This exploratory study examines the nature of customer entitlement and its impact on front-line service employees. In an open-ended qualitative inquiry, 56 individuals with waitstaff experience described the types of behaviors entitled customers engage in and the kinds of service-related "perks" these individuals feel deserving of. Participants explained how they responded to entitled customers, how and when managers became involved, and how their dealings with these patrons influenced their subjective physical and psychological well-being. We found that the behaviors of entitled customers negatively impacted waitstaff employees. Participants reported physiological arousal, negative affect, burnout, and feelings of dehumanization as a result of dealing with these patrons. While respondents drew on a variety of strategies to manage their encounters with entitled customers, they indicated workplace support was often informal and described feeling abandoned by management in dealing with this workplace stressor. Approaching customer entitlement as a form of microaggression, we offer recommendations for practice and suggest new directions for future research.

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What effect does economic inequality have on academic integrity? Using data from search-engine queries made between 2003 and 2011 on Google and state-level measures of income inequality and generalized trust, I found that academically dishonest searches (queries seeking term-paper mills and help with cheating) were more likely to come from states with higher income inequality and lower levels of generalized trust. These relations persisted even when controlling for contextual variables, such as average income and the number of colleges per capita. The relation between income inequality and academic dishonesty was fully mediated by generalized trust. When there is higher economic inequality, people are less likely to view one another as trustworthy. This lower generalized trust, in turn, is associated with a greater prevalence of academic dishonesty. These results might explain previous findings on the effectiveness of honor codes.

Despite a vibrant body of scholarship and a growing public discourse around the socio-political consequences of rising income inequality around much of the world, very little is known about the organizational consequences of societal-level income inequality. In this essay, we draw upon previous literature on the socio-political consequences of high income inequality to help identify its potential business consequences. In particular, we suggest that high levels of income inequality can give rise to (1) social movements that coerce and constrain firms' actions, (2) alternative organizational forms that displace existing organizations and (3) new political and regulatory risks that undermine firms' performance or survival. Using this argument, we emphasize the broader point that income inequality matters to firms and markets and that the study of inequality needs to be 'brought in from the cold' by organizational researchers. Furthermore, we outline a specific research agenda aimed at better understanding income inequality and how organizations can respond to it.There is a vibrant body of scholarship and a growing public discourse about the socio-political consequences of rising income inequality in much of the world. From the front-page press coverage of Occupy Wall Street in the early 2010s to Thomas Piketty's emergence as a talk-show fixture, there is a sense that citizens and scholars alike share a concern about income inequality. This concern is rooted in a belief that high levels of inequality are bad for society -bad for democracy, bad for health and well-being and bad for the cohesion of our cities and communities. These beliefs are borne out in a range of academic research showing that high income inequality has deleterious effects on the polity, public health, civic life and human development in general (see Neckerman and Torche, 2007, for a comprehensive review). In other words, we know how inequality affects

In this paper, we conceptualize and integrate a measure of political knowledge into the broader literatures on political behaviour, proactivity, and followership. Political knowledge refers to an individual's perceived understanding of the relationships, demands, resources, and preferences of an influential target, such as their leader. We examine political knowledge in the follower–leader context with two studies of employees (Ns = 301 & 492) and two studies of follower–leader pairs (Ns = 187 & 130 dyads). Findings generally support the convergent and discriminant validity of our political knowledge measure. In addition, we find consistent evidence for the mediating role of political knowledge of one's leader in the relationship between follower political skill and political will with self‐reported follower proactive behaviours. Taken together, the results contribute to the political influence framework and offer insight into the importance of ‘knowing your leader’ in enabling followers to engage in politically risky proactivity. Practitioner points Political knowledge describes an individual's understanding of specific influential others’ relationships, demands, resources, and preferences. Followers with political knowledge are more likely to take charge and enact change, which we think is because this knowledge makes enacting change seem less risky. Leaders seeking to improve their followers’ political knowledge should focus on building high‐quality relationships with followers; these relationships are positively associated with political knowledge.