Your Connections Made Me Undermine You: Provocative Effect of Coworker Friendship Contact Status

Abstract

Drawing on victim precipitation theory, we argue that employees are more likely to undermine coworkers who have high friendship contact status–friendship connections with people at high levels within an organizational hierarchy–and are thus targets of unfavorable upward social comparison. As a function of rational-choice considerations that are central to victim precipitation, we further argue that employees are more likely to target coworkers with high friendship contact status for undermining when coworkers have more unfavorable core self-evaluations (CSEs), and that this interactive effect is explained in terms of how unfavorable CSEs make coworkers more easy and deserving targets for employee undermining behavior. Empirical findings of a field study of perpetrator-reported undermining behavior provide support for our predictions.