The curse of employee privilege: harnessing virtual reality technology to inhibit workplace envy

Anand van Zelderen, Nicky Dries, Jochen Menges
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Abstract

In many workplaces, managers provide some employees with unique privileges that support their professional development and stimulate productivity and creativity. Yet with some employees more deserving of a privileged status than others, co-workers feeling left out of the inner circle may begin to exhibit feelings of envy. With workplace envy and intergroup conflicts going hand in hand, the question arises whether co-worker acceptance of employee privileges—where conflict can be constrained through an affirmative re-evaluation of co-workers’ privileged status—may lower the envy experienced by employees. Using virtual reality technology, 112 employees participated in a virtual employee meeting at a virtual organization where they were exposed to a new workforce differentiation practice. We show through our experiment that co-worker acceptance of employee privileges negatively influences workplace envy, which was partially mediated by the anticipated ostracism of employees. Moreover, we show that this effect is only found for employees with privileges, who worry more about being ostracized than their non-privileged co-workers. We anticipate that our findings will enable managers to conscientiously differentiate between their employees, using virtual reality simulations to steer employees’ thoughts and feelings in a direction that benefits both employees and organizations.
员工特权的诅咒:利用虚拟现实技术抑制职场嫉妒
在许多工作场所,管理者会为一些员工提供独特的特权,以支持他们的职业发展,激发他们的生产力和创造力。然而,由于一些员工比其他员工更应该享有特权,感到被冷落的同事可能会开始表现出嫉妒的情绪。由于工作场所的嫉妒和群体间的冲突是相辅相成的,因此就出现了这样一个问题:同事接受员工的特权--在这种情况下,可以通过对同事特权地位的肯定性重新评价来限制冲突--是否可以降低员工所体验到的嫉妒。利用虚拟现实技术,112 名员工参加了一个虚拟组织的虚拟员工会议,在会上他们接触到了一种新的劳动力差异化做法。我们通过实验表明,同事对员工特权的接受会对工作场所的嫉妒产生负面影响,而这种影响部分是由预期的员工排斥所调节的。此外,我们还发现,只有享有特权的员工才会产生这种影响,他们比没有特权的同事更担心被排斥。我们预计,我们的研究结果将使管理者能够有意识地区别对待员工,利用虚拟现实模拟将员工的思想和情感引向对员工和组织都有利的方向。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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