Abstract

People are social beings who exist with their emotions and experience them. Businesses are social environments where people interact and exhibit positive and negative behaviours. Especially in these areas, situations such as intense competition, the effectiveness of performance-based comparisons and the desire to increase social status can cause social emotions such as jealousy, anger, sympathy among employees or they can also reveal schadenfreude, which is as old as human history but is a new subject of research. Schadenfreude, which means rejoicing at someone else's misfortune, is considered morally controversial and negative by many researchers. Other researchers, on the other hand, have accepted it as positive because it satisfies the experiencer emotionally. In the light of these discussions, studies have been carried out in the fields of psychology, social psychology and sociology. However, although work life is the most suitable environment for the emergence of schadenfreude, this concept has not received enough attention in the field of organisational behaviour. This study, conducted based on document analysis method, was prepared to provide a better understanding of the concept of schadenfreude and to emphasise that it is a concept that should be studied in the field of organisational behaviour. It is a unique and important study that contributes to the field in terms of guiding researchers who want to work in this field in the future.