Keeping close tabs on your peers can have harmful effects on your career, writes Jim Bright.
A song by British singer Morrissey maintains that we hate it when our friends become successful.
There may just be a grain of truth in that. Social comparison is a powerful force in life and, left unchecked, it can lead to career misery.
Many commentators believe social comparison is particularly potent in our early careers and becomes progressively less important as times goes by.
This issue has been addressed in a recently published study by Monica Higgins and her colleagues in the Journal Of Vocational Behavior.
The researchers from Harvard wanted to see whether the relationships formed by students at a leading American MBA program had a lasting impact on how confident and successful they felt after graduation.
They followed 136 students over 10 years.
The students were periodically quizzed about the amount of career support they were receiving.
They were asked: "Please consider the people you believe ... take an active interest in, and concerted action to advance, your career. They may be people with whom you work or have worked, friends or family members ... and they may assist you with personal as well as professional development."
The researchers found the more career help the students received, the greater their perception of their early success.
However, the researchers also found the students' perception of their career success declined in proportion to the amount of support they received from friends who attended their MBA graduate school.
The more assistance they had from graduate school friends, the less they perceived themselves as having done well.
Keeping up with your friends from college or your early career sounds appealing, for networking reasons if nothing else.
On the face of it, however, maintaining these ties appears detrimental to an individual's sense of achievement.
One possibility for this is that the students who kept up close relationships with their peers were prone to social comparison.
What's more, if you belong to a high-achieving peer group, as one might expect in an elite business school, one or more of your friends is likely to become spectacularly successful.
I have seen this process with clients who began their careers surrounded by gifted friends.
Initially the problems can be caused by missing out on a graduate role, internship or articled clerkship with a top-end employer.
However, over time this can be exacerbated as precocious friends' career paths take increasingly upward trajectories.
Under such circumstances, people with solid or even enviable careers can see themselves as failures.
Think about Trevor Chappell compared with Ian and Greg, Danni Minogue with Kylie, Mimi Macpherson with Elle.
The reality is all of these are highly talented and successful individuals who may be unfairly judged by others simply because they happened to be brought up in the company of friends or family members who became successful and famous.
Social comparison is an insidious psychological process not a million miles away from jealousy.
We zero in on those who, through talent, hard work or, even worse, dumb luck, appear to be doing better than us.
What a difference it would make if instead we compared ourselves with those less fortunate than ourselves who had enjoyed less career success.
Perhaps then we'd feel luckier and more fulfilled.
