Envy
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 toxin we choke on when we want something that belongs to someone else. Its cousin jealousy is the poisonous sensation that someone might take from us what we already possess, notably the affections of an important person.
In the workplace, envy is often more than mild and, frankly, no compliment. It can be an invisible destructive force.
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.
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.
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. They might make the mistake of gloating and so make being envied worse than it has to be.
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!"
Psychology Today
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