Author(s): LIN, S.H., LU, W.C., Institution: NATIONAL PINGTUNG UNIVERSITY, Country: TAIWAN, Abstract-ID: 1245

Introduction
Psychological entitlement refers to an individual’s tendency to have a highly favorable self-perception and a tendency to feel worthy of high praise and rewards. Employees with higher psychological entitlement tend to seek and maintain achievements more than others because achievements can provide individuals with more resources and interpersonal influence in order to actually be entitled in the workplace. Attribution theory focuses on an individual’s perception of the causes of success and failure. When employees internally attribute their success or failure in the workplace, they will ultimately attribute it to their personal abilities and efforts. Furthermore, when looking back at their achievements, employees generally spend the most time focusing on how smart they are and hard they worked in the process. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the moderating effect of perceived environmental competitiveness on the relationship between psychological entitlement and achievement goal with attribution theory.
Methods
152 employees from sports and leisure-related companies took part in this study. Through a cross-sectional design, data was collected in the form of questionnaires. The measurement of psychological entitlement, perceived environmental competitiveness, and achievement goal were all adopted scales from published academic journal articles, which have good validity and sufficient reliability. In this study, all Cronbach’s alpha values were above .7, indicating acceptable reliability.
Results
The results of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that psychological entitlement was positively related to achievement goals. In addition, perceived environmental competitiveness would strengthen the positive relationship between psychological entitlement and achievement goal.
Discussion
The findings in the study revealed that the higher the psychological entitlement of employees, the better their achievement goal. And the higher the perceived environmental competitiveness, the stronger the relationship between employees’ psychological entitlement of employees and achievement goal. Since competition always involves winners and losers, competitors will have a sense of inferiority in their own abilities and status. Previous studies have stated that people with higher psychological entitlement tend to respond actively to self-threats. As a result, psychologically entitled employees tend to value their own contributions more than others and respond to threats of failure to perform tasks. Desire to reverse the self-perception of being poor or incompetent through actual performance, eliminate threats that conflict with a positive self-view, and maintain inner self-harmony.