Relationship of leadership and envy: How to resolve workplace envy with leadership—a bibliometric review study

Abstract

In recent years, workplace envy has gradually become a hot research topic for organizational behavior. Scholars have explored the antecedents and consequences of envy following the traditional research paradigm. The latest leadership theory also provides new ideas for its develop-ment. Although the traditional methods continue to optimize the research on the relationship between leadership and envy, they still do not fully reflect the binary logical relationship between the two and cannot offer sufficient explanatory power for the psychological activities and behaviors of employees and supervisors. In this paper, two pieces of bibliometric software, CiteSpace (American, Drexel University) and Histcite (American, Clarivate Analytics), were used in order to analyze the previous literature in regard to providing a theoretical basis, the main content, and the stages of development. Based on the integration, we propose a dual‐track theoretical model of leadership and envy as the prediction framework for future research. The research has returned to the intelligent attribute of leadership and believes that effective leadership can adjust the existence of various types of envy and transform it into the actual productivity of the workplace.