Psychological Entitlement and Deviant Behavior: The Moderating Effects of Organizational Justice and Perceived Organizational Support

Individuals form various relationships and perceive expectations about them. Within an employment relationship, an employer and employee form expectations about each others’ inputs and outputs. Generally, the relationship should be perceived to be equitable and reciprocal as both the employer and employee fulfill their contributions and receive benefits from each other. However, relationships are not always equitable and reciprocal and can form feelings of entitlement. Entitlement tends to allow individuals to form inflated self-perceptions and unrealistic expectations about their employment relationship. For example, when employees have high expectations about what they should receive from their organization, they believe that they deserve more from their organizations such as higher salaries, bonuses, and promotions regardless of their contributions toward the organization. Subsequently, psychological entitlement has been found to be associated with numerous negative attitudinal and behavioral outcomes such as aggression and conflict. As research has consistently found entitlement to result in detrimental outcomes, entitlement research has gained some academic attention. However, there has been limited empirical studies on entitlement, especially within organizational behavior. Within the literature, most of the studies have not been conducted at the workplace context; thus, creating a need to further research on how organizations can maintain and manage the detrimental effects of entitlement on workplace attitudes and behaviors. Furthermore, entitlement research has yet to be empirically tested with performance behaviors such as deviant behaviors and include boundary conditions for psychological entitlement with its behavioral outcomes. Therefore, this study empirically tests the relationship between psychological entitlement and deviant behavior and the moderating effects of organizational justice and perceived organizational support. The study sampled 494 corporate employees in South Korea and found psychological entitlement to be positively associated with workplace deviant behavior. For the moderating variables, distributive, interactional justice, and perceived organizational support were found to moderate the relationship while procedural justice did not moderate the relationship. As hypothesized, distributive justice and perceived organizational support were found to mitigate the effects of entitlement on deviant behavior. However, interactional justice was unexpectedly found to moderate the relationship in the opposite direction. Therefore, the study suggests that psychological entitlement can increase the likelihood of employees engaging in workplace deviant behavior while organizational facets such as organizational justice and perceived organizational support can help organizations and managers to mitigate and manage entitlement perceptions toward workplace deviant behavior. Furthermore, due to the study results, this study further bridges the gap within entitlement literature.