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In this chapter, we explore the implications of benign and malicious envy in the workplace and suggest methods by which leaders can manage the situational context to minimize negative responses to envy and promote positive responses. We argue that three aspects of the organizational context are especially influential in the development of envy: perceptions of fairness, employees’ feelings of control over their situation, and organizational culture. All three impact whether felt envy will be benign or malicious. In addition, the right organizational culture can prevent any feelings of malicious envy from leading to undesirable behaviors. We suggest that by fostering justice, promoting employee feelings of control, and exemplifying an ethical organizational culture leaders can manage the manifestation of envy and resulting behaviors in a positive direction.

This study investigates the dynamics of supervisor-subordinate relationship, commonly referred in leadership literature as leader-member exchange (LMX), in the context of envy, and its associated consequences. Building on the affective events theory, we hypothesize that employees who do not share a good relationship with their supervisors (low-quality LMX) will be envious of the peers that maintain great relationship (high-quality LMX) with the supervisor. As a result, they will restrict knowledge sharing, and engage in uncivil behaviors. Hierarchical regression was used to test hypotheses on data derived from a sample of 204 software engineers working across various information technology firms in India. The study found support for all of the proposed hypotheses and extends research in the field by demonstrating negative consequences of envy in the workplace.

In this final chapter, we summarize the core challenges to leadership in complex organizational systems as well as the lessons that we believe leaders can learn from the contributions presented in this book. Building on Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009), we argue that high levels of complexity characterize the contexts described, and that they are unusual because they deviate from the setting of standard business organizations. Since these contexts are not often discussed in the general leadership literature, there seems to be a largely unused potential in terms of leadership learning. Specifically, in order to better contextualize leadership, scholars and practitioners need to take organizational complexity into account. With reference to the underlying structure of the book, core challenges to leadership are proposed, clustering around four main foci: sports and competition, high risk, creativity and innovation, care and community. Subsequently, we derive six lessons for leadership: adaptability, perseverance, handling paradox, leading with values, inventing the future, and sharing responsibility. We thereby hope to stimulate fruitful discussions that put leadership into context and capitalize on complexity theory as an innovative approach to leadership research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how small-town residents’ perceptions of a minor league sport team’s socially responsible initiatives (SRI) influence several psychological responses to SRI, including feelings of gratitude, subjective well-being, place attachment and community pride.

A cross-sectional, survey-based research design was employed to empirically assess the effects of SRI on positive psychological responses in the context of a minor league sport team located in a rural community. The data set used in this study included a convenience sample of 307 small-town residents.

Residents of the rural community did perceive and feel grateful for their minor league sport team’s SRI. Grateful residents experienced higher levels of subjective well-being (happiness, pleasure and satisfaction) as well as enhanced community pride and attachment due to the local sport team’s altruistic and prosocial behaviors.

This study’s findings shed light on a critical function and benefit of a minor league sport team in rural communities. Emotionally valued prosocial efforts enhance the well-being of residents in rural communities. Thus, a reasonable course of action for local community leaders and public-sector organizations is to invest in and create partnership opportunities with their local minor league sport teams. Such efforts can turn sport teams into leverageable assets that can help promote healthy and sustainable communities for current residents as well as future generations.

A contribution of this study is the integration of the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions to better understand how gratitude mediates the relationship between SRI and beneficial community-focused outcomes such as pride, attachment and well-being.

This study aims to investigate the fit of a promotion (prevention) focus with malicious (benign) envy and how this fit influences positive and negative behaviours, depending on the context.

Four empirical studies (two laboratory and two online experiments) were used to test key hypotheses. Study 1 manipulated regulatory focus and envy in a job application setting with university students. Study 2 engaged similar manipulations in a social media setting. Studies 3 and 4 extended the regulatory focus and envy manipulations to the general population in pay-what-you-want (PWYW) and pay-it-forward (PIF) restaurant contexts.

The findings showed that a promotion (prevention) focus fits with the emotion of malicious (benign) envy. In the social media context, promotion and prevention foci demonstrated negative behaviour, including unfollowing the envied person, when combined with malicious and benign envy. In the PWYW and PIF contexts, combining envy with a specific type of regulatory focus encouraged both positive and negative behaviours through influencing payments.

Future research could validate and extend this study’s findings with different product/service categories, cross-cultural samples and research methods such as field experiments.

The four studies’ findings will assist managers in formulating marketing strategies to enhance their positioning of target products/services, possibly leading to higher prices for PWYW and PIF businesses.

The conceptual model is novel as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has proposed and tested the fit between envy type and regulatory foci.

This study aims to investigate how luxury brand attachment (LBA) and perceived envy may influence schadenfreude. In addition, the moderating influence of consumers’ need for uniqueness (CNFU) and private vs public consumption is examined.

Data were collected from a consumer panel in Australia. A total of 365 valid and useable responses were analysed through structural equation modelling in AMOS 26.

The results show that LBA has a significant impact on perceived envy. Consumers’ perceived envy also results in schadenfreude. However, LBA did not have any significant impact on schadenfreude. The moderating influence of CNFU is partially supported. This research further confirms that consumers’ public consumption has more relevance to visible social comparison and potential feelings of malicious envy towards others.

The research model may work as a strategic tool to identify, which group of consumers (e.g. high vs low attachment) displays stronger envy and schadenfreude. Brand managers can also explore the personality traits and psychological dynamics that influence the consumers to express emotional bonds and malicious joy within the context of consumer-brand relationships.

This is one of the first few studies that have examined the relationships amongst consumers’ brand attachment, perceived envy, schadenfreude and need for uniqueness within a luxury branding context.

Based on the situational approach for envy, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of two-dimensional workplace envy (being envied and envying others) on the task and contextual performance of employees working in either private or public sector organizations.

This study was conducted on survey data collected from 988 private sector employees and 530 employees from the public sector employed in Istanbul. Following a quantitative empirical design, structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The study results revealed that envying-others dimension has a significant negative effect on both task performance and contextual performance. In addition, the findings indicate more envious feelings of private sector employees than public sector employees. For public sector employees, male participants were found to envy others more than females.

In addition to the contributions, this study has its limitations. First, although the study was carried out with a comprehensive sample, it is limited to the views of 1,518 employees in Istanbul and is a cross-sectional study. Also, employee performance is evaluated through self-reporting, which forms another limitation; it could have been more reliable for the supervisors to assess their subordinates' performance.

Apart from scholars, our findings have implications for practitioners. Feelings such as envy that comes with a sense of competition can create an environment that stimulates people, motivates them to work, can make them productive and can also cause an ultimately destructive situation. This makes it critical to manage envy in the workplace. Though there may be facilitators behind it, one crucial factor that fuels envy in the workplace is the lack of fair human resources policies and systems. Still, human resources management is undeveloped in most public organizations. With effective human resources management, there may be some roadmaps for managers to dissolve conflicts arising from envy. First, it is imperative to have systems that will separate the employee from the others, which everyone will accept, strengthening the feelings of justice among employees. Envy often occurs following a social comparison. Management can implement an incentive system that supports employee collaboration and avoid nepotism. Especially in private organizations where the competition is more among employees, managers should give more attention to understand their subordinates' feelings. The managers' attention to expressing their feelings toward their subordinates could establish an equal distance within the workplace. In this sense, language selection is critical, and managers should be mindful of linguistic triggers. Managers should not avoid giving both positive and negative feedback to their employees. Unwarranted and unsystematic reward and/or punishment systems, made with the good intentions of increasing competition, can trigger envy. Finally, managers should implement an open-door policy and open communication that will encourage all team members to be transparent to each other.

The study was based on a rationale that envy has detrimental workplace outcomes that lead to low task and contextual performance. Although there exists a recent interest for examining the relation between workplace envy and employee performance, based on being envied and envying others dimensions, these studies are limited. This study focuses on these dimensions and performance relations, and it also provides a comparative outlook for public and private sector employees in Turkey in terms of workplace envy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse employees’ lying behaviour and its findings have important implication for the management and prevention strategies of lying in the workplace. Employee lying has caused both reputational and financial damage to employers, organisations and public authorities. This study adopts a psycho-cognitive perspective to examine the mechanism of lying reduction and the influence envy has on lying behaviour.

Incorporating social comparison phenomenon and cognate studies this study suggests that envy may restrain people from lying in the workplace. Specific hypotheses are developed and tested with 271 participants using dice game scenarios.

Research findings have found that people are likely to lie if lying brings them benefits. However, the findings also reveal that the envy aroused between two people may act as a psychological barrier to reduce the tendency to lie.

The research findings have provided an alternative perspective to the current prevailing view of envy as a negative emotion. Envy need not always be negative. Envy can provide an internal drive for people to work harder and enhance themselves but it can also act as a brake mechanism and self-regulator to reduce lying, and thereby has a potentially positive value.

The purpose of this paper is to assist service management academics and providers of positional services (i.e. services that provide status attainment benefits to consumers) to better understand how the envy reflex of outperformed consumers operates as an endemic emotional theme that, if properly managed, can be harnessed to improve consumer engagement outcomes.

The objectives of the research were addressed via two quantitative studies. In a preliminary descriptive study, the types of services consumers classify as “positional” were identified (n=351) and a measure of consumer perceived positional value was developed (n=179). In the main study, a 2 × 2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design was adopted using a sample of positional service consumers (n=265) with the data analysed via SEM and two-way MANCOVA.

The main study found a significant mediation effect of the envy reflex on the relationship between consumer perceived positional value and the overall likelihood of an engagement intention for outperformed positional service consumers. In addition, specific engagement intentions were predicted for outperformed consumers with a high envy reflex after considering how deserving they perceived a superior performer to be.

This research contributes to the burgeoning scholarly interest in the envy reflex as a consumption emotion by demonstrating its influence on consumer engagement outcomes. The research also demonstrates how tactics informed by appraisal theories of emotion can be used to manage endemic emotional themes in service environments to improve engagement outcomes.

Brand effect is an important source of innovation performance, but rarely any study in the past has paid attention to explore the way firm innovation activities transform into brand effect. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how firm innovation activities transform into brand effect.

A set of hypothesis has been developed to show the relationships among firm innovation activities, brand prototype, brand preference and brand recommendation. The online survey method was used for data collection. In total, 546 valid questionnaires were retrieved. The study used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling technique to test the hypothesis.

Results indicate that brand prototype leads the process of cognitive processing from innovation activities’ perception to brand preference and recommendation. The consumer perception of process innovation, marketing innovation, product innovation and the store environment have direct impact on brand prototype that further influences product sophistication, brand preference and brand recommendation. But, the most powerful influence is on brand preference. Moreover, product sophistication–attribute-specific brand knowledge has direct impact on brand preference and indirect impact on the brand recommendation. The whole process from brand prototype to brand preference and brand recommendation mainly reflects the strength of the brand effect formation.

This study provides useful managerial insights so that firms can learn the way to maximize brand effect through the management of innovation perception and cultivation of innovation soft capability to enhance innovation performance.

This study unfolds the transformation of firm innovation activities into brand effect that provides a new theoretical explanation and a holistic framework for the source of innovation performance.