Performance Pressure and Employee Expediency: A Self-Perception Model of Psychological Entitlement and Core Self-Evaluation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66635/0mt97x89Keywords:
performance pressure, employee expediency, psychological entitlement, core self-evaluation, moderated mediation, self-perception theoryAbstract
Performance pressure has become a standing condition of contemporary work, and among its quieter costs is employee expediency, the use of unethical shortcuts to expedite work for self-serving ends. Existing explanations of this relationship rest largely on moral reasoning, whereby employees quiet their objections to a shortcut before enacting it. Drawing on self-perception theory, the present study advances a complementary account in which performance pressure alters what employees believe they are owed. Observing themselves strain to meet demanding targets, employees infer psychological entitlement from their own effort, and this entitlement, in turn, licences expedient conduct. Core self-evaluation is expected to govern the first stage of this process because employees who are secure in their self-worth have little to infer from the strain of pressure. The model was tested in a survey of 357 full-time employees in India, using confirmatory factor analysis and bootstrapped conditional process analysis. Performance pressure exhibited a positive relationship with employee expediency, but psychological entitlement partially mediated this association. Core self-evaluation influenced the initial phase of the indirect pathway: the impact of performance pressure on psychological entitlement and the indirect influence of performance pressure on employee expediency were significant at low and average core self-evaluation levels but not at high levels, and the moderated mediation index was negative. All six hypotheses were supported. The findings position inferred entitlement as a mechanism operating alongside moral reasoning, identify the employees most susceptible to it, and link the management of performance pressure to the healthy and decent work envisioned by the Sustainable Development Goals.
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