A review of entitlement: Implications for workplace research

Interest in employee entitlement perceptions is increasing in academia and in organizations. Entitlement has a long history of being conceptualized as a personality trait in psychology closely aligned with narcissism. Research on workplace entitlement has generally revealed links with negative workplace behaviors, indicating costly outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations. Our aim in this article is to review the literature on workplace entitlement perceptions, identifying how the construct has changed definition over time, and indicating related constructs that impact on research within industrial and organizational psychology. This review progresses research in this field by examining the nomological network around entitlement and resolving current inconsistencies in the construct definition of entitlement in the workplace, and establishing a set of firm future research directions for entitlement research.