Managing Malcontents

New research finds that workers who bring a sense of entitlement to the workplace are not only more likely to be frustrated on the job and abuse co-workers, but they also don't respond well to supervisor communication on the topic. So what is HR's role in dealing with entitled employees?

By Michael O'Brien

Paul Harvey knows an entitled worker when he sees one.

After all, the assistant professor of management at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics didn't always work in an ivory tower.

"Before entering academia, I was involved with corporate recruiting," he says, "and around 2000, I started noticing a change in college graduates that we would interview, high levels of self-confidence that came across as arrogance."

He says what made it interesting was that, "in a lot of cases, these candidates didn't seem to have much to back the arrogance up," in terms of impressive GPAs or extracurricular activities on their resumes.

"A few years later, I started teaching and noticing something similar in many students. My colleagues often complained about the same thing as would managers I spoke with, so it became clear to me that this entitled mind-set was becoming a real problem for employers.

"I realized that there hadn't been much research done on workplace entitlement," he says, "so I saw an opportunity to start studying a phenomenon of real interest to both academics and practicing managers."

The result of that investigation into the behavior of entitled workers and the job-related impact of that behavior was recently published in Human Relations journal by Harvey and co-author Kenneth Harris, an assistant professor of management at Indiana University Southeast.

Their study of 223 full-time employees from a variety of organizations found that individuals with strong entitlement-driven self-perceptions can feel more frustrated and dissatisfied with their work lives than employees with more objective views of their relative worth and their contributions.

The more entitled an employee thinks he or she is, according to the research, the more likely that employee will engage in abusive behavior toward co-workers, such as insulting them, breaking promises or spreading rumors about them, or engaging in "office politics" such as ingratiation, self-promotion and doing favors.

"Overall, the frustration experienced by entitled workers appears to stem from perceived inequities in the rewards received by co-workers to whom psychologically entitled employees feel superior," says Harvey, who is based in Durham, N.H.

And, unfortunately, the research indicates that "high levels of feedback and information from supervisors worsened the consequences of entitlement," he says.

Such entitled employees "seemed to not only ignore the information they didn't want to hear, but had negative emotional and behavioral reactions to this communication," Harvey says. "We think this is a reflection of that resistance to criticism -- they feel annoyed that they're hearing a lot from their supervisor but not enough of it is praise."

He defines entitlement as "a stable and global tendency to expect high levels of rewards and praise, regardless of actual effort and ability levels."

Such an attitude apparently starts early.

"Entitlement seems to stem from early childhood experiences, i.e. parenting styles, teaching philosophies, economic conditions, etc., and appears to remain fairly stable over time for most people," he says.

Harvey says he prefers to use the term psychological entitlement in order to differentiate it from "legitimate" entitlement -- i.e., where someone feels entitled to something they truly have earned.

There are four main traits or behaviors of entitlement that Harvey says he has gleaned from both his own observations and current research on the topic, many of which became apparent in the study.

One is an inflated sense of self, manifested through very high self-esteem or self-confidence.

"A second is a tendency toward unrealistic expectations," he says. "They think a lot of themselves and expect to be seen that way by others and treated accordingly.

The third is a tendency toward unfulfilled expectations. Because their expectations are unrealistic, they often go unfulfilled, especially in the workplace, so we see a lot of complaining and reduced job satisfaction among entitled workers.

"Finally, entitlement is associated with an unwillingness to accept criticism," he says. "This is probably the most obvious behavioral trait and a big source of frustration for teachers and managers because both have to give critical feedback as part of their jobs."

Harvey says it is his personal belief that "this tendency is a protective mechanism that entitled individuals develop to shield themselves from the reality that their inflated self-perceptions are not based on real qualities and achievements."

So what to do with such people? Harvey's response is simple.

"The only thing I can really say works is to avoid hiring overly entitled people," he says, adding that the use of specific interview questions that get to the heart of self-evaluation "can be telling because an entitled person will often speak highly of him/herself but have very little to support the opinion."

But not everyone agrees with that assessment.

Kenneth P. De Meuse, associate vice president of research at consultancy Korn/Ferry's leadership and talent-consulting practice in Minneapolis, says that "to claim that supervisory communication with them may be more harmful than good, I cannot endorse."

"Ignoring the situation rarely solves problems. Perhaps, the supervisor needs to communicate with them differently. Do more listening than talking. Be empathic. Now, is not the time to dictate, to argue or debate, or attempt to convince them that they are lucky they still have a job," he says.

Sue Thompson, a consultant and speaker based in Wilmington, Del., says HR leaders should be more proactive about this type of situation -- although she notes their role may be limited.

"HR doesn't really create or establish company culture," she says. "The question is, What does the CEO do? When the CEO and his or her executives enable an entitled class of employees and perpetuate or ignore their bad behavior, HR can't do much. This falls squarely in the lap of top management, which needs to set a tone of acting like professionals and not high-school kids in cliques.

"What HR can do is recommend a professional atmosphere," Thompson says, "[HR can] recommend a modicum of fairness ... and then expect back-up when plain old common-sense rules must be enforced. Kick the entitled bums out when possible. They ruin the whole bunch. The lessons of life we received as children are good for business, too."