The Effect Of Power Envy On Organizational Citizenship Behavior And Organization Politics

Envy is an emotion that occurs when other's possession or trait character that one desire,and he/she hopes to gain it or the other lose it.Researches showed that workplace envy is very common and destructive.If not properly handled,envy can cause irreversible damage to the organization.Because of its universality and harmfulness,the study of workplace envy is extremely important.As a very important aspect in the workplace,power is distributed unevenly in the workplace.A large number of employees want a small number of promotion opportunities and positions.Power envy is common in the workplace because employees who fail in promotion may feel inferior to others and experience envy,so power envy should be paid attention by researchers.However,most of the existing envy literatures are about performance,and less attention is paid to the power envy.According to the pain theory of envy,the feeling of pain is the basis of envy.Pain brain regions such as the anterior cingulate gyrus are activated when an individual experiences envy.When an individual feels the pain of not as well as others,he may either improve himself(benign envy)or pull others down(malicious envy)to restore the psychological balance.Based on the pain theory of envy,this paper discusses the influence mechanism of the sense of power on the envy of power in the workplace and the behavior tendency of the employees after the envy of power in the workplace through two situational experiments.Study 1 was a single factor experiment,and study 2 adopted a2×2 experimental design.The following conclusions were drawn by data analysis.(1)The social comparison of power leads to the psychological pain of employees.(2)The psychological pain of employees has a positive effect on goodwill envy and malicious envy.(3)Psychological pain mediates social comparisons of power and benign envy;Psychological pain mediates social comparisons of power and malicious envy.(4)Employees' sense of power enhances the effect of psychological pain on malicious envy.Compared with the low-power employees,the psychological pain ofthe high-power employees had a greater impact on the malicious envy.Sense of power has no significant effect on the relationship between psychological pain and benign envy.(5)Malicious envy will increase employees' organizational political behavior,and benign envy increases employees organizational citizenship behavior.