Physical attractiveness acts as a significant “premium” for individuals across multiple domains. However, prior research has largely overlooked the conditions under which physical attractiveness may yield detrimental outcomes in interpersonal interactions. Grounded in the implicit personality and social comparison theories, we posit that physical attractiveness increases coworkers’ proactive helping through an enhanced desire for social interactions, while simultaneously enhancing coworkers’ social undermining through enhanced envy. Importantly, we theorize that coworkers’ perceived warmth and competence towards focal employees jointly influence the proposed positive and negative interpersonal effects of physical attractiveness. We conducted two studies to test our model. Study 1 employed a round-robin design to collect 452 dyadic responses from 192 team members, while Study 2 collected 360 dyadic responses across three time points. The results support our hypotheses, highlighting that the interpersonal benefits and detriments of physical attractiveness are contingent on coworkers’ perceived warmth and competence. These findings offer a nuanced understanding of the dual impacts of physical attractiveness and extending its effects to the organizational contexts characterized by repeated interactions.
