Feeling of 'lacking' as the core of envy: a conceptual analysis of envy

Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Envy among Nurses: A Scoping Review

AIM

This scoping review presents an overview of the causes and consequences of envy among clinical nurses.

BACKGROUND

Many nurses in the United States have in recent years left their permanent positions for temporary agency assignments that pay higher salaries. While greed seems like a likely explanation for the rise in travel nursing, humans tend to have a particular interest in wanting what others have.

EVALUATION

A five-stage scoping review framework and the PRISMA-ScR checklist guided this review.

KEY ISSUES

Social comparison and malicious envy are prevalent among nurses. Envy is a powerful emotion that affects human communication and behavior in organizations. Scholars have underexplored the potential benefits of leveraging benign envy in the nursing context.

CONCLUSION

The results highlight the relational nature of envy. Social comparison and envy provide an insight that suggests that nurses who change jobs are not necessarily greedy. They may be seeking the right mix of tangible and intangible rewards.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

Greed and envy can motivate nurses to change jobs. Although envy and greed may produce the same outcome, they are qualitatively different. The motivation to change jobs alludes to nurses' desire to have better control of their professional and personal lives.

The niche of envy: Conceptualization, coping strategies, and the ontogenesis of envy in cultural psychology

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it responds to the worries that gnaw at them and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanings and their greed until they believe these to be virtues.—Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“The niche of envy” is a cross-disciplinary attempt to capture and understand the complex and self-conscious emotion of envy as unfolded within social relationships and cultural settings. One of our main interests concerns how children come to understand envy in ontogenesis. Accordingly, we review existing theoretical approaches to understanding envy and introduce preliminary data about children’s understanding of envy. This paper consists of three sections. In the first section, we define envy by introducing the conditions and components that form part of it. We emphasize the fact that envy is a complex and embodied emotion, which embraces a triadic relationship, social comparison, and inequality. In this section, we also introduce social conditions that may facilitate envy and its consequences, such as hostility and aggression. The second section deals with coping strategies for envy. Here, we integrate research from different disciplines, e.g., socio-cultural, psychological, and anthropological research. Finally, in the third section, we introduce a cross-cultural and developmental view of how envy is embodied. We briefly address and offer a critique of Klein’s psychoanalytic view and present recent results from our cross-cultural studies of the ontogenesis of understanding envy.

Understanding situation awareness in nursing work: a hybrid concept analysis

Eighty percent of medical error are attributed to human factors. Human factors experts suggest the least explored factor in patient errors is attention, specifically, situation awareness. The purpose of this article was to analyze the concept of situation awareness using a hybrid concept analysis. The experience of situation awareness among nurses was elicited during the fieldwork phase through semistructured interviews. Content and relational analyses yielded 9 themes: perception, comprehension, projection, knowledge and expertise, cognitive overload, interruption management, task management, instantaneous learning, and cognitive stacking. A conceptual definition of situation awareness emerged along with recommendations for application in nursing.

Concept Development of Nursing Information

This article proposes a definition of nursing information. Nurses use information to plan, implement, and evaluate patient care. They seek information from colleagues, books, electronic sources, and equipment, and give information to multiple audiences. Even with the pervasiveness of information in nursing practice, there has been little research aimed at developing a definition of nursing information. This study was undertaken to start filling that gap. The Hybrid Model of Concept Development served as the study design. This model consists of three phases: theoretical, fieldwork, and final analytical. In the theoretical phase, a working definition of nursing information was developed. The fieldwork phase involved observations and interviews of 13 expert nurses working in a critical care unit. The qualitative data obtained from the fieldwork phase were analyzed to refine and extend the working definition. Previously identified categories in the definition--context, form, communication, and value--were validated in the analysis. New categories--multidimensionality, intervening/doing, and power--emerged during the final analytical phase, and the definition was revised to include this new knowledge. The utility of the definition of nursing information and its impact on nursing practice, information technology, and theory development is discussed.

Student nurses' experiences and perceptions of envy in one nurse education environment in Finland

The aim of this paper is to describe the different definitions of envy in a nurse education environment. Answers are sought to questions concerning student nurses' experiences and perceptions of envy and their ways of coping with envy in one polytechnic of health and welfare in Finland. Conclusions are presented to illuminate the concept of envy based on student nurses' perceptions in one polytechnic, where 64 (N = 100) student nurses were recruited from among the available (attending classes) students in 1998. The research material was collected using an instrument of 15 open-ended questions. The phenomenographic approach was used to analyze the data. According to this paper, envy appears different, depending on whether students are talking about their personal feelings of envy or envy shown by others. Furthermore, envy is described differently at the general level and in health care. Student nurses described their own envy as mild nuances of feelings, while envy at the general level was described as consisting of aggressive feelings. The most general way of coping with envy is rationalization. These findings can be used to help student nurses identify envy as a concept and also to recognize emotions as part of personal knowledge.

Envy in a nurse education community

The definition of envy is based on views of anthropology, sociology, psychology and nursing science. According to these definitions, a nurse education community consists of shared values, customs and beliefs common in the nursing community. The purpose of this paper was to describe envy in the reciprocal relations between student nurses in a polytechnic of health and welfare in Finland. The sample consisted of 110 student nurses in one faculty of health and welfare in a Finnish polytechnic. They were selected from among the available (attending classes) students, who had been studying in the same group for 1-3 years in 1996. The response percentage was 85.5 (n=94). The data were processed by various statistical methods. The findings of envy in a nurse education community were defined through the student nurses' views of their sense of self, their relations with their fellow students, the objects of envy and also the influence of the lecturers. The ways of coping with envy were also identified. The most common object of envy was a fellow student who worked part-time while studying. Another object of envy consisted of fellow students successful in examinations and skills, such as listening, friendships and good ideas. The students coped with their envy by sharing their own success and by denying envy. These results highlight some essential points of envy in a nurse education community and underline the need for open discussion, as emotions and envy are important to understand as part of nurse education. If envy is not identified, it may cause learning problems and even problems in patient care.