Technological Entitlement: It’s My Technology and I’ll (Ab)Use It How I Want To

Entitlement has been identified as a potentially valuable employee characteristic in the prediction of computer abuse but has not been studied systematically in the IS domain. We introduce the construct of technological entitlement as the persistent sense of being more deserving of technological resources, uses, and privileges compared to other employees. Adapting a model of general entitlement to the work technology context, we theorize that technological entitlement predicts computer abuse and that this relationship is amplified by perceptions of technology restriction. After developing and validating a scale to measure technological entitlement, we conduct three studies with working adult samples to test our hypotheses. In Study 1 (n = 187), using a behavioral design, we find that technological entitlement predicts computer abuse behavior (beyond general entitlement) and that this relationship is stronger when employees perceive organizational restrictions on technology usage. We replicate these findings in Study 2 (n = 339) with an experiment. In Study 3 (n = 156), we manipulate the context of restrictiveness within our experimental vignette to establish the generalizability of our moderator. We discuss how technological entitlement helps explain existing inconsistencies in the effectiveness of deterrence measures as well as other theoretical and practical implications of our work.