Feeling envied is an ambivalent experience that can be both privately satisfying and distressing. This research incorporates the pain-driven dual envy theory, a more advanced view of envy recently developed in the literature, to examine the ambivalence of feeling envied. We theorize that benign and malicious envy attribution can trigger goal conflicts in envy targets and cause distinct emotions which motivate their mixed behavioral tendencies for coping. Through a multi-wave survey study that adopted an emotional narrative methodology and a vignette-based experiment, we shed light on the achievement and relational contexts in which benign and malicious envy respectively arises. Together with a scenario-based experiment, the two studies found support for the role of authentic pride in explaining why envy targets become more helpful toward benign envier, as well as the role of anxiety in explaining why envy targets not only refrain from interpersonal helping but also engage in social undermining toward malicious enviers. We also yielded insights into the role of gender in shaping target reactions to envy attribution: female envy targets are more likely to experience authentic pride in face of a same-gender benign envier, but they are also more likely to enact avoidance and social undermining – as a form of aggression that involves the use of verbal and non-physical attack – toward same-gender malicious envier, especially when the domain of achievement is about social relationship. Our findings advance the understanding of how and when feeling envied shapes employees’ envy attribution process and their subsequent affective and behavioral reactions.
