Envy As Pain: Rethinking the Nature of Envy and Its Implications for Employees and Organizations

By Kenneth Tai, Jayanth Narayanan, Daniel J. McAllister. 2012

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although envy has been characterized by resentment, hostility, and ill will, researchers have begun to investigate envy's benign manifestations. We contend that the substance of envy has been confounded with its consequences. We conceptualize envy as pain at another's good fortune. This reconceptualization allows envy to result in both positive and negative consequences. We then examine how envy affects interpersonal behaviors and job performance, contingent on core self-evaluation, referent cognitions, and perceived organizational support.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24c43ff20119b8363cdc16329b898f126c0d07c8

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Envy: An Adversarial Review and Comparison of Two Competing Views (2019, background): “Another reason for the pain is the perceived violation of the ought force—how things should be (Heider, 1958; Tai et al., 2012).”
Research Note - Why Following Friends Can Hurt You: An Exploratory Investigation of the Effects of Envy on Social Networking Sites among College-Age Users (2015, background): “Referred to as a painful emotion promoted by the superiority of privileged others who possess something that one covets (Smith and Kim 2007), envy is an inalienable part of social interactions (Tai et al. 2012).”
Predictors of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Ethical Leadership and Workplace Jealousy (2014, background): “The negative affect contained in jealousy can reduce people’s intention to help others, including their organizations, because it can arouse a threat-oriented tendency (Tai et al. 2012), which often makes people self-protective and selfinsulated, and reluctant to be involved in prosocial activities ”
Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction? (2013, background): “[24] argue that whether malicious or benign – envy is an experience characterized by pain.”
Envy and Its Consequences: Why It Is Useful to Distinguish between Benign and Malicious Envy (2016, background): “Both Tai et al. (2012) and Cohen-Charash and Larson ( forthcoming) think that the action tendencies of envy should not be seen as part of the emotional experience, but argue that the actions that follow from envy depend on the situation.”