Incentives, Social Comparison Costs, and the Proximity of Envy's Object

We investigate the mechanisms that shape social comparison in organizations and generate social comparison costs. Drawing on the notions of inequity aversion and envy, we argue that heterogeneity in the strength and type of incentives provides an impetus for envy, and that the resulting social comparison costs are shaped not only by the magnitude of this impetus, but the distance of envy’s objects. In other words, the more proximate socially, structurally and geographically are those one envies the larger the costly behavioral response. To test our predictions, we use a quasi-experimental event during which outlets of a retail bank, previously operating under homogenous incentives, were assigned to four distinct tournament groups with differing ex ante probabilities of winning a prize — an event that provides envy’s impetus. We then explore how, for each outlet, the proximity of those assigned to more advantaged outlets — objects of envy — shape productivity responses. We find that organizational units with more socially, geographically, and structurally proximate peers assigned to ‘better’ tournament groups decreased their productivity, when compared to peers whose objects of envy were more socially, geographically, and structurally distant. We also show that these effects are stable over time. We discuss implications of these results for organizational design and boundaries.