The Impact of Idiosyncratic Deals on Coworkers’ Interactive Behavior: The Moderating Role of Developmental Human Resource Management Practices

Abstract

Organizations have come to recognize the importance of their human capital, particularly their top-performing employees, in sustaining their businesses in today’s competitive 21st-century landscape. To reward these few talented employees, organizations offer them preferential treatment in the form of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals). I-deals can effectively improve the performance of recipients, but this is not enough to demonstrate their management effectiveness. We should also measure their functional impact from the perspective of bystanders. This study seeks to explore the functional and dysfunctional impacts of i-deals on bystanders. We collected two-wave leader–employee matching data from sales teams, obtaining a sample of 108 leaders and 546 employees. The results indicate that coworkers’ perceptions of other employees’ i-deals (CPOEID) can provoke either malicious envy, which can lead to negative workplace gossip, or benign envy, which encourages feedback seeking. Developmental HRM practices not only lessen the positive effect of CPOEID on malicious and benign envy but also reduce the indirect effect of CPOEID on negative workplace gossip and feedback-seeking through malicious or benign envy. Our study, which applies social comparison theory, examines the double-edged effects of differentiated HRM practices on coworker interactive behavior. Additionally, our findings demonstrate the complementarity between differentiated and standardized HRM practices.