Why Envy Outperforms Admiration

Abstract

Four studies tested the hypothesis that the emotion of benign envy, but not the emotions of admiration or malicious envy, motivates people to improve themselves. Studies 1 to 3 found that only benign envy was related to the motivation to study more (Study 1) and to actual performance on the Remote Associates Task (which measures intelligence and creativity; Studies 2 and 3). Study 4 found that an upward social comparison triggered benign envy and subsequent better performance only when people thought self-improvement was attainable. When participants thought self-improvement was hard, an upward social comparison led to more admiration and no motivation to do better. Implications of these findings for theories of social emotions such as envy, social comparisons, and for understanding the influence of role models are discussed.

Clarifying the link between mastery goals and social comparisons in classroom settings

“…Based on Lockwood and Kunda (1997), we hypothesised that among students who judged their performance to be inferior relative to others, the mastery-oriented students would report higher perceptions competence than the performance-oriented students (see also Van de Ven et al, 2011). This second hypothesis does not necessarily contradict previous research or our first hypothesis (i.e., Van Yperen & Leander, 2014).…”

“…However, research has pointed out that individuals' reactions to comparisons with more capable individuals is more complex and depends on goals or motives (Lockwood & Kunda, 1997;Van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2011). Specifically, a number of studies have demonstrated that in comparison to performance-oriented students, the mastery-oriented students respond less negatively to situations that provide negative performance feedback (Neff, Hsieh, & Desitterat, 2005;Sideridis & Kaplan, 2011).…”

“…Specifically, in a series of studies, Lockwood and Kunda (1997) demonstrated that unfavourable comparisons with more capable students improved self-evaluations when individuals believed that ability was malleable and could be improved through hard work and effort (see also Van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2011).…”

The Emotion of Admiration Improves Employees’ Goal Orientations and Contextual Performance

“…Also the emotional reactions to outstanding role models seem to vary as a function of both the attainability of the result and the perception of control in achieving it. Manipulating participants' beliefs about self-improvements, Van de Ven, Zeelenberg, and Pieters [78] found that those who were primed with the idea that self-enhancement is easy felt more (benign) envy toward a fictitious outstanding model than those primed with the idea that self-enhancement is difficult. On the contrary, admiration was marg inally stronger when self-imp rovement was thought to be difficult.…”

“…Both the mediators and moderators of the relationship between leaders' perceived competence and followers' motivation deserve more research. One clear limit of these studies is that we did not consider competing emot ional med iators such as envy, which has recently been found to be more related to task performance than admiration [78]. Envy might exp lain the detrimental effect of leader's perceived competence on followers' motivation.…”