13919: Consequences of Unfavorable Eating Comparisons (session 25820)

Whenever individuals begin to organize, “food” often becomes an important consideration (e.g., ordering lunch for a team meeting). Although organizational research has sought to understand the impact of food in the workplace, existing work has generally adopted an individual perspective, resulting in the implicit assumption that healthy eating is good and unhealthy eating is bad. However, an individual perspective is limited, given that eating at work is rarely an isolated experience. As a consensus-shifting contribution, we seek to demonstrate how healthy eating can, in truth, have negative consequences. To do so, we theorize at the interpersonal level of analysis and demonstrate how unfavorable workplace eating comparisons (when employees perceive that their coworker’s diet is healthier than their own) trigger shame, thereby resulting in increased health complaints. Importantly, we demonstrate a crucial boundary condition of this effect, namely, the degree to which employees can control their diet. Our empirical package—which consists of three studies that span methodologies, samples, and cultures—provides general support for our hypotheses. In short, we find that eating healthy can have negative consequences for onlookers, thereby extending theory on workplace wellbeing.

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