2. In the corporate world at least, leaders are usually very encouraging of generosity or high-performance; it benefits their organization, after all. It's punished by peers because leaders encourage it. The peers are all in competition for a scarce resource - the leader's favor - and so when the leader bestows that on one individual for a particular accomplishment or act, that one individual ends up being resented by all their peers.
Think back to elementary school where the teacher's pet would get hammered down relentlessly by her schoolmates until she stopped speaking up in class. It's the same dynamic: overperformance leads to the lion's share of the teacher's attention, which makes your peers feel shortchanged, which results in social consequences for the overperformer.
This is also behind the conventional wisdom that "You can accomplish a lot in a big company if you don't care who gets the credit." If you overperform but then make everybody else look good, they won't resent you for it, and instead will help you out next time. That results in continued overperformance, as long as you can continue to stomach putting lots of effort in and lots of other folks getting the credit.
Think back to elementary school where the teacher's pet would get hammered down relentlessly by her schoolmates until she stopped speaking up in class. It's the same dynamic: overperformance leads to the lion's share of the teacher's attention, which makes your peers feel shortchanged, which results in social consequences for the overperformer.
This is also behind the conventional wisdom that "You can accomplish a lot in a big company if you don't care who gets the credit." If you overperform but then make everybody else look good, they won't resent you for it, and instead will help you out next time. That results in continued overperformance, as long as you can continue to stomach putting lots of effort in and lots of other folks getting the credit.