Bitter or better: how social comparison emotions drive coworker altruism and ostracism in response to job crafting

Prior research on the interpersonal consequences of job crafting largely relies on social learning and cognitive appraisal approaches, emphasizing its impact on coworkers’ well-being and engagement. In contrast, the present study adopts a social comparison-based emotional perspective to examine coworkers’ direct responses to job crafters, emphasizing that coworkers can both admire and resent such behaviors. Specifically, we investigate how approach and avoidance crafting influence coworker emotions (admiration and malicious envy) and how these emotions, in turn, shape coworkers’ altruistic and ostracizing behaviors toward the crafter. Based on a two-wave field study with a round-robin design, we found that approach crafting is positively related to coworker altruism through increased admiration, whereas avoidance crafting is positively associated with coworker ostracism through heightened malicious envy. This study contributes to the job crafting literature by presenting the emotional mechanisms that explain coworkers’ paradoxical reactions toward proactive job redesign.