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Emotions play a critical role in shaping workplace experiences, influencing both individual behavior and organizational outcomes. One particularly intriguing emotion is schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from others’ misfortune, which influences workplace behaviors. Although workplace schadenfreude plays a significant role, research on this phenomenon is limited, resulting in unanswered questions regarding its influencing factors, development process, and impacts. To address this gap and advance research in management and organizational behavior, we draw on insights from psychology and social psychology to inform the study of workplace schadenfreude. Using this cross-disciplinary approach, we develop an appraisal-based framework and conceptualize propositions to explain how schadenfreude emerges and operates in organizational settings. The framework proposes that employees’ negative attitudes towards others and individual differences of employees, such as antisocial and dominance orientation, self-related vulnerabilities, and moral differences, lead to schadenfreude through cognitive appraisals across justice-based, social comparison-based, and identity-based dimensions, establishing a mechanism that explains why and how this emotion arises in organizational contexts. Also, the paper broadens the understanding of schadenfreude’s effects by emphasizing behavioral, motor, and psychological outcomes. This conceptual work provides a foundation for future empirical research and offers theoretical and practical insights.