A recent study has found that people who are highly generous and cooperative might sometimes attract hatred at their workplace since it tends to be a competitive environment. “Most of the time we like the cooperators, the good guys. We like it when the bad guys get their comeuppance, and when non-cooperators are punished,” said Pat Barclay, a psychology professor at University of Guelph in Canada.
“But some of the time, cooperators are the ones that get punished. People will hate on the really good guys. This pattern has been found in every culture in which it has been looked at,” said Barclay. He said that a lot of people might tend to perceive 'do-gooders’ as someone who could prove to be a potential threat to them in terms of their jobs. “In a lot of these societies, they defend their equal status by bringing down somebody who could potentially lord things over everybody else,” he said.
“You can imagine within an organisation today the attitude, ‘Hey, you’re working too hard and making the rest of us look bad.’ In some organizations people are known for policing how hard others work, to make sure no one is raising the bar from what is expected,” he added. “It is a way of bringing those people back down, and stopping them from looking better than oneself in their attempts to protect the environment or address social inequality,” Barclay said.
