When the team puts my envy into perspective: The moderating role of team envy of supervisors on how employee’s own envy energizes supervisor-targeted helping

Abstract: Drawing from social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954), we seek to explain when and how other team members’ feelings of envy toward the supervisor affect focal employees’ reactions to their own feelings of the envy toward the supervisor. We proposed that feelings of envy toward the supervisor will make them less receptive to and thus reduce the relational energy employees receive from said supervisor. Furthermore, we examine the moderating role of team envy to assess how the level of team members’ envy moderates the focal employees’ envy-related response. We tested our hypotheses across three studies: an online study, an experiment, and a multi‑source, time‑lagged field study. Our work breaks new theoretical ground by integrating team dynamics into envy research and offers practical insights that may help mitigate envy’s negative work-related consequences.

Keywords: Envy, Relational Energy, Team, Helping