Age of entitlement: Why is it so difficult to manage Millennials?
Speaker：HUANG Xu, Professor, Baptist University, HKSAR
Host：WANG Lin, Associate Professor, Lingnan College, SYSU
Time and date：15:00-17:00, December 16th, 2020
Location：Third floor, Lingnan Hall
Language：English+Chinese
Abstract:
Millennials are often seen by managers as having a higher level of psychological entitlement than employees of older generations (Rosa & Hastings, 2018). In China, a buzzword for the younger cohort of Millennials is “post-90s,” which refers to people born between 1990 and 1999. Like their Millennial counterparts in the West, Chinese post-90s Millennials are labelled as an entitled generation by popular and business sources (Liang & Xu, 2018). In both the Western and Chinese popular press, Millennials are portrayed as having the attitudes of “want it all, and want it now” and being “disconnected between reward and performance (Ng, Schewitzer, & Lyons, 2010, p. 282). Managers find it hard to offer what Millennial employees expect, let alone to motivate them to contribute to the organization (e.g., Becton, Walker, & Jones-Farmer, 2014; Rosa & Hastings, 2018). Several large-scale survey studies in the West and China, however, have generated mixed findings and have thus failed to produce convincing evidence that Millennials (or post-90s Millennials in China) are more entitled than people of older generations (e.g., Becton et al., 2014; Costanza, Badger, Fraser, Severt, & Gade, 2012; Trzesniewski, Donnellan, & Robins, 2008; Wetzel et al., 2017).
In this presentation, I will present two on-going research projects, which are aimed to address why it is so difficult to manage millennials in China and other nations. In the first project, we demonstrated that (1) younger employees in China are not necessarily more entitled than older employees; it depends how they were raised by their parents; and (2) directive-achieving style of leadership is effective in managing entitled employees. In the second project, we challenged the conventional view by showing that managers, who tend to be more entitled than employees, are likely to label millennials as more entitled. It’s the managers’ entitlement that breads the illusion of entitlement.
