When Green Is Mean

Envy is common and corrosive—and usually denied. Most often, it stalks the office as a sense of unfairness.

By Judith Sills, published on September 01, 2008 - last reviewed on August 19, 2009

Green may be the millennial workplace virtue, but when it shows its face as envy, it is the time-honored office serpent, the worm in the apple. In envy's grip, you view your colleagues through the distorted lens of your own competitive failings. And should your successes awaken your colleagues' envy, it wears so many disguises it's difficult to avoid its acid bath.

Envy is the bile on which we choke when we want something that belongs to someone else. (Its cousin jealousy is the toxic sensation that someone might take from us what we already possess, notably the affections of an important person.)

Mild envy might be a socially acceptable compliment in our material culture, where its frank admission ("Oh, I hate you," delivered with a smile) can accompany admiration of a friend's purchase of, say, a knockout new home or car. But in the workplace, envy is often more than mild and, frankly, no compliment. It can be an invisible destructive force. If you experience envy—as target or sufferer—you might never know what hit you.

Generally, envy derives from a complex cocktail of competitiveness, emotional insecurity, and situational dissatisfaction. Four factors favor its flourishing at the office: a highly competitive workplace culture, an emotional dunce of a boss, favoritism in our families of origin, and, of course, exceptional achievement that ticks off everybody else.

Some institutions, whether by ignorance or tradition, are built on an underground swamp of envy that erodes their very professional foundation. Sadly, these are often the most prestigious of workplaces, where the best and the brightest battle to prove whose is the biggest. The wellspring of envy in which these achievers swim is often apparent only to those who escape to milder climes.

One litigator describes his decade at an international law firm this way: "Envy was our radon—invisible and deadly. The great detector was the fact that our toughest marketing job was to cross-sell in-house. People didn't like to refer to each other. It had to do with how the compensation was structured, and we spent half our time resenting colleagues who got the biggest referral fees. I left for a small smart boutique firm, where we are paid to be part of a team."

An escapee from the Ivy League validated the observation, attributed to Henry Kissinger, that the reason the level of bickering and envy in academia is so high is that the stakes are so low. "In a really outstanding faculty, there are so many qualified contenders for any prize. Maybe that was why, as soon as someone won one, you would hear him or her instantly downgraded. 'He didn't deserve it,' or most cutting, 'He really has a second-rate mind.'"

Envy inhabits every level of ability and accomplishment, often fostered by the deliberate or oblivious favoritism of your boss. "The principal has such obvious favorites, it makes the rest of us hate them," says one elementary school teacher. The result of this perception is, predictably enough, a cliquish faculty, a demoralized workforce, and a set of work standards constantly undercut by the feeling that they are unequally applied.

While a boss' favoritism certainly stokes envy, significant favoritism in your own childhood makes you especially vulnerable to it. The office family—with its inevitable structure of senior adults in charge, rivalrous siblings, inequitably divided resources of time, affection, and money—carries whispers of our own original families.

If favoritism was a painful theme in your own childhood home—say, the boys got the biggest share of freedom while you were the daughter who had to stay to clear the table—you are apt to relive perceptions of favoritism inside your office family. When it happens, you get that old familiar feeling of angry, agitated envy.

Finally, envy is almost universally provoked by exceptional achievement. "I worked on a newspaper for years with a great group of people. But when my book became a surprise best seller, they weren't so great anymore, at least not to me. They were sniping, cold, and critical of my other work. It came as a surprise, and it hurt."

Whatever its source, the impact of envy is corrosive, most particularly because it is denied. Few of us look in the mirror and see green. Instead, we look around and see unfairness, and we punish those we feel have been unduly rewarded at our own expense. We withhold support, sincere admiration, sometimes even friendship. We sneak to level the playing field, tearing down a colleague's reputation in an unconscious effort to enhance our own. We become critics where we may have been fans, and even gossips ("I've got an idea what she did to win that... "); in our hearts we believe we are better people.

Envy unleashed, and our reluctance to face it in ourselves and call it what it is, presses relentlessly toward professional mediocrity. The envied have two bad choices—suck up to the protection of the powerful or keep their heads down to avoid the potshots of the angry horde. And they might make the mistake of gloating and so make being envied worse than it has to be.

As for us enviers, the poison of envy can sometimes transform itself into something halfway constructive. It can unite us in an unspoken office brotherhood against him or her who dares to show us up. This is not a good thing, but it's not all bad.

Personally, too, some people push through envy's sow's ear and come up with at least an imitation silk person. They conjure mental magic that transforms envy into aspiration: "If she can do it, write it, sell it, win it, dammit, I can, too!"

The flush of exertion required to meet your newer, higher goal will wipe away that ugly shade of green. —Judith Sills, Ph.D.