Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Title: Unlocking the Resource Gain Paradox: How Psychological Entitlement Impacts Employees’ Response to Servant Leadership and Customer Aggression

Speaker: Zhijun Chen (College of Business, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics)

Time: 14:00 (Wednesday), July 12, 2023

Venue: Room 706, Mingde Business Building

Language: Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

By enriching employees’ resource reservoir, servant leadership enables employees to improve their self-esteem perceptions and counteract fierce endangerment such as customer aggression. Yet, employees sometimes make suboptimal resource investment decisions that can lead to a less desirable outcome, which we call the “self-esteem cocoon.” By integrating the conservation of resources (CoR) theory with the key resource theories, we argue employees lower in psychological entitlement draw on resources gained from their servant leaders to shield their self-esteems when being attacked by rude customers, thereby forming a self-esteem cocoon. By contrast, those high in psychological entitlement are profuse of personal resources at their disposal. Without seeing resource loss caused by fierce assaults, they will take resource gains from a servant leader for granted, thereby forming a self-esteem cocoon, too. When called by customer aggression to expand resource reservoir, servant leadership is more strongly associated with their self-esteem perception and subsequent job performance, leading to the gain paradox as CoR predicts. Our hypotheses obtained consistent support by data from three field studies. Consequently, our study offers a novel framework accounting for when employees make suboptimal investment decisions and lead to less desirable perceptual and performance outcomes.