Abstract
Envy has been positively associated with both moral disengagement and organizational unethical decision-making. Nevertheless, extant research suffers from a number of limitations that constrain our ability to define the unique links between different forms of envy and moral disengagement. In two studies (N = 419), using a dual conception of envy, we demonstrate that malicious envy has a consistently stronger and unique relationship to moral disengagement than does benign envy. Additionally, from further analyses we suggest that is the harming motivation of malicious envy, and the collateral damage potentially produced by self-improvement motivation of benign envy, the aspects that would relate both types of envy to moral disengagement. Lastly, we show that moral disengagement consistently accounts for the relationship between malicious envy and unethical decision-making. In sum, these findings open different ways to better understand the link between the envious experience, moral disengagement, and unethical decision-making, taking advantage of envy’s dual conceptualization.
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Notes
Even though some authors have postulated that envy proper is analogous to malicious envy (e.g., Miceli & Castelfranchi 2007; Smith & Kim, 2007), the former includes resentment as one of its distinctive features (Smith & Kim, 2007), whereas research on malicious envy has discarded a sense of resentment as a component of this type of envy (van de Ven et al., 2012).
Duffy et al., included negative affectivity as a control variable (using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988). Nevertheless, this approach does not allow to unveil the specific contribution of different negative emotions within the same observation.
Full correlation matrices for all studies are available in Supplementary Materials.
For all studies, both standardized beta coefficients, and correlation differences between malicious envy, and benign envy, were calculated (following Cumming 2009) and showed to be significantly different (p > .05) from each other. All analyses are available in Supplementary Materials.
Table available in Supplementary Materials.
Separate analyses for both malicious and benign envy scale items on moral disengagement are available in Supplementary Materials.
It is worthy to mention that this item is the only statement within the malicious envy scale that depicts a desire to directly (and actively) harm the target.
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Rengifo, M., Laham, S.M. Careful what you wish for: the primary role of malicious Envy in Predicting Moral Disengagement. Motiv Emot 46, 674–688 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-022-09973-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-022-09973-y