Mladen Adamovic

King's College London | KCL · Department of HRM & Employment Relations/King's Business School

In a multinational study (61 countries; N =15,039), we examined how collective narcissists, both agentic (ACN) and communal (CCN), reacted cognitively (through endorsement of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs) and behaviorally (via prevention, hoarding, and prosociality) to the pandemic. Higher ACN and CCN predicted greater endorsement of COV...

Using a resume study, we investigate hiring discrimination for leadership positions against job applicants with Chinese and Indian names before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We submitted more than 8000 job applications to job advertisements in Australia. We find hiring discrimination against applicants with Chinese and Indian names for non‐lead...

People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family's well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding a...

We argue that the importance of family relationships for individual well-being varies across societies as a function of a society’s degree of cultural heterogeneity. To examine the role of family relationships, we analyzed the responses from 13,009 participants in 50 societies on their life satisfaction across societies varying in their levels of h...

A theoretical perspective on grandiose narcissism suggests four forms of it (sanctity, admiration, heroism, rivalry) and states that these forms conduce to different ways of thinking and acting. Guided by this perspective, we examined in a multinational and multicultural study (61 countries; N = 15,039) how narcissism forms are linked to cognitions...

The number of international refugees in developed countries continues to increase due to various factors, including war, poverty, poor economic conditions, and environmental disasters. While prior research has focused on the challenges faced by refugees in finding work, prior research has neglected the organisational perspective. Therefore, our res...

Psychological science tends to treat subjective well-being and happiness synonymously. We start from the assumption that subjective well-being is more than being happy to ask the fundamental question: What is the ideal level of happiness? From a cross-cultural perspective, we propose that the idealization of attaining maximum levels of happiness ma...

Purpose This research paper aims to elucidate why and how a fair supervisor influences an employee's job satisfaction. While various theoretical approaches have been explored and numerous explanatory mechanisms investigated in prior organizational justice research, it is still unclear which explanatory mechanism is the dominant one to explain fairn...

Prior research has frequently used an employee's power distance orientation to explain differences in leadership effectiveness, work attitudes, consumer attitudes, and job performance. However, researchers have reported low reliabilities of power distance scales. One reason for these low reliabilities might be the application of country-level power...

Unfounded—conspiracy and health— beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal struct...

When the globalization of business begun, Hofstede introduced a cross-cultural framework based on four dimensions: 1) Individualism-collectivism, 2) power distance, 3) uncertainty avoidance, and 4) masculinity-femininity. Hofstede’s research was the starting point for cultural value research in connection with management and workplace topics. To ex...

We explore to what extent previously observed pan-cultural association between dimensions of self-construal and personal life satisfaction (PLS) may be moderated by three national-contextual variables: national wealth, economic inequality, and religious heritage. The results showed that MSelf-reliance (vs. dependence on others) predicted PLSpositiv...

Past research has shown that economic inequality shapes individuals’ self-construals. However, it has been unclear which dimensions of self-construal are associated with and affected by economic inequality. A correlational (Study 1: N = 264) and an experimental study (Study 2: N = 532) provided converging evidence linking perceived economic inequal...

We conducted a general, semi‐systematic literature review on organizational justice. Based on this review, we first explored the various ways in which organizational justice was conceptualized. Second, we explained the importance of organizational justice by reviewing and synthesizing theoretical frameworks in organizational justice research and st...

People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family’s well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding a...

In the past decades, the number of female employees and managers has strongly increased in most developed countries. This demographic development emphasizes the importance to investigate gender dissimilarity between employees and their supervisor and how it can be managed to elicit beneficial gender dissimilarity effects on employees’ attitudes and...

Multinational organisations and government organisations experienced problems introducing a merit pay system in different countries. Designing the right reward system is challenging in an international work environment, because employees often have different expectations about reward allocations. Most prior research predicted that individualistic e...

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and in...

Empirical assessments of the experiences and perceptions of urban green space (UGS) in a social housing context are scant. Studying UGS perception in these contexts is important to understand how people experience and derive benefits from UGS in disadvantaged communities. This short communication provides interdisciplinary and methodological guidan...

Most research on the development of personality traits like the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) focuses on local effects like parenting style or attachment, but people live in a larger society that may set the stage for any local effects. Here we paired nation-level data on the traits from 49 nations with several mi...

We conducted a field experiment to analyze if there is a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities entering leadership positions in organizations. We submitted over 12,000 job applications, to over 4,000 job advertisements, to investigate hiring discrimination against six ethnic groups for leadership positions. Drawing on implicit leadership theory, we a...

Prior research indicates that employees from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to experience depression and other mental health problems than their ethnic majority counterparts. To understand what drives these negative outcomes, we integrate research on ethnic minorities at work with the job demands-resources (JDR) model. Based on the JDR...

We analyze the relationship between occupational gender composition and gender discrimination in recruitment and investigate whether there is hiring discrimination against men in female‐dominated occupations. We do this with a large‐scale field experiment where we submitted more than 12,000 job applications for 12 occupations in Australia, varying...

Purpose A dynamic and changing international business environment and higher needs for innovation have increased the importance of creativity in organizations. Organizations need creative employees to develop new methods and procedures that stimulate innovation. However, prior research indicates that employees are sometimes passive and avoid engagi...

Teams with shared leadership arrangements are ubiquitous in twenty-first century organizations. Although transitions in leadership are a common and key feature of such teams, there is little insight into how and when leadership arrangements transition over time. Bridging the shared leadership and team adaptation literatures, we present a model of L...

Previous research into telework and job stress is characterized by inconsistent findings and reported beneficial, nonsignificant, and dysfunctional effects of telework on employees’ job stress levels and well-being. To investigate when the effects of telework on job stress are beneficial versus dysfunctional, the study draws on telework research an...

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been a source of fear around the world. We asked whether the measurement of this fear is trustworthy and comparable across countries. In particular, we explored the measurement invariance and cross-cultural replicability of the widely used Fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19S), testing community samples from 48 countri...

Due to the increase of the retirement age and better healthcare systems, it has become common for employees to work with young and old coworkers. However, age differences can cause misunderstandings, conflicts, and discrimination in the workplace. To improve the management of age differences, it is essential to investigate age dissimilarity (i.e.,...

The inclusion of cultural minorities as senior leaders is of growing importance and relevance to contemporary organizations with increasingly international composition, but much is to be learned about how and when such leaders impact the workplaces they lead. We draw on the “cultural difference” and “cultural congruence” propositions (Dorfman and H...

As recent research indicates, refugees and people seeking asylum are suffering disproportionately from the COVID‐19 pandemic and have become more and more “shut out” and marginalised. An important pathway to integration and self‐reliance is sustainable employment. To explore the impacts of COVID‐19 on the employment prospects of refugees and people...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of ‘societal emotional environment’: the emotional climate of a society (operationalized as the degree to which positive and negative emotions are expressed in a society). Using data collected from 12,888 participants across 49 countries, we show how societal emotional environments vary across countries and c...

Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of pe...

Previous research has shown that virtual work provides benefits to individual employees (e.g. less stress, higher job satisfaction, and higher productivity), the organization (e.g. lower real estate costs and higher commitment and performance) and, potentially, society at large (less traffic, less pollution, and lower healthcare costs through reduc...

Cultural minorities often suffer from ethnic discrimination in recruitment. To measure ethnic discrimination accurately, researchers have shifted from interviews, survey studies, and statistical salary comparisons to resume studies. To conduct a resume study, researchers send out similar, paired resumes in response to job advertisements and vary th...

Purpose: Migrant workers often suffer from social exclusion in the workplace and therefore identify less with their organization and engage less with their work. To address this issue, we integrate research on migrant workers with research on the group engagement model to create a model for understanding and enhancing migrant worker engagement. Thi...

The idea that human resource management (HRM) plays a strategic role in generating sustainable competitive advantage for organisations or intermediate outcomes such as innovation is a central tenet in HRM theory and research. Yet, the explanation for this relationship remains unclear. We contribute to understanding how HRM plays a role by integrati...

Resume studies are natural field experiments in which researchers standardize the content of resumes and vary them by individual characteristics. Researchers submit the resumes to job advertisements and compare the employers' responses toward the different resumes to measure labor market discrimination. Despite the robustness of this method, its us...

Purpose Teams often cannot fulfill their managers’ expectations due to unfairness issues and dysfunctional conflicts with teammates. This paper aims to create a fair team environment, it is important to analyze the interrelationship between unfairness and conflict. However, only a few studies have done this and reported inconsistent results. Using...

Abstract Objectives: The Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) capture individual differences in aversive personality to complement work on other taxonomies, such as the Big Five traits. However, the literature on the Dark Triad traits relies mostly on samples from English-speaking (i.e., Westernized) countries. We bro...

With the diffusion of team-based work organizations and flatter organizational hierarchies, many leaders empower employees to perform their work. Empowerment creates an interesting tension regarding coworker conflict, enhancing trust and giving employees more autonomy to prevent conflict, while also increasing workload and the potential for coworke...

Organizations increasingly use cross-functional teams, characterized by autonomy and interdependence, to improve innovation and to adapt to a dynamic business environment. Based on this trend, prior research started to investigate informational dissimilarity (employee’s dissimilarity relative to teammates regarding education, job specialization, an...

The Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) has garnered intense attention over the last 15 years. We examined the structure of these traits’ measure—the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DTDD)—in a sample of 11,488 participants from three W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., North America, Australia & Oceania, Western Europe) and five non-W.E.I.R.D. (i.e....

In Australia and many other countries of the Global North, public housing estates are being dismantled and redeveloped to create mixed-income communities. Proponents of redevelopment argue that the introduction of private housing will reduce public housing residents' experiences of stigma. In this paper, we interrogate these assumptions by identify...

The number of global virtual teams (GVTs) has increased in recent years due to globalization of business, improved information and communication technology, and higher innovation needs. Practitioners expect GVTs to be creative, innovative, and high-performing. However, GVT members suffer from interpersonal problems, stress, and misunderstandings ba...

Purpose Stress issues are a major concern for public organisations, especially in law enforcement. Organisational context is to blame for high levels of stress and low performance. Thus, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the authors aim to understand how one contextual variable – organisational stressors that emanate from the police stat...