Is Envy Always Bad? An Examination of Benign and Malicious Envy in the Workplace.

The current study investigated workplace envy by exploring if perceived self-efficacy of negative and positive emotions could predict malicious or benign envy. This study also examined how malicious and benign envy relate to two important organizational outcomes: job engagement and turnover intentions. Malicious envy is typically associated with negative emotions toward the target of comparison as well as negative behavioral outcomes, whereas benign envy is typically associated with positive emotions toward the target of comparison as well as positive behavioral outcomes.