Karen: Why your entitled colleague behaves this way

Middle-aged, entitled and not willing to back down, how do you deal with a person who seems to enjoy making your life harder than it needs to be?

Call out the Karens. Picture: Istock

Middle-aged, entitled and not willing to back down, how do you deal with a workplace colleague who appears to get a kick out of making your life harder than it needs to be?

The term Karen – which began life as a meme and has since become a broadly used slang term – is used to typically describe a middle-aged woman who presents overly-entitled requests and demands.

In a hospitality setting, that might look like demanding to speak to a manager because they’re not happy with their meal; in a suburban setting, it might be a person upset that another has parked on the street outside their house despite that being council land; and in the workplace, it could be a person who makes the lives of others increasingly hard for no apparent reason other than self gain, egocentric reasons or enjoyment.

A Karen at work might be two-faced, speaking to you one way when others aren’t around and being more polite when the boss or others are present; it might look like taking advantage of others’ kindness; or it might be trying to make you look as if you’ve messed up in front of others.

Maybe you’ve given them the benefit of the doubt and tried to do something nice only for them to turn it around and use the opportunity to force a sense of entitlement.

Whatever the circumstances, the entitlement tends to sting. But workplace experts say no matter how disgruntled you feel, you should avoid ever calling anyone a Karen at work.

The reason, they say, is that it is very likely the term will be frowned upon in the near future as it is gendered and ageist. And men who act in a similar manner can, and often are, treated in a different way. Which perhaps is because men express resentment or anger in the workplace in different ways.

Aaron McEwan

Calling somebody a Karen would also be considered a direct aggression, rather than a micro-aggression – just as many of the behaviours of a person who fits the stereotype of a Karen might be seen, explains Aaron McEwan, vice president of research and advisory at Gartner.

Use of the term borders on harassment which, he says, comes down to “the way in which language or behaviours are interpreted by the person that they’re directed to”.

“I can see very easily that the term Karen could be hurtful, it could be seen as harassment,” he says. “A sense of entitlement is not a thing that would be limited to a particular group of people. Particularly in a work context, it’s a lazy way to describe a bunch of complex behaviours.”

Dr Elizabeth Sander, an assistant professor in organisational behaviour at Bond University’s business school, agrees, adding that research shows there are gender differences in how people behave as well as how it’s perceived.

“It’s very tricky to take this sort of general slang that we’ve seen on TikTok into the workplace because the setting is quite different and the situations are quite different,” she says.

There’s actually a lot of literature on entitlement in the workplace, Sander says, adding, “employees will often become entitled or behave in entitled ways when they feel they are being treated unfairly by the organisation”.

“Research in organisations has also shown that people who are high in entitlement are often characterised by a motivation to attain status,” she says

When people feel they are being treated unfairly, they often resort to behaviours in which they seek payback from the company. One might be taking paper home from the printer, she says.

Dr Elizabeth Sander, an assistant professor in organisational behaviour at Bond University

Sander has spent a lot of time researching entitlement in the workplace, and she says the findings are rather interesting. As it turns out, some workplaces can even turn a person into what would be described as a Karen, she says.

“Sometimes it comes about because the organisation is actively promoting to the employee their brand, how great it is to work for their organisation and the status benefit of belonging to that organisation. “Those types of communications by the organisation might increase this perception that an employee is entitled to do certain things and they have more autonomy,” she says.

“What the research shows is often it’s not necessarily the fault of co-workers per se but of management in the organisation and people’s perception about how they’re being treated that can then lead them to engage in what we would sort of say are entitlement behaviours.”

That type of disconnect from how a company promotes itself and how it treats its employees was a big issue during the pandemic, she says. As many companies attempted to promote themselves and the benefits they gave to employees, some workers may have formed beliefs about their workplace that don’t quite live up to reality.

“What happens a lot in organisations is there is incongruence between the company actually says it does, what it says its values are, what it says its culture is and what it actually is,” she says. “That incongruence can actually really upset some employees because they either find it confusing or they find it quite demotivating.”

Some colleagues may adopt entitled behaviours over time, Sander says, adding it may come after a promotion which could validate a person’s over-inflated sense of importance.

Other times organisations which are typically bad to work for may cause those behaviours to form. “Historically, companies that have toxic work cultures that have destructive leadership behaviours and abusive supervision, certainly will lead to a range of unhappy employees, high employee turnover and perhaps employees adopting unhelpful or destructive work behaviours themselves,” she says.

When it came to dealing with an entitled colleague, Sander and McEwan have a similar view. First confront the person, but failing that, and if initial conversations don’t resolve, take up it up with management and/or a human resources team. “If you feel safe and the situation warrants it, there are ways to be assertive,” McEwan says.

He says it’s worth keeping in mind that in the current environment, stress levels are at a high. “Generally speaking workplace mental health issues are at record levels. There’s a really good chance that your co-worker is stressed, anxious or not having a great time mentally,” he says.

It’s also important managers understood that failing to address problematic employees can cause high performing staff to walk away.

“There’s a thing that we call co-worker quality which comes down a worker’s perception of the value or quality of the people they work with,” McEwan says. “For the first time in a long time, that’s now entered the top 10 reasons for why people leave and join a new company.”