Why Entitled Employees May Have a Point

Imagine you’re conducting an annual review for one of your direct reports. She asks for a title boost (even though she’s only been in the role for a year), a 10 per cent raise (even though she knows everyone else is getting five per cent), and an exemption from the company’s three-days-in-office hybrid work mandate.

It might rub you the wrong way. It might seem bold. It might seem, well, entitled.

But what if you considered a bit more context. What if your employee had long been both underpaid and overqualified for her role. What if she had proven herself to be effective working from home. 

Is she still entitled? Or is she simply asking for something fair and deserved? Or is it a bit of both?

Welcome to the complicated, and sometimes messy, world of employee entitlement — a topic very familiar to Glenda Fisk, an associate professor in Queen’s University’s Employment Relations Studies department. With a background in industrial and organizational psychology, Fisk has spent a considerable chunk of her career studying why people come to expect things they haven’t earned and how this can affect everything from negotiation to workplace culture.

As she explains in this conversation with Smith Business Insight contributor Deborah Aarts, entitlement at work isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but it is something that deserves better understanding. 

What is the focus of your work on entitlement?

I’m primarily interested in what we would call excessive entitlement, or illegitimate or undeserved entitlement. In one of the papers that I’ve written with [Asper School of Business professor and Smith School of Business alumnus] Lukas Neville, MSc’07, PhD’12, we talk about it as having a sort of aristocratic world view: Someone will claim or assert deservingness based on personal qualities, or traits, or experiences rather than their objective merit. They might feel they deserve what they’re asking for, but their peers might have a different view. Entitlement really is in the eye of the beholder.

What about the subject captured your attention as a researcher?

I think what really got me fired up about this topic was its complexity. Entitlement involves so many interesting questions. When someone feels entitled, is it excessive? Is it negative? Is it legitimate? Is it depressed? Some people aren’t entitled enough, opting not to claim things they’re rightfully deserving of. 

Then, of course, there are questions around attribution: Who determines whether someone is overly entitled and why? Who’s to say that someone’s sense of deservingness is illegitimate? 

It does seem to be incredibly subjective.

You’d think having someone objectively evaluate inputs and outcomes might result in determining whether that entitlement is deserved. But here’s another layer to the complexity: Any objective third party trying to evaluate legitimacy is also informed by the larger social context that they reside in.  

So, in an individualistic society like North America, we tend to believe that what people earn in terms of their rewards should be a pretty good match with what they’ve contributed. But there might be other societies or political systems where there are different views about what is right and how inputs should or should not match up with outcomes.

Do broader economic conditions — like, say, a recession or a boom — affect feelings of entitlement?

I think so. The availability of alternatives in the job marketplace could affect how demanding people are, or how likely it is that they feel enabled to claim certain things that they might not otherwise. If there’s nothing available in the occupational landscape, they’re probably more likely to kind of put up and shut up. But if it’s a seller’s market for labour, then they’re probably more likely to ask for things they wouldn’t otherwise.

Can an organization’s unique culture also play a role?

Definitely. The culture of an organization can either encourage or discourage entitlement. And that’s where it gets really interesting to me.

Think of the process of recruiting people for jobs. This can often involve inaccurate or inflated promises — the interviewer might present a rosy picture of the benefits that the interviewee will accrue if they join the organization. That can set into motion a sense of perceived deserving.

Or, if the workplace offers non-contingent rewards — for instance, a bonus everyone gets independent of their individual contributions — that leniency in the performance culture can reinforce a sense of deservingness too. If I’m being rewarded for what could objectively be classified as kind of mediocre or even subpar performance, that changes how I see the relationship between my personal inputs and my rewards.

 I’m curious about whether age plays a role. By now it’s a cliché that older employees consider Millennials too entitled at work, and they appear to now be extending that complaint to Gen Z too. So, are employees more entitled today than they once were?

There are a few factors at play here. In the book Generation Me, San Diego State University researcher Jean Twenge documented all sorts of longitudinal data that shows individualism was dramatically increasing, and that continues. People are rating themselves higher on their self-evaluations, especially younger workers.

Alongside that, we’re experiencing a rapid change in the nature of work itself. Technology has opened up possibilities for workers that weren’t available 30, 20, even 10 years ago. Furthermore, as we’ve moved into a knowledge-based economy, it’s more difficult to evaluate contributions and outcomes. It’s not like going into a manufacturing job where you put in your eight hours and produce 1,000 widgets, which justifies your paycheck. Many of us now sit in front of a computer cogitating all day. It’s hard to quantify that contribution.

Together, this rise in individualism coupled with these rapid changes to work are changing how people feel about what they deserve.

Can you share an example?

Sure. I think we are seeing a fundamental shift in how people prioritize work, vis-à-vis things like personal life or family time. A Millennial might feel like, ‘Well, I should be able to work from home,’ or ‘I should be able to work flexible hours to meet my schedule.’ It might be easy for a Boomer or a Gen Xer to say, ‘Oh, that’s entitlement.’ Which view is legitimate? Is that Millennial’s request really entitled? Or does it perhaps necessitate a shift in how we think about work?

Which brings us back to what you mentioned earlier about perceived legitimacy. In a time of income inequality and high cost of living, is it such a bad thing for people to demand more, or better, working conditions?

Many of us automatically think of entitlement in a colloquial sense, like ‘Oh, that’s so entitled.’ But there are, in fact, many situations where entitlement is completely justified — and in fact necessary — to reckon with change or to realize growth in how we work.

For instance, historically women have received lower levels of pay than men for comparable work. In that domain there’s still a sense of restricted or depressed entitlement where women don’t always claim benefits they’ve earned, or even ones they’ve been granted on a legal or contractual basis. When someone who is underpaid claims or requests more compensation, that is legitimate entitlement. 

It becomes a question of where the line is between entitlement that is excessive and entitlement that is really more about empowerment. 

What is the difference?

It comes down to how the individual thinks about the balance of rights and responsibilities. 

People with a more empowering approach to entitlement balance the rights they’ve been granted with their responsibility to live up to the requirements of the job. They can articulate very clearly their contributions and do so as part of legitimizing or validating their claim.

But those with more negative forms of entitlement focus only on the rights half of the equation. Among people who are high in excessive or illegitimate entitlement, we see correlations with things like narcissistic personality and exploitative attitudes and — often — very high self-esteem, which can be fragile. Such people are more likely to have a blind spot about their contributions. Their instinct is not to detail what they’ve done to earn an award for example; the mentality is more ‘I deserve this because it is me and I am awesome.’ They seek external validation and when they don’t get it, it’s a blow to how they see themselves and they’re likely to respond negatively.

What effects does this have on workplaces?

Entitlement in its excessive, negative form can have such a detrimental impact on workplace culture and relationships. 

Such psychologically entitled people tend to adopt a zero-sum mindset and are more likely to use unethical tactics in bargaining. They are more likely to engage in counterproductive work behaviours, like politicking and even aggression. They’re at a greater propensity to react in very negative ways when their expectations aren’t met.

I imagine this can make things uncomfortable around the water cooler.

Consider the example of an entitled person when they’re made aware that they haven’t earned rewards that they feel deserving of. They might react in an explosive way, which their colleagues then must manage around. Or the entitled person may try to correct what they see to be an inequity by stealing from the organization, because they feel they haven’t received what they perceive to be deserving of. Or they might start bad-mouthing the company to outsiders.

Clinical psychologists consider entitlement the strongest dimension of the narcissistic personality. So, when you’re managing someone who is excessively, unjustifiably entitled, it’s going to be very difficult because we know that personality disorders like narcissism don’t change easily. It’s important to recognize that.

What can managers do to make sure they’re not unfairly dismissing legitimate requests as unreasonable or excessive?

At a high level, traditionally, most managers have had the view that anyone demanding special considerations or rewards is a bad thing. It’s that attitude of ‘How dare you ask for that’ or ‘How dare you think outside the box.’ But I think more and more managers are thinking about it more situationally. They’re now asking, ‘Why are you requesting that?’ or ‘What is the context for what you want?’ We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how employers see employees in relation to the work and the expectations that they have of that.

Practically, I think managers should set realistic expectations, from the job interview onward. They should keep communication open so that employees know, for instance, why certain decisions have been made — especially when it comes to distribution of rewards. Have they been allocated fairly? Is there a procedure that’s been applied consistently and transparently? When decisions about rewards and recognition are made in a black box, it tends to foster that sense of ‘Why didn’t I get it? I’m just as deserving’ among other employees. Clarity around how decisions are made — how contributions and inputs affect how rewards and outcomes are allocated — really is important in keeping excessive or unfounded entitlement at bay.