How different types of envy affect workplace ideas

Workplaces should be collegial, collaborative environments in which great ideas from any employee are welcomed by everyone in the organisation as a way to advance the company’s interest. Yet humans don’t always work that way, as people who don’t come up with such great ideas may be envious of those who do for a variety of very human reasons including insecurity, career prospects and status.

Managers are well aware that envy can lead to damaging behaviours such as withholding help and undermining colleagues, and the negative effect of envious behaviour has been extensively studied for many years. Yet those previous studies have left largely unexplored the influence of envy on how we judge the ideas and outputs of co-workers in terms of creativity.

Research co-authored by Jungmin Choi, Assistant Research Professor at Cambridge Judge Business School, looks at envy and creativity through a new lens. The research breaks down such envy into benign envy and malicious envy, to determine how people experiencing each type of envy evaluate a co-worker’s creative ideas. In addition, the research looks at whether strong identification with an organisation changes the effect of envy on idea evaluation.

“I’m really interested in emotions, and the workplace effect of those emotions,” says Jungmin, a member of the Organisational Behaviour subject group at Cambridge Judge. “As a researcher it’s very easy to compare yourself with other researchers, so I wanted to understand this better. Sometimes envy can motivate you to learn from or emulate another person, while at other times it can make you want to diminish their success. This research looks at both types of envy.”

Benign envy can prompt people to boost their own workplace motivation

The research says that benign envy is characterised by a self-improvement motivation that leads people to seek to reduce the gap between themselves and their co-worker by enhancing their own standing within the organisation, perhaps by boosting their workplace motivation. Malicious envy is characterised by “a pull-down motivation, whereby individuals attempt to reduce the gap by diminishing the target’s perceived advantage”. In some cases, such malicious envy may translate into criticising a colleague’s ideas in an effort to alleviate one’s own negative emotions through schadenfreude, or “malicious joy at another’s misfortune”, the authors say.

Adds Jungmin: “One key way benign and malicious envy are different is that with benign envy I can feel envy toward another person but still feel they are deserving of their situation, but with malicious envy I may not think the person deserves what they have achieved. With benign envy, someone may be envious but they also see the other person as someone to emulate – so we’re more likely to identify with this person, and this identification appears to protect against the tendency to discount the other person’s creative ideas.”

Identification with the organisation tempers malicious envy

The research also finds that higher identification with the organisation weakens the negative impact of malicious envy on how a colleague’s ideas are evaluated, because the evaluator may be more inclined to assess the creative ideas of another in light of how it advances the collective goal rather than how it affects their own relative standing. The authors acknowledge, however, an alternative view that says strong organisational identity can intensify status concerns within the firm that heightens defensiveness and makes evaluation of a co-worker’s ideas more negative.

“Creativity evaluation, or the assessment of an idea’s novelty and usefulness, is not solely about the merit of the idea,” says the research. “Rather, it is a fundamentally social and political process in which evaluators’ judgments are shaped by interpersonal dynamics between idea generators and evaluators.

“By distinguishing between benign and malicious envy, we reveal their divergent roles in shaping creative evaluation, thereby providing a nuanced explanation for how a social emotion can distort or facilitate idea recognition.”

Managerial implications revolve around project selection

From a practical organisational perspective, the findings have important managerial implications: if managers can better understand how envy distorts creative evaluation, that can help advance creative ideas and prevent costly barriers to innovation. Evaluation of an idea’s creativity is crucial to the innovation process, because creative ideas often need advocates to push them forward compared to other ideas competing for limited resources – so the evaluation of co-workers can help determine which ideas are pursued and which are dismissed.

“However, such evaluations are not purely objective,” the authors say. “They are influenced by a broad range of contextual and individual factors that extend beyond the intrinsic merits of the idea itself”, including “evaluators’ cognitive and motivational states.”

Creativity in organisations functions as a competitive asset showing peers and managers competence and potentially higher status, so recognition for a creative idea can result in greater funding and perhaps career advancement – so peers can perceive the success of a colleague as a relative loss for themselves, the authors note.

The research also draws on a previous study examining how managers’ goals may determine whether or not a creative idea advances: managers motivated primarily by learning are more likely to adopt more radical ideas, while managers who focus on showing competence are more likely to oppose such new ideas as potential threats to their own status.

3 studies looked at envy and identification with the firm

Across 3 online experiments, participants were assigned to different envy conditions:

• study 1 compared benign envy, malicious envy and a control condition
• study 2 compared benign and malicious envy
• study 3 additionally varied whether organisational identification was high or low

The research recruited participants from online survey platform CloudResearch for the 3 studies, and these participants were randomly assigned to conditions of Benign Envy versus Malicious Envy versus a Control group. While the Benign and Malicious groups were provided a scenario in which they are product developers at a home appliance company proposing an idea for an important project, and were also provided supplemental statements that the colleague “deserves (vs. does not deserve) to have his [her] idea selected for this project” as “he [she] has (vs. does not have) what it takes to be a great product developer”.

Participants in the control condition did not read the workplace scenario and instead evaluated the idea directly.

Participants were also asked to rate the creativity of a colleague’s idea – a refrigerator with built-in rotating shelves to allow items in the back to be easily accessed, and they were also asked to indicate how much they choose to invest in the idea on a 0 to 100 scale that assumed they had $100 to allocate to a new project within the company.

Benign envy was measured on a 5-item scale that asked questions such as whether the colleague’s success “encourages me”, whether the colleague “inspires me to work harder to have my idea selected for another project”, and whether “I want to be like” the colleague. Malicious envy was measured with a 5-item scale that such as “I wish that [the colleague’s] idea would not have been selected,” “I wish that [the colleague] would fail at something,” and “I would like to take [the colleague’s] success away from him [her].” Items for both benign and malicious envy were assessed on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

Previous research had identified that an idea must be perceived as both novel and useful to be considered creative, so the research asked participants to rate on a 7-point scale the idea based on how novel, new, useful, practical, creative and innovative the idea is.

Interestingly, there was no difference between individuals in the Benign Envy Condition and those in the Control category in creative assessment.

“These findings show that benign envy will lead to higher creativity assessment of an idea generated by the envied target compared to malicious envy. Individuals who feel benign envy evaluate the idea generated by the envied target the same as those who do not experience any envy, while malicious envy lowers the creative assessment of the idea,” the study says.

High-stepping to creativity

In the second study, participants were asked to provide creativity ratings for a different idea within the field of fitness equipment: gloves and shoes or socks with magnets on them so a magnetic platform can adjust the resistance sought for exercises like high-stepping a weight training exercise or a handstand exercise.

The third study looked at the effect of organisational identification on the negative relationship between envy and creative evaluation for those with malicious envy toward a colleague’s idea. These participants were told, based on their group, that their company was a “good (vs. poor) fit for” them, that co-workers “hold very similar (vs. very different) attitudes about the direction of and vision for the company”, and “they have considerable (vs. very little) personal interaction with other people at the company, outside of [their] direct reports”.

The result: the difference between benign and malicious envy is narrowed when organisational identification is high. “Specifically, when organisational identification is low, benign envy leads to significantly higher creative evaluation compared to malicious envy. However, when organisational identification is high, the difference between benign and malicious envy in predicting creative evaluation is reduced, suggesting that a strong organisational identity may buffer against the negative effects of malicious envy on creative assessments.”

Creativity assessment is inherently ambiguous

From a theoretical perspective, the research contributes new thought to an area of academic study that has mostly focused on evaluators’ cognitive and motivational states, rather than emotional influences. “Yet creativity evaluation is an inherently ambiguous context in which emotions are likely to affect judgment. By demonstrating that benign and malicious envy exert systematically different effects on the assessment of creative ideas, the present research shows that creativity evaluation is shaped not only by cognitive considerations of novelty and usefulness but also by the evaluator’s emotional state.”

Likewise, the research moves beyond prior research that mostly looked how envy affects behaviour toward the envied target (such as reduced cooperation and social undermining) rather than on evaluative judgements of ideas and other work outputs. “By demonstrating that envy can shape judgments of others’ work beyond interpersonal interactions, these findings highlight a previously underexamined pathway through which envy may affect innovation-related outcomes in organisations.”

The practical implication of the research for managers and employees alike is that understanding these envy-related dynamics can help prevent the devaluation of creative ideas. “One key insight from these findings is that fostering organisational identification may help buffer against the negative effects of malicious envy on both creative evaluation and investment decisions. Managers can enhance organisational identification by cultivating a collaborative culture.”

Further research can look at envy between bosses and subordinates

The authors say that there is scope for further research that looks beyond how envy affects peer evaluations of colleague’s creative ideas to also look at how envy affects more hierarchical situations such as between supervisors and subordinates in which power differentials and status disparities could influence how envy is experienced and expressed.

“This research identifies envy as a complex and influential social emotion in the evaluation of creative ideas,” the research concludes. “The effect of envy on creativity evaluation depends on the type of envy experienced. Benign envy, compared to malicious envy, leads to more favourable evaluations and subsequently a greater willingness to invest in the ideas of an envied target – an effect driven by heightened personal identification with the target.

“The detrimental impact of malicious envy on creative evaluations can be mitigated by strong organisational identification. Collectively, these findings offer a foundation for future research on the emotional and social dynamics that influence creativity evaluation.”