How does witnessing coworker ostracism differentially elicit victim-directed help and enacted ostracism: The mediating roles of compassion and schadenfreude, moderated by dispositional envy

Abstract

This study examines the differential effects of observed ostracism on observers’ victim-directed helping behaviors and their own enactment of ostracism, as informed by their dispositional envy. In particular, we examined two distinctive paths that explain the observers’ congruent (compassion) and incongruent (schadenfreude) emotional responses toward victims. Utilizing a four-wave, multi-source survey dataset comprising 306 employees from various organizations in Pakistan, our findings reveal that observed ostracism elicits feelings of compassion in employees with a low dispositional envy, who then exhibit greater victim-directed helping behaviors. By contrast, employees with a high dispositional envy experience schadenfreude when observing ostracism, prompting them to engage in further victim-directed ostracism themselves. Our findings provide important insights into the catalytic role of dispositional envy in determining emotions that explains why the observation of a coworker’s social exclusion prompts a differential behavioral response.