Comparing your treatment with colleagues': what should you discuss with your manager?

Employees rarely assess how their manager treats them without looking at how others are treated. The useful question is not whether to stop making comparisons, but under what conditions a difference in treatment warrants a discussion about the rules being applied.

What the literature establishes

Leon Festinger (1954, Human Relations) proposes that people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves with others, particularly when objective reference points are unavailable. This classic theoretical paper does not directly address benefits granted by a manager. It nevertheless provides a framework for understanding why, when criteria are unclear, a colleague's treatment can become a particularly salient benchmark.

When comparison becomes a question of fairness

Jerald Greenberg (1990, Journal of Applied Psychology) studied reactions to temporary pay cuts in industrial plants, examining theft and the explanations accompanying those cuts. The findings link the context of underpayment and the way it is explained to the reactions observed. They show that reactions to treatment perceived as unfavourable cannot be understood solely through its material content, without establishing that every comparison between colleagues produces the same effects.

The hasty conclusion

One might conclude that an effective relationship requires a manager to grant everyone exactly the same opportunities. That would confuse equal treatment with fairness: different responsibilities, service requirements or accommodation needs can justify different arrangements. The purpose of the discussion is therefore less to obtain what a colleague obtained than to check whether the criteria are relevant, explainable and consistently applied. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the evidence and observation cannot settle

A general theory of social comparison and a field study of pay cuts do not provide direct evidence about working-time arrangements or access to training. Employees do not necessarily know the constraints of a colleague's role, and some individual circumstances must remain confidential. Conversely, confidentiality alone does not justify every difference: a manager can explain the general criteria without disclosing someone else's personal circumstances.

A practical check in Sion

Within SHR's programme « Construire une relation efficace avec son manager », an exercise applicable in Sion is to select one category of comparable requests, such as access to training, within a hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or Alpine tourism team. For one month, the manager records the decision on each request, the work-related criterion cited and whether that criterion was communicated to the applicant, without recording confidential personal reasons. The measure is the proportion of decisions accompanied by an explicit, communicated work-related criterion, supplemented by a review of divergent decisions to which the same criterion appears to apply. This record checks the traceability of criteria, not the fairness of each decision; it provides a basis for discussing facts rather than a colleague's presumed advantages. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager in Sion

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