Close Friends, Closer Comparisons: Regulating Envy in Multiplex Relationships

Workplace envy is a socially embedded experience with important personal and relational implications. Yet, not all workplace relationships provide the same context for experiencing and regulating envy. In contemporary organizations, work is increasingly carried out within multiplex relationships that span both professional and personal domains. These relationships broaden the dimensions along which social comparisons occur and heighten the self-relevance of others’ successes, advantages, and favorable life circumstances, making envy especially likely. At the same time, friendship obligations, professional norms, and ongoing work responsibilities can constrain how envy is managed and expressed. Drawing upon emotion regulation theory and research on workplace relationships, we develop a theoretical model that explains how individuals regulate envy within multiplex relationships. We argue that envy simultaneously makes salient personal and relational motives—the desire to reduce the sting of envy and the desire to preserve a valued workplace relationship. These motives, in turn, activate a dual-motive appraisal process through which individuals arrive at key decision points that culminate in one of three regulatory pathways—experience-, situation-, or expression-level regulation—with each pathway producing distinct emotional and relational trajectories. In laying out this model, we seek to advance research on workplace envy and multiplex relationships.