Chapter 6: Why Leaders Feel Entitled to Take More: Feelings of Entitlement As a Moral Rationalization strategy

As most of us will have noticed, recent years have shown a growing concern regarding the exorbitant salaries of top managers, their desire to obtain higher bonuses each fiscal year, and their tendency to make allocation decisions that primarily favor those in higher hierarchical positions. These kinds of behaviors have received increasing exposure in the media, so that nowadays a common belief seems to be that unethical behavior by those in charge is pervading contemporary organizations and groups. Indeed, such practices have given rise to the idea that leaders are by definition self-interested (i.e., a myth of self-interest is created regarding the decisions that leaders make, cf., Miller, 1999), and as a result claims such as “top managers should receive high payments because they will otherwise leave for 'where the money is',” seem to have become widely accepted.