Previous research on leader-subordinate relations has come to the consensus that perceiving oneself as treated better than one’s teammates by the team leader motivates individuals to engage in prosocial interpersonal behaviors such as helping. Our work, published in Journal of Management Studies, challenges this consensus by showing that this perception can also lead individuals who are innately driven to dominate others to undermine their teammates. In three empirical studies, we demonstrate when and why better leader treatment for the individual can result in worse outcomes for their team.

An Overlooked Aspect of Leader-Subordinate Relations

Research on leader-subordinate relations has come to the consensus that one’s perceptions of being treated better by a leader (compared to one’s coworkers’ treatment by the same leader) motivates prosocial interpersonal behaviors such as helping. These positive behaviors are thought to stem from the increased self-worth that subordinates experience when they perceive their leader treatment as better relative to that received by their coworkers. However, previous research has overlooked the fact that increased self-worth may also be associated with subordinates’ feelings of superiority and arrogance (i.e., hubristic pride). This oversight is consequential given that hubristic pride, an emotional response to diverse indicators of success, is believed to motivate individuals’ use of aggression to gain and maintain high status.

Pride and the Desire to Dominate Others

With our study, we challenge the consensus in the scientific literature on leader-subordinate relations by proposing that perceiving oneself as receiving better leader treatment can lead to social undermining, behavior which harms victims’ standing and reputation in their workgroup. However, we did not expect all subordinates to respond to perceptions of better leader treatment with equal amounts of hubristic pride and, in turn, social undermining. This is because hubristic pride is linked to various psychological traits, suggesting that certain individuals, compared to others, are more likely to experience hubristic pride and its accompanying behavioral motivations. For this reason, we theorized that employees high in trait dominance, a personality characteristic representing an individual’s desire to control others and their willingness to use aggressive methods to do this, would be especially prone to hubristic pride when perceiving their leader treatment as better than that of their coworkers. Trait dominance determines how important superiority over others is to the individual and, thus, how important control over resources and the social attention of others are as life goals. Furthermore, it has previously been proposed that individuals motivated by dominance pay particularly close attention to status-relevant information, which is in line with our theory that individuals with high trait dominance will be particularly motivated (and willing) to use social undermining behaviors to acquire and maintain high status within their workgroup.

Shifting the Conversation on Work Team Dynamics

Two experiments and a longitudinal field study using diverse samples from both the United Kingdom and United States empirically support our theory and our research findings are important for several reasons. First, they demonstrate that employees who fare poorer in terms of leader treatment are susceptible to negative treatment (i.e., social undermining) by those who perceive themselves as faring better. Thus, it is not as previous research would suggest, which is that only the better faring subordinates need worry about negative treatment from their worse-faring coworkers. Second, our study challenges previous research into social undermining which has typically assumed that social undermining is motivated by feelings of envy (i.e., faring worse than others). Instead, we show that social undermining can also be motivated by hubristic pride (i.e., faring better than others). Third, the current study warns supervisors of the negative consequences that can arise when subordinates with high trait dominance perceive themselves as receiving better leader treatment than their coworkers. Thus, although it has previously been claimed that better leader treatment can maximize the citizenship potential of employees, we reveal it may potentially do more harm than good. For this reason, we recommend practitioners take employees’ dominance characteristics into account when hiring. Doing so can help inform leaders’ decisions of when treating some employees better than others is advantageous or not.

In sum, our work shifts the consensus in the scientific literature on leader-subordinate relations by showing when and why perceptions of better leader treatment can motivate negative coworker-directed behavior, while also offering practical help to organizational leaders dealing with the ethical decision of if, and when, to preferentially treat individual subordinates.