The dark side of groups: effects of entitlement and conflict

© 2017 Dr. Emma Yue ZhaoDespite the focus in the popular press about entitlement, there has been limited research on entitlement in the management literature. Through multiple studies, this thesis examines the effects of entitlement beliefs in the workplace in the context of groups. Incorporating various literatures, I theorise and find that: 1) entitled individuals are physiologically more likely to experience threat than less entitled individuals and also more likely to experience threat after encountering task conflict; 2) entitlement relates to conflict in several different ways such that the relationship is affected by the duration of the task – in short-term tasks, entitlement is likely to influence heightened perceptions of the types of conflict, but in long-term tasks, entitlement is curvilineally related to relationship conflict; and 3) entitlement influences the distribution of roles in the workgroup as both low- and high-entitlement is likely to lead to being selected as the leader. I utilise both laboratory and survey methods to capture and collect the data in this thesis. I also discuss the implications of my findings on theory and practice