Entitlement

In some cases, leaders adopt a laissez-faire attitude, permitting the employees to believe they run the organization without accountability to any other stakeholders.

Employee participation is an important attribute in any organizational setting. In fact, it has been well recognized for the past fifty years that embracing the concept of radical quality requires perceiving and treating people as vital participants in the business, service, health care, or educational enterprise.

In some cases, excellent companies are employee-owned and the employees really do run the company. In other cases, there are well-defined approaches to what is commonly referred to in many German companies as co-determination, where union leaders sit on the Board of Directors. In the American economic system, there are established norms for how employees can organize in unions and how these unions can represent the employees. There are a variety of healthy approaches to engaging people in participating and contributing to the sustained success of the organization.

An unhealthy approach would be to encourage a sense of entitlement among the leadership, owners, or employees in an organization. The entitlement belief system is one in which managers and employees believe they are entitled to their jobs and their benefits due to years of service, past sacrifices, and past performance. They believe they should be immune to the vagaries of market forces, the impact of new technologies, and changes in customer requirements. Perhaps the classic example has been the Luddites in England who would destroy new mechanical looms for weaving that would make their traditional hand looms unnecessary.

When the belief in entitlement is pervasive, the leadership and the employees believe no one else would even want to have their job and all that they put up with. They expect regular salary increases regardless of the organization’s performance and resist learning new methods and technology.  

Entitlement is created, in part, by management’s failure to continually share business and performance information with the workforce and a failure to engage employees in decision-making. A sense of entitlement is quite different from a sense of ownership and commitment.

A great deal of research has gone into the question of autocratic versus participative leadership in organizations. Entitlement is not the result of autocratic or participative leadership approaches, but comes about from adopting a laissez-faire approach that leaves people to their own devices without any accountability. Entitlement comes from an absence of leadership. (1)

Successful management in organizations depends on establishing a sense of ownership and commitment among the employees. Committed employees can accomplish a great deal in terms of supporting assessment, quality control, problem solving, quality improvement, and innovation.

There are several elements that contribute to building a sense of ownership and commitment in organizations that leadership can influence. A mission statement that helps each person see how they contribute to the organization’s success is vital. Employee participation in setting and measuring goals that enable the organization to reasonably stretch and grow are important, along with employee participation in planning and implementing changes to the workplace.

The success of many organizations depends on effectively engaging the employees and supporting them in taking individual accountability for their actions and participating in the assessment, control, problem-solving, improvement and innovation of the system. Rather than feeling entitled to being there, people need to be engaged and to feel accountable for doing their bit. It is only through active engagement that individuals and their collective organizations are able to stave off the inevitable results of entropy and to overcome the existential challenges to their organization.

This Levels of Accountability chart has been very useful in helping leaders build participative organizations that encourage individual accountability and discourage entitlement.(2)

The chart can be posted on the wall in meeting rooms as a quick way to check whether people are acting above the line (taking accountability for their actions and engaging in critical thinking and action) or below the line (acting as victims).

(1) John Robert Dew. Empowerment and Democracy in the Workplace. Quorum Books, 1997.

(2) John Robert Dew. Managing in a Team Environment. Quorum Books, 1998.