'When you're obsessed with someone else's success, your self-respect suffers, and you may neglect or even sabotage your own performance and possibly your career.'
'Envy is the distress people feel when others get what they want, and it is universal.'
- People at all levels of a firm are vulnerable to envy.
It intensifies in times of economic crisis.
- As losses mount, employees worry that they're in jeopardy and grow to resent successful colleagues.
Envy damages relationships, disrupts teams, and undermines organizational performance. Most of all, it harms the one who feels it. When you're obsessed with someone else's success, your self-respect suffers, and you may neglect or even sabotage your own performance and possibly your career.
Envy is difficult to manage, in part because it's hard to admit that we harbor such a socially unacceptable emotion. Our discomfort causes us to conceal and deny our feelings, and that makes things worse. Repressed envy inevitably resurfaces, stronger than ever.
Harvard Business Review, 2010
