Competition for resources, recognition, and favorable outcomes are all facts of life in professional settings. When one falls short in comparison to colleagues or subordinates, feelings of envy may arise. Fueled by inferiority, hostility and resentment, envy is both ubiquitous and painful. Will employees "level up" with their envied counterpart through self-improvement behaviors? Or will they "level down" through sabotage and undermine their peers and subordinates in the process?

Envy at Work and in Organizations aims to determine the direction workplace envy takes. Contributors are drawn from many countries and from an extraordinary range of disciplines to share their insight: experimental social psychologists offer insights from lab studies, psychoanalytical scholars emphasize unconscious processes, organizational psychologists describe groundbreaking research from disparate work settings, and cross-cultural psychologists reveal the variety of ways that envy can emerge as a function of cultures as wide-ranging as the Japanese school system to the fascinating structure of the Israeli kibbutzim. Work and insight from behavioral economists and organizational consultants is also included.

Envy at Work and in Organizations is a valuable, distinctive resource for both scholars and practitioners looking to grasp the nature of envy. Edited by Richard H. Smith, Ugo Merlone, and Michelle K. Duffy, this volume will help readers understand the factors that help individuals and organizations overcome envy and transform it into something positive to promote workplace well-being.

Introduction

Chapter 1: What is the Nature of Envy?
Yochi Cohen-Charash and Elliott Larson

Chapter 2: A Social-Contextual View of Envy in Organizations: From Both Enviers and Envied Perspectives
Lingtao Yu and Michelle Duffy

Chapter 3: The Two Faces of Envy: Studying Benign and Malicious Envy in the Workplace
Christopher M. Sterling, Niels van de Ven, and Richard H. Smith

Chapter 4: How Do People Respond to Threatened Social Status? Moderators of Benign versus Malicious Envy
Jan Crusius and Jens Lange

Chapter 5: Envy as an Evolving Episode
Charles E. Hoogland, Stephen Thielke, and Richard H. Smith

Chapter 6: Competent but Cold: The Stereotype Content Model and Envy in Organizations
Elizabeth Baily Wolf and Peter Glick

Chapter 7: A Social Network Perspective on Envy in Organizations
Theresa Floyd and Christopher Sterling

Chapter 8: Envy, Schadenfreude and Evaluation: Understanding the Strange Growing of Individual Performance Appraisal
Bénédicte Vidaillet

Chapter 9: Envy and Its Dynamics in Groups and Organizations
H. Shmuel Erlich

Chapter 10: The Othello Conundrum: The Inner Contagion of Leadership
Mark Stein

Chapter 11: Culture and the Elicitation, Experience, and Expression of Envy
Yi Wen Tan, Kenneth Tai, and Cynthia S. Wang

Chapter 12: Envy and School Bullying in the Japanese Cultural Context
Hidefumi Hitokoto and Masato Sawada

Chapter 13: 'Storms of Slander' - Relational Dimensions of 'Envy' in Java, Indonesia
Thomas Stodulka

Chapter 14: The Behavioural Economics of Envy: What Can We Learn From It?
Jérémy Celse

Chapter 15: Envy and Interpersonal Corruption: Social Comparison Processes and Unethical Behavior in Organizations
Jooa Julia Lee and Francesca Gino

Chapter 16: Envy and Injustice: Integration and Ruminations
Paresh Mishra, Stephen Whiting, and Robert Folger

Chapter 17: Disposal Diapers, Envy and the Kibbutz: What Happens to an Emotion Based on Difference in a Society Based on Equality?
Josh Gressel

Chapter 18: Envy and Inequality in Romantic Relationships
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev

Chapter 19: The Benefits and Threats from Being Envied in Organizations
W. Gerrod Parrott

Chapter 20: Containing Workplace Envy: A Provisional Map of the Ways to Prevent or Channel Envy, and Reduce its Damage
Vittorio Annoni, Susanna Bertini, Mario Perini, Andrea Pistone, Serena Zucchi