We analyze a fundamental, but so far unaddressed, aspect of leadership and social comparison: how leadership can influence the employee social comparison processes inherent to performance contexts such that they are more conducive to subsequent performance. Based on the observation that people tend to compare in counterproductive ways, which detracts from future performance, we advance and test theory on how leaders can improve employee performance by influencing the social comparison processes between them. Results from a randomized field experiment in a contact center with objective performance data from 290 employees show that leadership focused on influencing assimilative social comparison improved performance in the five months after the intervention. As hypothesized, this effect was mediated by employee assimilative social comparison and was only obtained when leaders created a collaborative context in which to influence the assimilative social comparison. Our theory and findings have important implications for both leadership and social comparison research.

我们分析了领导力和社会比较的一个基本但迄今为止尚未解决的方面：领导力如何影响绩效环境固有的员工社会比较过程，使其更有利于后续绩效。基于人们倾向于以适得其反的方式进行比较（这有损未来绩效）的观察，我们提出并测试了领导者如何通过影响员工之间的社会比较过程来提高员工绩效的理论。在联络中心进行的一项随机现场实验，使用了 290 名员工的客观绩效数据，结果表明，专注于影响同化社会比较的领导力在干预后的五个月内提高了绩效。正如假设的那样，这种效应是通过员工同化社会比较来调节的，并且只有当领导者创造一个影响同化社会比较的协作环境时才会出现。我们的理论和研究结果对领导力和社会比较研究都有重要影响。