Supervisor Downward Jealousy and Its Social Function in Supervisor-Subordinate Relationships

We introduce the concept of supervisor downward jealousy, defined as supervisor’s fear of losing valued relationships with subordinates because of an actual or imagined rival (e.g., an informal leader). We integrate recent theoretical framework on workplace jealousy with the social functional view of emotions to propose and test a novel theoretical model to delineate both the antecedents and consequences of supervisor downward jealousy. We theorize that the presence of an informal leader contributes to the emergence of supervisor downward jealousy, particularly when the informal leader is competent, and that jealous supervisors are more likely to refrain from abusive supervision and provide supervisory support to their valued targets (i.e., other subordinates), particularly when the other subordinates are competent, with the hope to repair and rebuild the valued relationships. We first developed a scale on supervisor downward jealousy (Study 1a) and then adopted a multi-method, multi-sample research design including an electronic confederate-based experiment (Study 1b) and a multi-wave, multi-source field study (Study 2) to test our model and hypotheses. Results across both studies provide consistent support for our predictions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications as well as future research directions of our work.