Malicious Envy and Benign Envy in Organization: The Relationships with Perceived Fairness, Self-Esteem, and Counterproductive Work Behavior

To improve our understanding of employees' malicious and benign envy, this study analyzes the perceived unfairness and self-esteem as precedence factors and the relationships with counterproductive work behavior as outcome variables. A total of 493 participants from 20's to 50's completed a survey for the study. The results indicate people feel malicious envy and counterproductive work behavior is increased when they perceived unfairness of envied person or their self-esteem was threatened. People feel benign envy when they perceived fairness of envied person or they experienced high on self-esteem by that person, however, it do not lead to counterproductive work behavior. Furthermore, the results show malicious envy is ambivalent emotion while benign envy is positive. Finally, theoretical and practical implications and limitations of this study were discussed.