E. L. Kersten

Threatened egotism occurs when people or events undermine an individual’s high but unstable self-esteem. It doesn’t affect those with a stable self-esteem, since external threats are unlikely to faze such people. And those with a low self-esteem are unsusceptible to threatened egotism because external threats simply reinforce already low self-perceptions.

Millennials, then, are especially vulnerable to threatened egotism, because their inflated self-perceptions are generally grounded in an affirming and supportive social environment rather than in realworld achievement. As a result, millennials are likely to possess a host of interpersonal pathologies and behavioral maladaptations that have been linked to threatened egotism, four of which are especially salient to the workplace: violence and incivility, revenge at a cost to self, self-handicapping, and destructive persistence.

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