Downward envy: When bosses are jealous their staff

Co-worker envy has existed for quite some time, but since 2018, there has been an increase in downward envy; managers are starting to envy their own high-performing staff.

In a recent episode of The HR Leader Podcast, Sabreen Kaur, a PhD candidate at Monash Business School, talked about her research on downward envy.

Downward envy was a recent phenomenon that only began to pick up in 2018, she said.

Kaur described it as “envy that leaders in the workplace would experience of their employees”.

“It is that painful feeling a leader would experience when they see and they perceive that this employee has some advantage or is doing something really well, and they don’t have that advantage or they are not doing that well,” she said.

She attributed the 2018 shift to an increase in staff diversity at workplaces. This included age gap, career goals, and different ways of working, she noted.

Kaur highlighted that younger workers are likely more tech-savvy, creative, take more risks and prefer more autonomy in their work.

She compared them to their more experienced managers who have different goals, who take less risks and may not be comfortable giving that sort of autonomy to their employees.

Envy can manifest through abuser supervision, which she identified as “taking away employee’s resources or taking away their opportunity”.

Other, more subtle behaviours include managers giving employees the cold shoulder or not assisting them. These can have a negative effect on workplace trust and dynamics, she said.

It does not have to be a range of factors; it is most often just “one little thing that the employee has”, Kaur stressed.

“This employee becoming more popular with the top management, that could really be harmful to the leader’s self-esteem,” she said.

The manager is “going to start to dislike them” and “going to start to trust them less”, which she deduced would also impact the way they feel about their employee.

“It does have potential for very extreme implications in the organisations as well. Because again, leaders have power. They can control things, they can control outcomes for employees,” she said.

The manager’s leadership personality plays a big part, she said. “On a very individual level,” she said, “there are people who like to be in the limelight”. Kaur said it takes empathy on the manager’s part to be happy for employees who take the spotlight.

“Envy can really quietly erode things like team morale, things like driving away your top talent, driving away your high-performing employees,” she added.

Further, she said, “no organisations want to lose their high-performing employees and to deal with the high turnover”.

Organisations can benefit from moving away from zero-sum models when it comes to rewarding their employees, she said. She urged that “we need to really promote shared recognition” and foster “co-success”, which will “minimise the occurrence and even the development of this envy”.

Workplaces that “encourage leaders to reflect on their personal growth and goal attainment over time” will thrive, especially where employees can compare themselves to their past performance or past goal attainment, she said.

When asked about where she thinks this is all going, she expressed hopefulness: “I think organisations are definitely heading in the right direction where they’re prioritising the health of employees, where they’re prioritising good workplace dynamics.”