A Social Context Model of Envy and Social Undermining

By M. Duffy, Kristin L. Scott, Jason D. Shaw, Bennett J. Tepper, Karl Aquino. 2012

512 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We integrate moral disengagement, social identification, and social norms theories to develop, test, and replicate a model that explains how and when envy is associated with social undermining. In Study 1, a two-wave study of hospital employees, results support the prediction that the mediated effect of envy on social undermining behavior through moral disengagement is stronger when employees have low social identification with coworkers. Study 2, a four-wave, multilevel study of student teams, shows that the indirect effect of envy on social undermining through moral disengagement is stronger in teams with low team identification and high team undermining norms. Employees have numerous opportunities to observe and contemplate how the benefits and advantages they enjoy at work compare with those of their colleagues. Whether these opportunities present themselves formally (e.g., through performance appraisals) or informally (e.g., through friendship networks), common experience and empirical research suggest that favorable social comparison information gives people pleasure, but unfavorable information can focus their attention on what they lack relative to their colleagues (Hogg, 2000). In the latter case, feelings of envy—the emotion that surfaces when one lacks and desires others’ superior qualities, achievements, or possessions (Parrott & Smith, 1993)—may arise. Envy of others at work (referred to here as “envy”) may have positive consequences if, for example, it motivates a person to increase performance or attempt self-improvement (Duffy, Shaw, & Schaubroeck, 2008; Schaubroeck & Lam, 2004). But envy also has a dark side. Envy poses threatens the core of an individual’s professional identity

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems and Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ee52cdc5a48f5a09c4ca7e98a354fa76aafedad

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Citations in the corpus

The Evil Queen's Dilemma: Linking Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry to Benign and Malicious Envy (2016, background): “Maliciously envious behaviour is characterized by hostility (Duffy et al., 2012; Lange & Crusius, 2015b) with the ultimate goal to dominate others (Lange & Crusius, 2015b).”
Unraveling respect in organization studies (2014, background): “This respect for persons – the idea that treating a person as something valuable in itself – has strong roots in moral theory, with some theorists claiming it as the key principle of practical reasoning (Downie and Telfer, 1969; Gauthier, 1963).”
Understanding Employee Responses to Stressful Information Security Requirements: A Coping Perspective (2014, methodology): “consistent with MD as an overall cognitive orientation consisting of three broad categories [6], and following recent empirical work [22], we conceptualized MD as a second-order construct consisting of its three broad categories as first-order subconstructs.”
Leader Narcissism Predicts Malicious Envy and Supervisor-Targeted Counterproductive Work Behavior: Evidence from Field and Experimental Research (2018, unknown): “Recent literature notes that envy may lead to different consequences if invidious individuals attempt to improve their situation and increase performance (Duffy et al. 2012).”
Envy: An Adversarial Review and Comparison of Two Competing Views (2019, background): “For example, envy predicts more undermining behavior when such behavior is normative (Duffy et al., 2012), and less prosocial behavior when such behavior is counternormative (e.”
Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it (2013, background): “When social comparisons lead to envy, people are motivated to take actions to sabotage others or aggress against them (Vecchio, 2000), to undermine them socially (Duffy et al., 2012), or to engage in other harmful behaviors (Pruitt & Kimmel, 1977; Smith & Walker, 2000).”