When the Moon is Jealous of the Stars: Implications of Informal Leadership for Supervisor Downward Jealousy and Their Treatment of Other Subordinates

Informal leadership has received considerable attention over the last decade, yet the literature remains unclear about the interpersonal dynamics in teams where both informal and formal leadership coexist. Integrating the social functional view of emotions with recent theoretical advancements on workplace jealousy, we propose a theoretical model that explains how supervisors react emotionally and behaviorally to informal leadership. Specifically, we theorize that, when an informal leader is highly competent, their informal leadership will elicit supervisor downward jealousy stemming from the supervisor’s fear of losing valued relationships with the other subordinates; and this jealousy, in turn, will prompt more supervisor support and less abusive supervision toward the other subordinates who are also highly competent. We adopted a multiwave, multisource field study and an experiment using the critical incident technique to test our model and hypotheses. Results across these studies consistently supported our predictions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications as well as future research directions of our work.