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. Looking back, she realizes that envy eroded her confidence, undermined her productivity and creativity, and clouded her ability to see where she could take her interests and talents. “It was a huge stumbling block for me,” she says.
Now, more than 20 years later, Levine is a successful professional speaker, career coach and corporate comedian. Ironically, she says, some of the peers she thought had it all figured out early on have since reached out to her for career advice and informal coaching. Envy may have felt like an obstacle at the time, she reflects, but it also pushed her to create a career tailored to her own skills and interests.
Professional envy can have positive and negative repercussions. Workplaces where managers make a point of comparisons — posting leaderboards or naming employees of the month — provide fertile ground for cultivating envy, says Michelle Duffy, who studies organizational behavior at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. The green-eyed monster can foster environments where people act dishonestly and undermine, belittle or freeze out their colleagues, or even sabotage their work. Envy at work can damage productivity, creativity, teamwork and cooperation.
But envy can, on the flip side, inspire people to work towards self-improvement and set higher goals. What makes the difference? Research on workplace envy has surged in recent years, as Duffy and colleagues described in a recent article in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Now she and other researchers are studying it in hopes of learning how organizations can manage it and channel its impacts in positive ways.
