Envy may be humanity’s oldest flaw.
In the Judeo-Christian creation story, Cain kills Abel after God favors Abel’s offering. Whether or not one reads the story literally, it captures something psychologically ancient: the pain of seeing another person receive what we want, and the temptation to remove the person who makes us feel inferior.
That force is still with us. There is good evidence that our happiness depends not only on what we have, but on how we compare with those around us. Economists have repeatedly found that subjective well-being is affected by relative income and status, not simply by absolute levels of wealth.
But comparison has a fundamental flaw: we compare surfaces. We see the promotion, not the years of rejection. The prospering family, not the private health struggles. The wealth, not the sacrifices behind it. The privilege, not the difficult childhood. We compare what is visible about someone else with what we know about ourselves. So what happens when comparison turns into envy?
Envy can be productive—or destructive
An upward comparison can motivate us: I want what she has, so I will work to become better. But envy can also take the opposite route: If I cannot have what she has, I want her to have less of it. Psychologists distinguish between benign envy, which can motivate self-improvement, and malicious envy, which can lead people to undermine the person they envy.
And this is where organizations become particularly interesting.
Envy can punish excellence
The evidence that envy can target excellence is unusually strong. A multi-source three-wave lagged field study of supervisors and subordinates found that high subordinate performance is linked to supervisory undermining, consistent with an envy-mediated pathway from subordinate performance to abusive supervision, among supervisors high in social-comparison orientation.
The “tall poppy” literature points in the same direction. In Feather’s experimental studies, people reported greater pleasure when a high achiever failed than when an average achiever failed.
Research on social comparison also suggests that people can be threatened not only by those already above them, but by colleagues who are rising faster than they are. In other words, you do not necessarily have to be at the top to become threatening. It may be enough to be on your way there. This creates a disturbing organizational possibility: a workplace can end up punishing precisely the people it most needs.
Don’t shine too brightly. Don’t rise too quickly. Don’t make your boss look bad.
Envy is not always about performance
There is another, perhaps even more important, dimension: ethics.
In four experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monin, Sawyer, and Marquez found that people who themselves participated in objectionable conduct could dislike a person who refused to participate on principle. The rejection was mediated by the perception that the moral rebel implicitly condemned those who complied.
The target does not have to say, You are doing something wrong. Their behavior can communicate it anyway. This may be particularly relevant to whistleblowers, employees who refuse unethical practices, and people who visibly adhere to standards that others violate.
When reform threatens the people who must implement it
Now imagine a bold reformer entering an organization. A new government arrives with a clear anti-corruption mandate. A new CEO announces a restructuring. A new leader promises to reward performance, improve accountability, or eliminate entrenched privileges.
The reformer arrives with good intentions.
But the reformer usually takes the existing formal hierarchy as good and given. And they cannot see the invisible structure underneath it. They may not know who is corrupt and who is honest within a ministry. They may not know which manager will be inspired by an excellent subordinate and which will feel threatened by her. They may not know who has the self-confidence to welcome a rising colleague—and who needs to keep potential competitors safely below them, or better: kick them out.
Meanwhile, everyone inside the organization knows.
The masks are well rehearsed. A Potemkin village can be remarkably convincing when the president, CEO, or minister comes to visit.
And this is where well-intentioned reform can produce the opposite of what it intended.
If reform leaves the existing hierarchy largely intact, threatened managers can use that hierarchy to defend themselves. A corrupt boss may marginalize the ethical subordinate who refuses to go along. An insecure or unproductive boss may undermine the proactive subordinate who makes their own limitations apparent.
A threatened manager may remove the most formidable potential competitor—not because that person is doing anything wrong, but because she is becoming too good, too visible, or too difficult to control.
Meanwhile, the reformer thinks they are changing the system. The system may instead be using its existing people and incentives to neutralize the reform. The moat gets built so no rival reaches the castle.
When envy becomes an organizational force
This is why reform cannot be only about policies, structures and formal incentives. It also has to understand the psychology of the people who will implement them.
A good policy in the hands of someone whose status, power, or self-image it threatens can become something very different from what its designer intended. And this is where envy becomes more than an unpleasant human emotion. It can become an organizational force.
A statically governed organization may create a strange equilibrium in which being exceptional carries an interpersonal cost. People learn, consciously or unconsciously, not to stand out too much. And those who do may find themselves subtly isolated, undermined or cut down.
And here we return to Cain and Abel. If envy is indeed one of humanity’s oldest destructive forces, organizations cannot simply hope that it will disappear. They need ways to protect the people who stand out—and to let those who see what is happening reach the person with the power to act.
In practice, that may mean giving tall poppies—and those who see them being cut down—a direct, trusted channel to the reformer, or their closest advisers. Because sometimes the most important protection against dysfunction is not another rule. It is a hotline.
