Interpersonal Harming in Work Teams: Social Comparison, Envy, and Goal Interdependence

Evidence shows that interpersonally harmful behavior, defined as “behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of another individual in the organization” (Venkataramani & Dalal, 2007, p. 925), severely compromises employees’ psychological health, work attitudes, and job performance, and may also reduce team effectiveness (Lim, Cortina, & Magley, 2008; Pearson & Porath, 2005). Recent research has conceptualized interpersonal harming as a dyadic phenomenon or “a function of a relationship between a perpetrator and a victim” (Hershcovis & Barling, 2007, p. 268). However, very little is known about what causes interpersonal harming behavior. Those few studies which have examined the dyadic antecedents of interpersonal harm have suggested that an actor is more likely to harm a target when he or she feels envy or dislike for the target (Cohen-Charash & Mueller, 2007). However, such studies have generally overlooked the reasons why specific individuals may have intense feelings toward some of their coworkers but not others, which in turn may drive them to engage selectively in harming behavior.To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel, multilevel model to better understand the development of interpersonally harmful behavior in coworker dyads in work teams. Based on insights from social comparison theory and research (Buunk & Gibbons, 2007), we suggest that comparison with a higher-performing team member induces harming behavior when individuals believe that they can never achieve a similar level of performance in the future (future performance similarity) and when the teams’ goal interdependence is low. Furthermore, a substantial body of work suggests that different patterns of social comparison will elicit distinct interpersonal emotions, such as envy (Smith, 2000). More importantly, our own recent studies (Lam, 2009; Lam, Huang, Walter, & Chan, 2010) have shown that envy may activate or suppress harmful behavior depending on teams’ cooperative context. Building on this foundation, we propose that (1) a focal team member’s harming of another may depend interactively on his or her comparison with, and the level of expected performance similarity to, the target; (2) envy may mediate this moderated linkage; and (3) a team’s goal interdependence may function as a contextual, cross-level moderator influencing this mediated, moderation relationship.We propose to examine these issues in a series of multi-method studies, combining longitudinal field surveys with quasi-experiments. The project aims at enabling scholars to better understand the origins of interpersonal harming and aiding organizations in their efforts to confine this “dark” side of organizational behavior.