The bright side of entitlement: exploring the positive effects of psychological entitlement on job involvement

Purpose Although the sense of entitlement was traditionally associated with a range of maladaptive personality characteristics, the purpose of the current study is to take an initial step to explore a positive implication of psychological entitlement. Design/methodology/approach The target population for this study comprises employees from various industries in Taiwan. To examine the research hypotheses, structural equation modeling techniques were employed to perform a mediation analysis and conditional process analysis. Findings The results of this research showed that career ambition mediates the relationship between psychological entitlement and job involvement, where psychological entitlement is positively related to career ambition, and career ambition is positively related to job involvement. Nonetheless, the authors' data did not support the proposed moderation effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between career ambition and job involvement. Originality/value This work is among the first to investigate how an employee's psychological entitlement is associated with his/her job involvement and the boundary conditions that affect this relationship.