When workers feel envious of their peers, it can undermine collaborations — or inspire them to do better on the job. Can organizations harness the green gremlin to boost productivity?
Back when she was in college, Alaina G. Levine used to envy fellow students who seemed to have their entire lives mapped out. A physics and astronomy student at the University of Arizona, her own direction felt unclear — while they, on the other hand, appeared to know precisely what they wanted to do and how to get there.
Now she and other researchers are studying it in hopes of learning how organizations can manage it and channel its impacts in positive ways. Many languages have just one word for envy, but Dutch has two: benijden, which refers to the benign envy that inspires people to work harder, and afgunst, for the type of malicious envy that motivates people to bring others down.
“Paradoxically, this performance benefit occurs when enviers attend to and consult with the very source of their pain: the envied target,” Lee and Duffy wrote. Utz and psychologist Nicole Muscanell, then at Penn State, used questionnaires to assess the emotional reactions of more than 400 academics; participants were instructed to scroll through their ResearchGate notifications and respond to a series of questions assessing their reaction to posts in their news feed about their own achievements or those of others. Not surprisingly, notifications of a colleague’s achievement triggered envy, while notifications of a personal achievement triggered pride.