Entitled to Fail

It is quite possible that some of the executives caught up in the corporate scandals at AIG, the automakers, Wall Street firms and some life insurers are victims of their own sense of entitlement.

New research looks at employees who feel entitled to undeserved preferential treatment at work. According to Paul Harvey, assistant professor of management at the University of New Hampshire, and co-author Mark Martinko at Florida State University, people who feel entitled to preferential treatment more often than not exhibit self-serving attributional styles. They have a tendency to take credit for good outcomes and blame others when things go wrong.

When it comes to the recent corporate scandals, Harvey says that entitlement attitudes may play a part. Entitlement is often thought of as a component of narcissism. Narcissists believe that they are worthy of a certain level of respect and rewards, and they are determined to get that level of respect and reward, no matter what.

“A great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting. They feel cheated and might try to obtain rewards they feel they are entitled to through unconventional, unethical means. This might involve behaviors like manipulating performance data to achieve higher bonuses, which have been linked to many of the problems we’ve seen recently,” Harvey said.

In our view, these employees appear to think they are entitled to all the credit when things work out but none of the blame when they don’t. It must make it very difficult for those who have to work with or, heaven forbid, supervise these self-anointed superstars. How can mere mortals begin to understand them?

Harvey advises supervisors to remove as much ambiguity as possible so that employees are less apt to form biased judgments. Document who does what so that credit and blame can be accurately determined.

Employers could screen the entitlement levels of would-be hires. For example, a hiring manager could ask: “Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers /classmates /etc., and if so, why?” Harvey advised: “If the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief.”

Perhaps the most troubling finding is that the number of entitlement-minded workers is on the rise among younger workers.

Harvey detailed the research results in a recent issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior in the article “An empirical examination of the role of attributions in psychological entitlement and its outcomes.”