Insights Into Core Self-Evaluations and Psychological Entitlement for Small Businesses Hiring Practices

Abstract

In the quest to find highly productive and engaged employees in small businesses, those hiring often consider applicants’ personal characteristics, such as their work experience, education, grades in school, disposition, values, and personality. Yet they may be unaware of how these characteristics relate to each other and certain demographic characteristics. Core-self evaluations and psychological entitlement are personality traits that impact positive (Judge, 2009) or negative organizational outcomes (Ogunfowora et al., 2021), respectively, and, therefore, might be used in hiring. We hypothesized that core self-evaluations (CSEs) vary as a function of whether survey respondents are males, white, employed, have high grade point averages (GPAs), and have higher self-enhancement (power, achievement) levels than their counterparts. We also hypothesized that psychological entitlement varies as a function of whether respondents are employed, have high GPAs, and have higher self-enhancement levels. We found partial support for our hypotheses based on survey results from a dyadic sample of 189 respondents, which we bootstrapped and confirmed using a sample of 5,000. Males and those who are unemployed while in college had higher levels of CSEs, while people with higher levels of (others-reported) self-enhancement and those with lower GPAs had higher levels of psychological entitlement. These results give new insight into what individual differences may predict CSEs and psychological entitlement, which both have an impact on organizationally relevant and desired outcomes, such as finding the most productive employees.