Envy effects on conflict dynamics in supervised work groups

Abstract

At the end of the last century, chaos theory principles have helped organizational theorists to analyze several aspects of organizations and to account for their dynamic evolution. However, most of contributions remained relegated as qualitative discussions of organizational phenomena. In this paper, starting from effort allocations of subordinates in supervised work groups which were observed in a human participants interaction, we found evidence of nonlinear relation between the colleagues’ effort. In order to explain the large variability of behavior we observed, we consider those activated by unfavorable social comparison and propose a dynamical model. A theoretical dynamic model based on the empirical results appears to be powerful for modeling repeated interactions in a work group. Research and intervention design should focus on individual intolerance and beliefs about the reciprocal capacities between subordinates, which, according to our study, appear to play a key role in the inefficiency of equilibria observed in supervised work groups.