Introduction
“Rhonda, age thirty-four, is one of twenty-five female secretaries at a midsize legal firm. Her boss, impressed by Rhonda’s computer skills, suggests she go for further training so she can help with the information technology needs of the firm. He offers to accommodate her time away for classes if she will agree to stay with the firm for a year after she finishes. When Rhonda tells her coworkers about the opportunity, they congratulate her, but in the weeks that follow, the emotional climate of the office grows noticeably cooler. Within a month of starting classes, Rhonda is no longer invited to lunch with the other women, and they frequently ‘forget’ to pass on important messages that arrive while she is in class.” (Dellesega, 2005, p. 8).
Many organizations routinely compare employees with each other. For example, managers frequently rank employees or publically recognize an employee for special achievement (e.g., an employee of the month award; Garcia & Tor, 2007). In a 2006 survey, Hewitt Associates found that over 60% of organizations used a competitive reward system, and Greenberg, Ashton-James, and Ashkanasy (2007) argue that the use “of comparative social information in the workplace is, in some ways, an institutionalized process” (p. 36). Given the frequency of such comparisons, individuals are likely to compare their accomplishments with those of their colleagues not only when their managers formally engage in comparison processes, but also on their own even without an institutionally driven comparison (Exline and Lobel, 1999 and Festinger, 1954).
In the opening example, a manager’s recognition of a high-potential employee harms relationships between that employee and her co-workers. Even though this manager may not have intended to make the comparison between Rhonda and her co-workers salient, Rhonda’s co-workers made the social comparison and consequently withdrew from Rhonda and began to undermine her performance. Prior research has shown that social comparisons in the workplace have implications for interpersonal liking (Schaubroeck & Lam, 2004) and aggression (Cohen-Charash & Mueller, 2007). In this paper, we examine the implications of social comparisons on trust.
A substantial literature has documented the importance of trust (Hosmer, 1995 and Lewicki et al., 2007). Trust facilitates cooperation (Pillutla, Malhotra, & Murnighan, 2003), reduces transaction costs (Granovetter, 1985), and enables managers and organizations to operate effectively (Dirks and Ferrin, 2001, Jones and George, 1998 and Kim et al., 2006). Although trust is critical in many workplace relationships, common organizational practices trigger social comparisons that may unintentionally damage trust.
In this paper, we describe how social comparisons influence subsequent trust. Although prior work has found that individuals may harm competitors during a competitive interaction (Cohen-Charash and Mueller, 2007, Garcia et al., 2006 and Schweitzer et al., 2005), no prior work has examined how competitive interactions influence trust in subsequent cooperative contexts. We show that comparisons with someone whose performance is superior to one’s own (upward comparisons) and comparisons with someone whose performance is inferior to one’s own (downward comparisons) harm trust. The type of trust that is harmed by upward and downward comparisons depends on the direction of the comparison. Downward comparisons harm cognitive trust, and upward comparisons harm affective trust.
Conclusion
Our work describes the influence of social comparison information on two distinct components of trust: affective trust and cognitive trust. We demonstrate that upward social comparisons harm affective trust and that downward social comparisons harm cognitive trust.
In addition to extending our understanding of how ability information influences trust, our findings have important implications for models of trust. Our findings highlight the distinct nature of affective trust and cognitive trust, and argue for the inclusion of both types of trust in future models.
The harmful effects of social comparisons may be particularly important in the workplace, because they are difficult to recognize. Employees may be reluctant to acknowledge feelings of envy or threat, and as a result, outperforming targets may fail to recognize the effects their own outperformance has on others. Given the importance of teamwork and cooperation in organizations, however, managerial success may rest on a manager’s ability to guide the social comparisons others make and to manage the consequences of both upward and downward social comparisons.
