Search results

Expressions of pride may elicit others’ envy. In the consumer context, prior research has repeatedly demonstrated that such envy significantly affects consumers’ attitudinal and behavioural responses towards the object of envy. This paper aims to investigate whether this pride-envy relationship is bi-directional. Does being envied by others affect consumers’ self-directed feelings of pride, as well as their subsequent attitude towards a product (i.e. the object of envy)?

Three experiments examined how emotional reactions of envy from others may influence consumers’ subsequent affective and attitudinal responses towards their own product or purchase. The first experimental study (n = 129) examined whether exposure to benign envy from others evokes higher levels of authentic pride and positively influences product attitude. The second experiment (n = 159) investigated whether exposure to malicious envy from others evokes high levels of hubristic pride, and therefore, negatively influences product attitude. The third study (n = 80) was a quasi-field experiment seeking to provide further empirical support for the relationship between benign (vs malicious) envy and authentic (vs hubristic) pride and their effects on attitude.

The first experiment showed that when participants observed expressions of benign envy towards them, they expressed authentic pride, which ultimately increased positive attitudes towards the product. The second experiment showed that when participants observed expressions of malicious envy towards them, they expressed hubristic pride, which, in turn, reduced positive attitudes towards the product. The effect of malicious envy was further moderated by susceptibility to social influence, whereby the indirect effect of malicious envy on product attitudes was only significant among participants with high susceptibility. The third experiment demonstrated the relationship between benign (vs malicious) envy and authentic (vs hubristic) pride and the effects on attitude in a quasi-field study.

The present paper aims to fill a research gap by showing how being the recipient of others’ malicious or benign envy affects consumers’ self-directed feelings of pride, as well as their attitude towards a product that is the object of envy.

The current research is among the first to show that the emotional expressions of other consumers can influence existing consumers’ affective responses and attitudes towards a product. These findings highlight the importance of building a positive culture and community around brands and products, whereby other consumers’ consumption of the brand or product is perceived positively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical evidence demonstrating that others’ expression of benign (malicious) envy may lead to the self-feeling of authentic (hubristic) pride, which has a downstream effect on attitude towards the product.

This study aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19 concerns on employees’ well-being, considering workplace stress, aggression, and emotional outcomes, such as emotional engagement, emotional exhaustion, and negative emotional reactions. This study also considers the moderating role of technostress between workplace stress and aggression, which has been overlooked in previous studies.

Data were collected from frontline hotel employees in Turkey. Online data were collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk services. A total of 250 questionnaires were distributed. Nevertheless, only 204 questionnaires with valid responses were usable for analysis through partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The analytical findings showed that COVID-19 concerns (financial, social gaze, and technological) cause workplace stress, resulting in aggression. Aggression subsequently affects the employees’ emotional outcomes, impacting their emotional well-being. Furthermore, the results showed that technostress insignificantly moderates workplace stress and aggression.

This study provides valuable practical implications to the hotels’ top management, practitioners, and policymakers to provide preventive measures to employees, such as wearing masks and maintaining distance. Hotel practitioners should limit employees’ direct contact with customers and reduce factors that result in overall financial losses and create financial stress for employees.

The current study examined the relationships between the study’s variables in Turkey’s hotel industry context by employing the conservation of resources (COR) theory. The study investigated stress and aggression phenomena, their impact on employees’ emotional responses, and ultimately their influence on the employees’ well-being.