The mechanism nobody opts out of

Leon Festinger proposed in 1954 that humans have an innate drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities, and that when no objective standard exists, they evaluate by comparing themselves to others. The workplace is the most structured and sustained social comparison environment most adults inhabit: it provides performance metrics, visible hierarchies, observable reward distributions, and a captive comparison audience. This structural richness makes it uniquely powerful at activating comparison processes — and therefore uniquely susceptible to both their motivational benefits and their toxic consequences.

The commercial significance of this is specific. Social comparison in the workplace is not a feature of certain cultures or certain personality types that can be designed out. It is a fundamental property of how the human brain constructs its model of its own relative position, operating continuously and automatically in every environment where other people’s performance is observable. The question for any entrepreneur building a team is not whether social comparison will happen but which of its two pathways it will activate.

The two-pathway model: what determines inspiration vs. envy

Upward comparison — comparing oneself to someone who appears to be performing better — produces two distinct outcomes depending on one variable: whether the gap feels attainable. When the comparison target’s level feels reachable, upward comparison produces inspiration and increased effort. When the gap feels uncloseable, the same comparison produces envy and negative affect without motivational benefit.

This distinction is commercially decisive because it means the same high-performing team member simultaneously inspires some colleagues and demoralises others — not because of anything the high performer is doing differently with different people, but because the attainability appraisal that determines which pathway activates varies by individual self-efficacy, prior trajectory, and the specific distance of the gap they perceive. The team leader who assumes that visible high performance uniformly motivates the team is missing half of what is actually happening.

A 2023 study of 882 temporary agency workers directly measured the dual-pathway mechanism: upward social comparison was associated with both benign envy — the admiring version that produces informal workplace learning — and malicious envy — the hostile version that produces social undermining behaviour. Both pathways activated from the same comparison stimulus. Psychological availability moderated which pathway dominated: higher availability strengthened the benign pathway and weakened the malicious one.

Benign vs. malicious envy: the critical distinction

The most important theoretical contribution to the social comparison literature for understanding workplace toxicity is the distinction between the two forms of envy that upward comparison can produce. Benign envy — sometimes described as the admiring version — produces motivation to improve oneself. Malicious envy — the hostile version — produces the desire to bring the envied person down rather than raise oneself up. Both are responses to the same upward comparison; what determines which form results is a combination of the perceived fairness of the envied advantage, the closeness of the relationship with the envied person, and the magnitude of the gap.

Van de Ven, Zeelenberg and Pieters’ research found that benign envy activates approach motivation while malicious envy activates avoidance and sabotage motivation. The fMRI literature further shows that comparison processing recruits different neural regions depending on the emotional outcome — the reward valuation circuits for the motivational response and the conflict and negative-affect circuits for the hostile one. The emotional form is not merely a subjective description; it corresponds to a measurably different neurological state that produces measurably different behaviour.

Knowledge hiding: the most commercially costly expression of malicious envy

A three-wave study of 411 employees in China found that upward social comparison of received help — observing that a colleague received more assistance from others — was positively associated with the observer’s feelings of envy, which in turn negatively affected interpersonal citizenship behaviour. The finding is notable because the trigger was not performance outperformance or salary difference but the socially positive act of one colleague receiving help. Social comparison is operating on any dimension of organisational resource allocation, including the distribution of supportive attention, and the envy it generates degrades the prosocial behaviours that make teams function.

Knowledge hiding is the most commercially damaging specific form this degraded citizenship takes. The employee who withholds information, methods, and expertise from a colleague they envy is imposing a direct tax on the organisation’s collective intelligence that is invisible in any performance metric and attributable to no single actor. Both knowledge sharing (through benign envy and inspiration) and knowledge hiding (through malicious envy and resentment) can operate simultaneously within the same team in response to the same high performer — producing the inconsistent dynamic that management typically cannot diagnose because the mechanism is invisible.

If the social comparison dynamics described here — the persistent sense of falling behind, the low-grade resentment of others’ visible success, or the exhaustion of competing while pretending not to — are significantly affecting your wellbeing, that deserves attention beyond the management framework. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

The leaderboard problem: designing comparison contexts

Festinger’s similarity hypothesis — that humans pick comparison targets near their own level — has a specific and underappreciated design implication for any entrepreneur who uses leaderboards, performance rankings, or visible metric dashboards. A leaderboard that places bottom-quartile performers in constant view of top-quartile performance is imposing the unattainability condition that converts upward comparison into demoralisation. A leaderboard designed to show each performer their immediately adjacent peers — close enough for the gap to feel closeable — exploits the motivational pathway while reducing the toxicity that the uncloseable-gap condition produces.

The design of any comparison context is itself a psychological intervention. Pay transparency, performance review formats, and public recognition systems all create comparison information that activates the dual-pathway mechanism in predictable ways. Whether the net effect is motivational or toxic depends on whether the comparison environment is designed with the attainability variable in mind or left to activate randomly across the workforce.

A book worth reading alongside this

The Status Game by Will Storr is the most accessible contemporary treatment of how status competition — the applied form of social comparison — drives both the highest-quality human achievement and the most destructive interpersonal behaviour, and why the same mechanism produces both simultaneously. Storr draws on evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and historical case studies to argue that the pursuit of relative status is one of the most powerful forces in human motivation — and that the environments humans create to channel it determine whether it produces the cooperation and striving that build organisations or the sabotage and malicious envy that destroy them. For any entrepreneur who wants to understand the deeper logic of why their team dynamics look the way they do, it is the most readable and most practically illuminating available account of the mechanism at work.

Have questions about this article?

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If the social comparison dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP therapist finder: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Festinger, L. (1954), Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. Van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M. & Pieters, R. (2011), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6), 784–795. Han, S. et al. (2022), International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(14), 8351.