GREEN-EYED MONSTERS IN THE WORKPLACE: ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF ENVY PARESH MISHRA Kelley School of Business Indiana University 1309 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405 pmishra@indiana.edu ABSTRACT In this article, I highlight the importance and relevance of envy—an understudied emotion in the field of organizational behavior—to the workplace; I distinguish envy from other constructs, most importantly fairness perceptions, and propose a theoretical framework for empirical consideration. INTRODUCTION Envy is a powerful emotion that has been recognized and analyzed by scholars studying an array of disciplines in social science. The emotion, however, has received little attention from scholars in the field of organizational behavior. Thus, I first illustrate the power and relevance of envy through a description and analysis—along the lines of Weick’s (1989) disciplined imagination—of a real-life tragedy. THE TRAGEDY In the early hours of April 5, 1967, a fire broke out in an off-campus residential building of Cornell University, and killed eight students and a young professor. Four of the eight students were in a fast-track program that allowed exceptionally bright students to earn a Ph.D. degree through just six years of college education. On May 23 rd , another fire broke out, affecting students who were mainly in the same accelerated Ph.D. program. A week later, a third fire broke out in another residential building that housed a lot of the fast-track program students, including some evacuees from the first fire. Seven of the nine students threatened in this fire were in the accelerated Ph.D. program (Ramanujan, 2007; Schoeck, 1970). Given that a specific group was the target of the fires in all three instances, it is statistically very unlikely that the fires were mere accidents. The New York Times (6/1/1967) reported that investigators were convinced that the three fires were cases of arson, though no one was ever charged (Ramanujan, 4/4/2007). If the fires were caused by arsonists, what must have been their motive? If we applied the different theories that exist in our field to this incident, would anyone give a satisfactory explanation? Arson could be considered an instance of counter-productive work behavior (CWB); so, I start my thought experiment with the general theory of crime (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990) that has been inculcated into organizational literature (Marcus & Schuler, 2004). According to this theory, chronic lack of self-control is the best predictor of CWBs. Did the arsonists of the 1967 Cornell residential building fires lack self-control? Though possible, it is very unlikely, because the arsonists planned and executed their actions so well that the investigators never found enough clues to track them down. Also, if the arsonists suffered from