Being trusted by your manager sounds like good news, and often it is. Yet many people have noticed that being seen as the favourite can change how colleagues treat them. A 2025 research paper looked at this directly. It suggests that being trusted by a leader can, in some teams, come with a social cost. It does not show that this happens everywhere.
The paper was published in September 2025 in Frontiers in Psychology by researchers based in China and Thailand. It focused on multicultural team settings and on perceived trust from leaders, which the authors treat as a core part of inclusive leadership. Inclusive leadership means leading in a way that makes team members feel valued and part of the group.
The researchers drew on social comparison theory, the idea that people judge themselves by comparing themselves with others, and that these comparisons can produce envy. They used two studies. One was a contextual experiment, where people respond to a described situation. The other was a multi-source field survey, in which information is collected from more than one kind of respondent in real workplaces.
The authors tested whether employees who felt trusted by their leaders became the targets of coworker envy, and whether that envy in turn led to exclusion behaviours. They also examined whether a competitive climate in the team made the pattern stronger. The authors say they ran robustness checks that took account of stable differences between individuals.
The authors report that perceived trust from a leader could make an employee a target of envy among coworkers, and that this envy was linked to workplace exclusion behaviours. In other words, the trusted person could end up more isolated than included.
The pattern was stronger when employees perceived their team to be competitive. The authors describe this as a boundary condition: the effect depends on the climate of the team, and it is not described as automatic. In a less competitive team, the link between being trusted and being excluded was weaker.
The authors say their robustness checks, which allowed for stable individual differences, produced the same pattern of results.
The abstract does not report the sample sizes, effect sizes or the countries involved, so this article cannot give those. It is also worth saying that the paper looked at the downside of leader trust. It is not a finding that trust from managers is harmful overall, and the authors note that leader trust is usually linked with positive outcomes.
This is one paper, based on an abstract that gives limited detail. We cannot say how large the effects were or how many people were involved. Experiments built on described scenarios cannot fully capture what happens in real teams, and surveys capture views at one time. Both can show an association between feeling trusted, envy and exclusion, but cannot by themselves show that one causes the other in your workplace.
Exclusion is not inevitable. The paper itself points to team climate as an influence, which suggests that how a team handles recognition and competition matters. A trusted employee in a collaborative team may experience none of this.
The paper also does not suggest that people should avoid earning or accepting trust, or that managers should withhold it. Nor does it suggest that colleagues who feel left out are acting unreasonably. Envy is a common human reaction, and it can be worth noticing when it arises in oneself.
The work was done in multicultural team settings that the abstract does not locate. Workplace rules and cultures differ, and this is not Australian workplace or legal advice. If you experience exclusion or unfair treatment at work, your employer’s policies, a union, or an advisory service can explain what applies to you.
For teams, the practical idea is that recognition is more likely to land well when the reasons are clear, when opportunities to be trusted are open to more than a few people, and when the climate rewards shared success over rivalry. Whether those steps would work in a given team is not something this paper tested.
If workplace exclusion is affecting your mood or sleep, consider speaking with your doctor or another qualified health professional. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, and 000 is for emergencies.
Source: Trusted but isolated: how perceived trust from leaders leads to workplace exclusion through being the target of envy DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1680581
Conceptual illustration of recognition and possible social distance within a team. AI-generated editorial illustration. This article summarises published research in our own words and is general information, not personal health advice.
Please Login or Sign up to be able to comment