The extant social undermining literature suggests that employees envy and, consequently, undermine coworkers when they feel that these coworkers are better off and thus pose a threat to their own current status. With the present research, we draw on the sociofunctional approach to emotions to propose that an anticipated future status threat can similarly incline employees to feel envy toward, and subsequently undermine, their coworkers. We argue that employees pay special attention to coworkers' past development in relation to their own, because faster-rising coworkers may pose a future status threat even if they are still performing worse in absolute terms in the present. With a set of two behavioral experiments ( = 90 and = 168), we establish that participants react to faster-rising coworkers with social undermining behavior when the climate is competitive (vs. less competitive). We extended these results with a scenario experiment ( = 376) showing that, in these situations, participants extrapolate lower future status than said coworker and thus respond with envy and undermining behavior. A two-wave field study ( = 252) replicated the complete moderated serial mediation model. Our findings help to explain why employees sometimes undermine others who present no immediate threat to their status. As such, we extend theorizing on social undermining and social comparison. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research has shown that employees who occupy more central positions in their organization's network have lower turnover. As a result, scholars commonly interpret turnover as the consequence of social networks. Based on Conservation of Resources theory, we propose an alternative coevolution perspective that recognizes the influence of changes in

No abstract

No abstract

While managers generally seem to enjoy better mental health than regular employees, there are also plenty of reports about them suffering from burnout. The present study explores this relationship between hierarchy level and burnout in more detail. In doing so, we not only investigate what impact managerial rank may have on burnout, but we also contrast two different theoretically meaningful mediators for the relationship: sense of power (feeling in control over people) and work-related self-efficacy (feeling in control over tasks). The results of two surveys—the first with 580 managers (single-source) and the second with 154 managers matched with ratings from close others (multi-source)—show a negative relationship between managers’ hierarchy level and burnout that is explained by both mediators independently. Additional analyses reveal that high sense of power and high self-efficacy are both necessary conditions for low levels of burnout. Such fine-grained analyses allow us to understand why managers at the top are less threatened by burnout, in contrast to what some media reports suggest.