The majority of research and practice has regarded leader gratitude expression as an effective strategy to influence employees, showing its universally benefits. We challenge this consensus by focusing on the perspective of third-party and revealing coworkers’ potential negative or positive reactions. Drawing upon appraisal theory of emotion and social comparison literature, our research identifies coworker trait psychological entitlement as an important boundary condition and proposes that coworkers with higher psychological entitlement will feel envy after observing leader gratitude expression to the focal employees, thus resulting in coworker social undermining. However, coworkers with lower psychological entitlement will feel admiration after observing it and thus promote affiliative citizenship behavior. We find support for all of our hypotheses in a pre-registered, two-wave and multi-source field study. Our research highlights the potential dark side of leader gratitude expression and contributes to the existing literature and practices.
