“行高人非”还是“见贤思齐”？职场上行比较对员工行为的双刃剑效应

p>Upward social comparison is widely penetrated in our workplace. Most studies have devoted considerable efforts in identifying the down sides of upward social comparison, demonstrating that it will lead to negative emotions and dysfunctional behaviors. However, a few studies also reveal the positive effects, arguing that workplace upward social comparison could motivate individuals to learn from comparison targets. The controversial results suggest that the mechanism behind the relationship between upward social comparison and individuals&rsquo; different responses in the workplace remains unclear. To fill this gap, we investigate the double-edged sword effects of workplace upward social comparison. Furthermore, current research perspectives of upward social comparison are relatively insufficient, most of which discuss from the explanation mechanism of emotion based on social comparison theory, but few studies explore the upward social comparison impacts from a cognitive lens. To fill this research gap, our study draws on a cognitive lens and investigates <em>how</em> and <em>when</em> workplace upward social comparison yields adaptive or maladaptive behavioral outcomes based on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress. Specifically, we posit that an employee prove-performance goal orientation determines an employee to interpret workplace upward social comparison as either challenge or threat. We further demonstrate how these challenge and threat appraisals motivate learning behavior from the social comparison targets and social undermining toward the social comparison targets, respectively.</p><p>We used a multi-wave, round-robin design to collect data. 270 employees from 65 teams agreed to participate. At wave 1, 270 employees were invited to assess their workplace upward social comparison, performance-prove goal orientation, social comparison orientation, learning goal orientation, and demographics. 251 employees provided valid responses (response rate = 93%). Two weeks after wave 1, 251 employees were invited to evaluate their challenge and threat appraisals, and 240 employees provided valid responses (response rate = 95.6%). Two weeks after wave 2, 240 employees were invited to report their learning behaviors towards their coworkers, and meanwhile, employees were invited their received social undermining from coworkers. 240 valid responses were received (response rate = 100%). Finally, 720 dyads from 240 employees from 60 teams were used to test our proposed model.</p><p>Given that the dyads nested in employees and then employees nested within teams, we tested our hypothesis by multilevel social relations model. To test the conditional indirect effects, a <em>Monte Carlo</em> simulation with 20,000 replications was used to generate the 95% Monte Carlo confidence intervals in <em>R</em> 3.5. The results showed that, with lower levels of performance-prove goal orientation, employees tended to appraise workplace upward social comparison as challenges, which promoted them to learn from upward comparison targets. On the contrary, with higher levels of performance-prove goal orientation, employees tended to appraise workplace upward social comparison as threats, which elicited employees&rsquo; social undermining toward upward comparison targets.</p><p>Our study provided several theoretical and practical implications. First, our study revealed the double-edged sword effects of workplace upward social comparison on subsequent learning behaviors and social undermining from a cognitive rather than emotional lens. Second, our findings demonstrated &ldquo;how&rdquo; and &ldquo;why&rdquo; workplace upward social comparison drive employees to develop two distinct behavioral responses from a novel theoretical perspective&mdash;the cognitive appraisal theory of stress. Third, we found that performance-prove goal orientation would be the critical boundary to divide the effects of the workplace upward social comparison. Furthermore, our findings offer important practical implications to managers and policymakers.</p