They Want What I’ve Got (I Think): The Causes and Consequences of Attributing Coworker Behavior to Envy
研究员工如何将同事的模糊行为归因于嫉妒，并探讨这种归因如何影响员工后续行为，为理解被嫉妒者的心理机制提供新视角。
The focus in research on envy has recently shifted to include not only the envious person but also the person who is a target of that envy. We join the conversation in this nascent but developing literature by addressing a critical question: Given that envy is a covert emotion, how do employees come to perceive that they are envied? The answer, we propose, is that when employees are faced with ambiguous coworker behavior, they will, under certain circumstances, make an envy attribution for that behavior. We position envy attributions as a type of a relational attribution and elaborate a model grounded in theory on self-regulation that explains both how and when employees come to attribute the behaviors of their coworkers to envy. Going further, we then draw from research on approach-avoidance to explain the subsequent behavior of an employee who has attributed coworker behaviors to envy. In so doing, we not only provide an explanation for conflicting findings in the extant “being envied” literature but also call for an increased focus on attributions as intervening mechanisms that explain people’s response to others’ emotions.