculated the 2003 number using statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor and the Bureau of National Affairs.)