Managers routinely use public praise to set examples and elicit similar behaviors. Surprisingly, there is little research on how coworkers may react to the public praise that their peers receive. The current literature on positive work experience would primarily associate it with observers’ envy toward the target of public praise. To deepen our understanding of coworkers’ varied reactions to their peers’ public praise, we draw on Ganegoda and Bordia’s (2019) contingency model of positive work experience to explore when and how observing public praise triggers different psychological processes in observers. We posit that observers’ high interpersonal liking toward the praised target fosters positive empathy, leading to beneficial work outcomes (e.g., helping behaviors). Conversely, high self-relevance with the target tends to elicit envy, moderated by distributive justice. When distribute justice is high, it fosters benign envy, which boosts observers’ performance. However, low distributive justice triggers malicious envy, undermines helping behaviors, interpersonal relationships, and team effectiveness, while increasing social undermining. One vignette study and one recall study were conducted, and the results from the two studies were largely supportive of our hypotheses and consistent. This research introduces public praise and provides a nuanced understanding of its dual effects on coworkers.
