College of Business

Despite the fact that envy has been widely viewed as the most pernicious and organizational dysfunctional workplace emotion, research has ignored envy’s longer-term, chronic consequences. This oversight can largely be attributed to over reliance on the relatively static affective events framework that does not account for how envy-eliciting events can threaten an individual’s social standing or trigger emotional schema from previous events. Hence, we propose an extension of this framework in order to address these shortcomings and in order to more fully account for the cumulative effects of prior envy-eliciting events. In particular, by integrating insights from social comparison and emotional schema theories into the current framework, we offer a deeper, more fine-grained explanation for the accumulation of envious feelings and their longer-term, chronic consequences. We believe that these additional insights will offer a perspective, both for researchers and practitioners alike, into how envy-eliciting events can result in more malicious and chronic, dysfunctional outcomes over time. Future research and managerial implications are discussed.