Silence hurts more among the entitled: Psychological entitlement amplifies the costs of workplace silence

Abstract Workplace silence has generally been studied from a social exchange perspective as a response to negative initiating actions. However, social exchange relationships involve ongoing transactional chains in which a given response may also serve as a new initiating event. Building on this perspective, we examine how a specific form of silence, supervisor‐directed improvement‐oriented (SDIO) silence, can function as a negatively valenced initiating event that carries forward into later employee responses. We specifically propose that SDIO silence undermines employees' felt responsibility for contribution, which in turn weakens positive, active social exchange responses. We argue that this process is stronger among employees high in psychological entitlement. Using a multi‐wave, multi‐source study of public sector employees ( N = 422), we find that SDIO silence reduces felt responsibility, which in turn weakens affective commitment, emotional job engagement, and promotive voice, and that these adverse effects are stronger for employees high in psychological entitlement. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.