When Envy Clouds Fairness: How Dispositional Envy Undermines Performance in Political Workplaces

What is it about?

This study explores how employees’ dispositional envy—a tendency to feel resentful toward others’ success—can hinder job performance, focusing on informational unfairness as an explanatory mechanism and organizational politics as a contextual factor that strengthens this process. Drawing on conservation of resources and trait activation theory, the authors propose that envious employees perceive their organizations as unfair in the way information is shared, which depletes their psychological resources and reduces their motivation to perform well. Using multisource, time-lagged data collected from employees and their supervisors in Pakistan, the study finds that perceptions of informational unfairness explain why envy can harm performance. Moreover, this negative pathway is particularly strong when employees believe that organizational decision-making is politically driven, meaning that promotions, resources, and information depend more on influence than on merit. In such climates, envy translates more readily into dissatisfaction and reduced effort. For organizations, the findings highlight the importance of reducing internal politics and fostering transparent communication. By minimizing favoritism and ensuring fair information flow, employers can prevent envy from turning into disengagement and poor performance, thereby cultivating a more equitable and productive workplace.

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Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This research is unique in showing how a stable personality trait like envy interacts with the organizational environment to affect performance through fairness perceptions. It integrates emotional tendencies and contextual cues to reveal how employees’ reactions depend not only on who they are but also on how fair and political their workplace feels. The study is timely given the growing recognition that toxic political climates and unequal information sharing undermine collaboration and performance. By focusing on Pakistani organizations, it adds culturally relevant evidence on how envy and perceived injustice operate in collectivist, hierarchical work settings, offering insights for managing fairness and emotional well-being across diverse contexts.