A daily investigation of the influence of different types of being envied on the envied employees
Abstract
Purpose
Although the targets of envy have received increasing attention in management research, how envied employees respond to envy remains ambiguous and merits further investigation. Drawing upon regulatory focus theory, this paper aims to reconcile these inconsistent findings by developing and testing a model that elucidates how different types of being envied (i.e. benignly or maliciously) can elicit either favorable or unfavorable motivational and behavioral reactions.
Design/methodology/approach
An experience sampling study was conducted on 131 employees across 10 consecutive workdays in China. Focusing on within-person effects, multilevel mediation models using multilevel structural equation modeling were applied.
Findings
Results indicated that on days when employees are benignly envied, they engage in more organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) due to increased daily promotion focus. On the contrary, on days when employees are maliciously envied, they participate in more counterproductive work behavior (CWB) due to decreased daily promotion focus.
Practical implications
Organizations and managers should take a more holistic view of workplace envy when considering that envied employees may use OCB to deal with benign envy. Conversely, considering that CWB may emerge from employees who are maliciously envied, it is crucial for managers to be vigilant in discouraging and addressing malicious envy in the workplace.
Originality/value
This paper takes an initial foray into incorporating the concepts of benign envy and malicious envy into the literature on being envied and provides a novel perspective to explain why being envied can lead to both functional and dysfunctional responses.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Lifang Gao for her suggestions on the manuscript and her dedication to data verification in the first round of revisions.
Author contribution: Feng Wang collected data and wrote the draft. Fu Yang and Yingwei Ren designed the theoretical framework of the study and revised the manuscript. Rong Fu revised the manuscript and provided valuable suggestions for the draft.
Conflict of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.
Compliance with ethical standards: Ethical Standards All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Citation
Wang, F., Fu, R., Yang, F. and Yingwei, R. (2024), "A daily investigation of the influence of different types of being envied on the envied employees", Nankai Business Review International, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/NBRI-09-2023-0080
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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