Home » Articles posted by amockaitis
Author Archives: amockaitis
AI is Reshaping Work. So are Global Teams. HR is Struggling with Both.
There is no shortage of conversation about how artificial intelligence is transforming organizations. Automated workflows, AI-assisted hiring, predictive analytics for talent management, large language models handling tasks that once required specialists. The discourse is loud, the investment is huge, and so is the pressure on HR functions to respond.
Amongst all this noise, a quieter transformation has been underway for much longer, and it still hasn’t received the strategic attention it deserves. Global teams, cross-border, multicultural, often virtual groups that do the real coordination work of international organizations, have been reshaping how work gets done for decades. Most multinational organizations rely on them heavily. Most HR functions have still not figured out how to support them properly.
That gap matters more now, not less. As AI takes over more of the transactional and analytical work that has historically occupied HR departments, what remains is precisely the kind of complex, relational, culturally-embedded challenge that global teams represent. The organizations that will get the most from AI are the ones that also get the human side of global work right. That is HR’s territory.
The model that no longer fits
The traditional architecture of international HRM was built around the expatriate assignment. Identify a high-potential employee, send them abroad for a year or two, provide cross-cultural training (sometimes), manage the repatriation, hope the organization retains them long enough to recoup the investment. This model made sense in a world where international work was episodic and expensive, where getting someone into a foreign market required physical presence and a significant organizational commitment.
That world has not disappeared, but it has been joined by something far more pervasive. The real international work in most organizations today is not happening through planned assignments. It is happening in global teams – distributed groups whose members coordinate across time zones, languages, and cultural contexts, often without ever meeting in person. These teams are not the exception. They are the infrastructure.
And yet the HR systems designed to support international work are still oriented largely toward the individual assignee. Selection, training, performance appraisal, compensation, repatriation: the whole apparatus assumes that international experience is something that happens to one person at a time, in one place at a time. It does not account for the collective, simultaneous, permanently ongoing nature of global team work.
The cost of getting this wrong
The consequences are not abstract. Research consistently shows that cross-cultural training programs, the kind organizations routinely offer to international assignees, typically one to two days in duration, have mixed effects at best. Generic approaches that do not engage with the specific cultural dynamics of a particular team, in a particular organizational context, tend to produce little measurable change. Meanwhile, seventy percent of firms do not even source international assignees from outside their traditional talent pools, meaning that international experience and the career advantages it brings remain concentrated in a small number of people, in a small number of locations.
Return on investment is rarely calculated rigorously, and when it is, the results are uncomfortable. When expatriates leave within a few years of returning home, taking their accumulated international knowledge with them, the organizational benefit of the assignment largely walks out the door. The costs, financial and human, were real. The returns were largely personal.
What global teams make possible
Global teams offer a fundamentally different model. They distribute international exposure across a much wider group of people, simultaneously, at considerably lower cost, and without the relocation risks, dual career complications, and repatriation failures that make traditional assignments so difficult to manage. A team whose members are working across Frankfurt, Singapore, Wellington, and Dublin is already engaged in sustained, task-based, cross-cultural collaboration that no training program can replicate. They are learning by doing, in real time, work that actually matters to the organization. This has implications across three dimensions that HR has been slow to fully appreciate.
On diversity, global teams are inherently diverse, and that diversity, when well-supported, generates creativity, broader perspective-taking, and more robust problem-solving. The challenge is not the diversity itself but the organizational climate surrounding it. Firms that design HR policies oriented toward actively leveraging difference, rather than simply managing it, that reward cross-border collaboration structurally and make it visible in performance systems, are the ones that turn the potential of global teams into actual organizational capability.
On talent, global team participation is one of the most effective development environments an organization can provide. High performers in these teams are demonstrating in real time exactly the competencies that organizations claim to want in future global leaders: cultural intelligence, the ability to build trust across distance, comfort navigating ambiguity, skill at integrating knowledge from multiple contexts simultaneously. HR systems that recognize and reward these contributions are identifying leadership potential far more accurately than any assessment center designed for a single-culture context.
On integration, global teams are a knowledge and coordination infrastructure, not just a staffing arrangement. Members learn from one another about local markets, institutional contexts, and ways of working, converting tacit knowledge into something the wider organization can access and use. They build lateral networks across units and geographies that no organizational chart can manufacture. In doing this, they are performing some of the most strategically valuable integration work in the firm. Most HR systems are not measuring it, let alone rewarding it.
Why this is urgent now
Here is where AI becomes relevant. As artificial intelligence absorbs more of the transactional work of HR, the routine screening, the scheduling, the compliance monitoring, the reporting, what is left is the work that requires genuine human judgment in complex, relational, culturally-variable and flexible situations. Global teams provide this. They cannot be managed by algorithm. They require investment in selection processes that identify people with the disposition to work across cultural boundaries. They require performance frameworks that capture collective contribution, not just individual output.
Organizations that are investing heavily in AI-driven HR tools while leaving their global team infrastructure unsupported are automating the easier problems while leaving the harder ones unaddressed. The human complexity of coordinating across cultures, building trust without physical proximity, and integrating genuinely different ways of thinking about problems is not going to be solved by technology.
What needs to change
HR functions that take global teams seriously invest in selection criteria that identify people with real cross-cultural capability, not just those who have already lived abroad or speak multiple languages. They design performance assessment processes that capture what teams produce collectively, not just what individuals contribute. They create development programs that use global team participation itself as a training environment, because sustained interaction across cultural boundaries builds competence far more effectively than any structured intervention. And they ensure that the experience and networks built through global teamwork are formally recognized, rewarded, and connected to visible career pathways.
None of this is technically complicated. It does not require new AI tools or advanced analytics, though those can help at the margins. It requires a strategic decision to treat global teams as a core organizational capability.
The question worth asking
Every organization using global teams, and that is most of them, is already assuming that distributed, cross-cultural collaboration can work. The question is whether HR is providing any serious support, or whether it is still designing systems for a world where international work means one person, one country, one assignment at a time.
In an era currently preoccupied with what AI can do and the future of work, the more pressing question for most organizations should be what their people, spread across borders and cultures, are actually capable of together.
More reading:
Mockaitis, A. I., Zander, L., & De Cieri, H. (2018). The benefits of global teams for international organizations: HR implications. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(14), 2137–2158. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2018.1428722
Lithuania Between Past and Present: What Ten Years of Data Tell Us about Changing Values
What do Lithuanians value today compared to a decade ago? And why have those values shifted? These are the questions at the heart of a study I recently published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, co-authored with colleagues at Kaunas University of Technology. Drawing on six waves of the European Social Survey covering 11,199 Lithuanian respondents between 2010 and 2020, we tracked how personal values have changed over time, and tried to understand what is driving those changes.
The short answer is: values in Lithuania have changed, but not in the ways most theories would predict.
What we measured, and why it matters
The study draws on Shalom Schwartz’s framework of human values, which organises personal values into four broad groupings. Self-transcendence covers concern for others and the world, values like benevolence and universalism. Self-enhancement reflects ambition and status-seeking, values like achievement and power. Conservation captures security, conformity, and tradition. Openness to change encompasses autonomy and the appetite for new experiences.
These four groupings tell us something important about how people orient themselves in their social world and their responses to the conditions around them. And crucially, they do not all change for the same reasons.
Three forces behind value change
We were interested in disentangling three different influences on values. Age effects are the predictable shifts that come with moving through life: as people get older, research consistently shows they become less focused on personal achievement and novelty and more oriented toward tradition, security, and concern for others. These are universal patterns tied to the life course. Period effects, by contrast, are shifts that affect everyone alive at the same time, regardless of age, because something in the broader environment has changed. And cohort effects are the lasting imprints of the historical era in which a person was raised, the idea that growing up under Soviet rule, or under independence and EU membership, leaves a distinctive mark on one’s values that persists into adult life.
Lithuania offers a particularly compelling context for separating these effects. The country has experienced not one but multiple dramatic disruptions: Soviet occupation, independence in 1990, economic collapse in the early 1990s, EU accession in 2004, the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The period covered by our study, 2010 to 2020, was anything but stable. Unemployment peaked at nearly 18% in 2010, youth unemployment reached 35% that same year, and roughly a quarter of the total population emigrated between 1990 and 2020.
To capture cohort differences, we organised respondents into four political generations whose formative experiences differ sharply. The Stalin generation (born before 1945) lived through occupation, war, and the imposition of the Soviet system. The Soviet generation (born 1945 to 1969) was socialised under intensive ideological indoctrination and institutional conformity. The late Soviet generation (born 1970 to 1989) experienced the upheaval of independence and the collapse of the USSR as young adults. And the Independent EU generation (born after 1989) has no memory of Soviet rule but grew up in a period of economic uncertainty and mass emigration.
What we found
The age effects were largely as expected. As Lithuanians grow older, they place greater importance on conservation values and self-transcendence, and less on self-enhancement and openness to change. These patterns held across all political generations and were consistent with what research in other countries has found.
The period effects were more striking. Self-enhancement values showed the sharpest fluctuation over time, rising sharply from 2010 to 2012 before declining steadily through to 2020. Openness to change dipped across most of the decade before recovering slightly after 2014. The Soviet and late Soviet generations followed very similar trajectories across all four dimensions, which makes sense: they share a broadly common socialization history, and their values appear to have been relatively stabilized by it.
The most surprising findings, however, involve the youngest cohort, the Independent EU generation. Standard modernization theory, associated most prominently with Ronald Inglehart, predicts that younger generations raised in conditions of relative prosperity and democratic freedom should show increasing self-expression and openness, shifting away from traditional and security-oriented values. That is not what we observed. Instead, the Independent EU generation showed a decline in openness to change and self-enhancement over the period of the study, and an increase in conservation values. In the latter years of the study, this generation also showed a sharp rise in self-transcendence, placing greater importance on concern for others.
A generation trapped between scarcity and modernity
These findings are, on the surface, paradoxical. This is the first generation with no memory of Soviet rule, the generation that grew up in an EU member state, with access to mobility, education, and a more open society than any that preceded them. And yet their values, at least during this decade, moved in a more conservative direction.
We think the explanation lies precisely in the economic context of their formative years and early adulthood. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic upheaval of the 1990s are not abstract historical events for this generation: they are the backdrop against which these individuals grew up, entered the labor market, and tried to build adult lives. Youth unemployment in Lithuania was among the highest in the EU during the early years of this decade. Many of their peers emigrated, dramatically reshaping the social landscape around them. The scarcity hypothesis, which holds that people prioritize values that reflect their most pressing unmet needs, helps explain the pattern. When personal achievement feels foreclosed by economic circumstances, the importance placed on achievement values tends to decline. When the environment feels uncertain, security and tradition gain salience.
There is also likely a selection effect operating here. The emigration of large numbers of young Lithuanians during this period, particularly those motivated by ambitions for career advancement and personal growth, may mean that those who remained were disproportionately more conservative in their orientations to begin with, or became more so in response to what they witnessed around them.
What is also striking is how differently the Soviet legacy generations responded to the same period fluctuations. The Soviet and late Soviet cohorts showed far less sensitivity to the economic disruptions of 2010 to 2020. Having been socialized under conditions of scarcity, political repression, and constrained personal freedoms, these generations appear to have developed a resilience of sorts, a value structure that was less destabilized by economic turbulence than that of their younger compatriots.
What this tells us about value change more broadly
These findings push back against simple narratives about how societies modernize. The assumption that democratization and economic development will reliably produce a shift toward self-expression and openness to change does not survive contact with the Lithuanian data. Values are not just a reflection of how prosperous or free a society is at a given moment. They carry the weight of history, and they respond to the specific conditions that different generations encounter in their most formative years.
For Lithuania, a society that has been in near-continuous transition for three decades, this means that values remain contested terrain, shaped simultaneously by Soviet legacies, post-independence economic realities, and the particular vulnerabilities of each successive cohort. Whether the conservative turn among the youngest generation proves to be a temporary adaptation to economic hardship, or a more durable feature of their value profile, is a question only further longitudinal research will be able to answer.
What is clear is that the story of Lithuanian values is not one of steady linear change. It is a story of generations navigating radically different pasts, coping with a turbulent present, and carrying the traces of both into their orientations toward the future.
This post is adapted from: Mockaitis, A.I., Kumpikaitė-Valiūnienė, V., Duobienė, J., Banevičienė, I., & Žičkutė-Daugelavičienė, I. (2025). Between past and present: Age, period and cohort effects on changing values in Lithuania. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00220221251326957
Funding for this research was granted by the Lithuanian Research Council, Nr. S-MIP-23-115
Further reading:
Who’s at the Wheel? CEO Personality and the Drive to Internationalize
What our new research reveals about the CEOs who drive firm internationalization
There is a persistent assumption in leadership research that the most effective executives share broadly positive traits: conscientious, agreeable, emotionally stable. But what if some of the most consequential drivers of firm behavior lie precisely where we least like to look?
A study recently published in the International Business Review, co-authored with colleagues at Maynooth University and Victoria University of Wellington, takes that question seriously. We examine whether CEOs who score high on what psychologists call the “dark triad” of personality, comprising narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, are more likely to lead their firms into international markets, and why.
The dark triad: not just a liability
The dark triad captures three overlapping but distinct personality profiles. Narcissists display grandiosity, a need for recognition, and an intense drive for dominance. Machiavellians are strategic, calculating, and willing to manipulate to achieve their goals. Psychopaths are impulsive, low on empathy, and drawn to risk. These traits carry obvious costs in organizational life: bullying, unethical conduct, and poor interpersonal dynamics are well-documented correlates.
But the picture is more complicated than a simple moral ledger. Research across entrepreneurship and management has increasingly documented the upside. Individuals high on the dark triad are more likely to recognize opportunities, less deterred by uncertainty, and more willing to make bold, unconventional decisions. Our study extends this logic to international business, asking whether these same qualities translate into a propensity for internationalization at the firm level.
What we found
Drawing on data from 405 small and medium-sized firms in the United Kingdom and United States, we find that CEO dark triad personality is positively associated with the degree to which their firms pursue international markets. The mechanism, however, is not simply that dark triad CEOs take bigger swings. What appears to matter is that these leaders cultivate what the strategy literature calls organizational ambidexterity: the firm’s capacity to simultaneously exploit existing strengths while exploring new opportunities.
Ambidexterity, we argue, is exactly the kind of capability that dark triad CEOs are well-positioned to foster. Their appetite for short-term gain pushes exploitative refinement, while their relentless pursuit of status and dominance fuels exploratory risk-taking. Together, these translate into a balanced, forward-moving organizational posture that supports international expansion. Ambidexterity partially mediates the relationship between CEO personality and internationalization, meaning the personality effect operates both through this firm-level capability and through direct strategic choices at the top.
Why this matters
For decades, international business research has focused on what CEOs know and who they know: international experience, social networks, institutional knowledge. Our study draws attention to who they are. Personality is not merely a demographic variable to be controlled away; it shapes the strategic frame through which leaders perceive, interpret, and act upon opportunities in foreign markets.
This has practical implications for boards, investors, and governance structures. A CEO with dark triad characteristics may accelerate internationalization in ways that generate genuine competitive value, particularly in resource-constrained SMEs where the personality of a single leader has outsized organizational influence. At the same time, these traits carry real risks that governance structures need to account for. The question is not whether to avoid such leaders entirely, but how to channel their tendencies productively and build in the institutional checks that prevent the same boldness from becoming recklessness.
The findings also open up a richer research agenda. Future work might examine whether these effects vary across cultural or institutional contexts, how dark triad leadership interacts with team composition, and whether different combinations of the three traits produce different internationalization pathways.
Going global is never purely a strategic calculation. At the executive level, personality is very much part of the equation.
Interested? Read more:
Nooshabadi, J.E., Mockaitis, A.I., & Chugh, R. (2024). Chief executive officer’s dark triad personality and firm’s degree of internationalization: The mediating role of ambidexterity. International Business Review. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2024.102296
Further reading:
- Babiak, P., & Hare, R.D. Snakes in Suits, Revised Edition: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office.
- Hare, R.D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us.
- Murphy, M. Managing Narcissists, Blamers, Dramatics and More…: Research-Driven Scripts For Managing Difficult Personalities At Work.
The Silence Syndrome: What Multinationals Get Wrong About Corporate Language
New research on corporate language, socialization, and the conditions under which knowledge actually transfers
Picture this: a U.S.-based subsidiary in Shanghai introduces “English-only Fridays” to encourage use of the corporate language. The result is not better communication. It is silence. Employees disengage, avoid conversations, and curtail the very knowledge-sharing the policy was designed to promote. Researchers have called this the “silence syndrome,” and it captures a problem that far too many multinationals encounter without fully understanding.
Our new study published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Management sets out to explain why corporate language mandates so often fail to deliver on their promise, and what organizations should do instead.
The policy versus the practice
The study draws on data from 132 subsidiaries of foreign MNEs operating in Jiangsu Province, China, representing parent firms from 22 countries across Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. Its starting point is a distinction that sounds simple but has substantial implications: there is a meaningful difference between formally adopting a corporate language and actually using it. Most of the literature has treated these as the same thing. They are not.
The formal adoption of a corporate language, typically English, is a top-down directive. It specifies what language communication should happen in. What it does not do is ensure that the resulting communication is meaningful to those on the receiving end. Subsidiaries can comply with such policies on paper while the practical reality on the ground looks quite different, a phenomenon organizational scholars have called ceremonial adoption. Our data show that formal adoption is actually negatively associated with communication quality. The mandate, in other words, can make things worse before it makes them better.
The relevance problem
To make sense of this, the study applies relevance theory, drawn from linguistics, to the organizational context. The core insight is straightforward: for communication to be effective, recipients must perceive the information as relevant, which means it must be cognitively accessible and contextually meaningful, not merely linguistically comprehensible. A message delivered in a language you are uncomfortable with, about practices whose organizational rationale you do not fully grasp, does not transfer knowledge. It generates cognitive burden and communicative withdrawal.
This reframes the challenge for MNEs considerably. The question is not simply which language to use but whether the information being communicated lands as relevant to subsidiary employees. That depends on communication quality, on socialization, and on employees’ actual proficiency in the corporate language, and these three factors interact.
What the findings show
Three empirical findings stand out. First, while formal corporate language adoption does not directly improve communication quality, high-quality communication does significantly improve knowledge transfer. The practical implication is that MNEs need to invest in how information is conveyed, not just in which language it is delivered. Clarity, contextual fit, and directness matter. Expatriate managers in high-context environments like China need to tailor communication to local cognitive frameworks, not simply translate headquarters messages and transmit them downward.
Second, when host country nationals actually use the corporate language in their daily interactions, this generates higher levels of socialization, both formal and informal, which in turn drives knowledge transfer. The causal pathway matters: it is not language use per se that helps transfer knowledge, but the social interactions that language use opens up. Joint meetings, cross-national teams, shared training programs, socializing during and outside working hours are the mechanisms through which knowledge becomes meaningful and transferable. Importantly, socialization substitutes to some extent for high-quality formal communication. Subsidiaries with rich socialization depend less on the clarity of formal channels because informal interaction fills in the contextual gaps.
Third, and perhaps most counterintuitively, language proficiency moderates these processes in ways that complicate the standard managerial prescription. The socialization pathway is most important precisely in subsidiaries where proficiency is lower. Where employees struggle with the corporate language, face-to-face interaction and deliberate socialization become more, not less, critical. Waiting until proficiency improves before investing in socialization is the wrong sequence. The research also finds that a high level of proficiency is not a prerequisite for effective knowledge transfer; employees can engage productively through socialization even with imperfect command of the corporate language.
What this means in practice
For MNEs operating across significant linguistic and cultural distance, these findings reframe the managerial task. Language training remains valuable, but it should be designed around high-relevance, practically grounded skills rather than formal proficiency benchmarks. More importantly, organizations need to build the social infrastructure through which language becomes a vehicle for shared meaning rather than a barrier to it. In the Chinese context specifically, this means attending to guanxi, to the development of personal relationships between expatriates and host country nationals, and to the creation of deliberate opportunities for interaction that bridge the in-group/out-group dynamics that can otherwise shut down knowledge exchange.
The broader lesson is simple but easy to overlook. A language mandate tells employees what to speak. It cannot, on its own, ensure they are actually heard.
Read more: Mockaitis, A.I., Tan, J., Zhu, J., Zhu, C.J., & Chen, Z. (2026). Corporate language and knowledge transfer in MNE subsidiaries: A relevance lens. Asia Pacific Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-025-10063-z
Further reading:
Diaspora & Cultural Identity
I surveyed over 1,100 Lithuanian migrants worldwide expecting to find cultures drifting apart across generations. What we found was more surprising.
The story we usually tell about diaspora goes something like this: a people displaced from their homeland carry its culture with them, transmit it to their children, and over generations it slowly fades as they assimilate into their host countries. The Lithuanian diaspora, consisting of waves of wartime refugees, Soviet-era exiles, and more recent economic migrants scattered across continents, seemed to be the perfect setting for testing that story. It turned out to complicate it considerably.
What we found
We measured individual-level cultural values across five dimensions: collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity, and long-term orientation, comparing Lithuanian-born migrants, foreign-born diaspora members, and nonemigrant home country nationals.
On three of the five dimensions, the groups were strikingly similar. Collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation showed no significant differences across generations, emigration waves, or migrant groups. Values that one might expect to erode over decades of living abroad appear, instead, to hold.
Three of five cultural values showed no significant differences between migrants and nonemigrants, regardless of how long ago, or from where, people left.
The differences that did emerge were on power distance and masculinity. Lithuanian-born migrants score higher on both than foreign-born diaspora members, and the generational pattern is clear: older cohorts, who came of age under Soviet rule or post-independence economic turbulence, endorse hierarchy and assertiveness more strongly than younger cohorts socialized in more open, prosperous conditions. This is consistent with what we know about values formation: people carry the imprint of the world they grew up in.
The bigger question
Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding is about timing. We might expect post-war diaspora members, who have been separated from Lithuania for decades, unable to return, to have drifted furthest from home country values. They have not, at least not on most dimensions. The differences between emigration waves are modest. What appears to matter more than when people left is the simple fact that they left at all: migrants as a group differ from nonemigrants in consistent ways, regardless of wave or generation.
This has implications well beyond the Lithuanian case. International business research routinely treats national culture scores as if they describe a homogeneous group. Behind any national average lie subgroups shaped by radically different histories – people who fled, people who chose to go, people born abroad to parents who fled. Collapsing those distinctions into a single number discards exactly the variation that tells us something interesting about how culture actually works.
See:
Mockaitis, A.I., & Zander, L. (2023). Dissecting generations of migrant identities within a diaspora. In: A.I.Mockaitis (Ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of Global Migration in International Business, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38886-6_6
Further reading:
Eggstraordinary Art: A New Book Just Released on Egg Decorating
Once a year for at least a week, my kitchen and dining room become a frenzied artist’s workshop full of dyes, the smell of melting beeswax, and a variety of tools. I go on a hunt for white chicken eggs to ethnic shops (and chicken farms!) and buy as many as I can, and spend my days hunched over the delicate eggs, painstakingly fashioning each egg into a work of art. Each year I try a new technique or style, searching for design inspirations that surpass the creations of the year before. Some of the eggs take several hours, depending on the tradition in which they are designed. Decorating eggs this way for Easter is a family and ethnic tradition. I have been decorating since childhood, and over the years I have amassed a collection of my favorite ones. Many of the eggs are given as gifts. For the past decade, I have taken photos of them and shared them with the Lithuanian community.
These photos are now published in my new book Eggstraordinary Art: Beautiful Eastern European Eggs for Easter. It is available now worldwide on Amazon.
Click here to go to the sales website.
The eggs in this photo are decorated in traditional Lithuanian style using the drop-pull method. But I have also learned the Ukrainian method, which is far more intricate. The book includes descriptions of these traditions and a photo gallery.
Understanding Openness to Change among Lithuanian Generations
VALUEHOST is a three-year research project funded by the Lithuanian Research Council. We explore changing Lithuanian values, with a focus on emigrants and their experiences in their host countries. In this post, I introduce some interesting findings from one of our studies on changing values at home.
We have analyzed data between the years 2010-2020, from the European Social Survey database on individuals’ values. In this study, we were interested in exploring whether values can change in the short term. Scholars have long held that values are enduring, and that they are very slow to change. In societies, this change would be steady, and progressive over generations. Typically, we notice these differences by comparing our own values with those of our parents’ generation.
But much of the research on values change has been in the context of relatively stable advanced economies. Generations here have labels which we all know: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, etc. Societies in the former USSR, though, have had different social, political, and economic transformations. Their process of modernization has been quite different.
In our study, we distinguish between generations which we link to political eras. People who grew up in these different eras in Lithuania acquired their values during vastly different historical periods. Some periods were more turbulent than others. We label them the Stalin generation for individuals born before 1945. The Soviet generation includes those born between 1945 and 1969. The late Soviet generation comprises those born from 1970 to 1989. The Independent EU generation includes individuals born after 1989. One of our aims was to compare the values of these different political generations to one another and over time.
Here we look at one of the results on Openness to Change values, derived from the work of Shalom Schwartz. This is a measure that combines three personal values: self-direction, stimulation and hedonism. Self-direction encompasses the extent to which individuals value independence in thought and action. Stimulation reflects how much people value excitement, novelty and challenges in life. And hedonism refers to the pursuit of personal pleasure or immediate gratification.
We compared six rounds of surveys across more than 11,000 individuals, starting in 2010, and every two years thereafter.
In the figure, we can see that openness to change appears to fluctuate over the years. Some generations are quite similar, but one stands out – the Independent EU generation. These are individuals, who, at the time of the survey, were between the ages of 18 and 30. For the other generations, openness to change declines slightly but increases over time by survey round 10 in 2020. We see the opposite in the youngest generation. Here, openness to change declines steadily over the years. In the final survey round, there is a slight increase. But overall, openness to change has declined for this generation during the 10 years up to 2020.
We would be interested in hearing your thoughts about why this has happened.
Narcissistic CEOs: Strategies for Entrepreneurial Success
Our latest article has just been published in the International Small Business Journal. Have you ever worked with someone who is at times charismatic and charming and at other times nitpicky, controlling and lacking in empathy? A coworker or manager who likes to brag about themselves, their achievements, successes and ambitions to be the best of the best, yet is also often insecure, envious, and manipulative? They instigate office drama and act as the center of attention. They crave glory. They are difficult to work with yet have their superiors, clients, and partners charmed. That coworker or boss likely has narcissistic tendencies.
Our study focuses on CEOs with these types of personality traits.
We analyze the tendencies of narcissistic CEOs to engage in acquiring, developing, and protecting resources. We examine how these behaviors translate to fulfilling their grandiose entrepreneurial strategies. Essentially, narcissistic CEOs are resource hogs. This helps them weather uncertain times, and when threatened, they are further activated to try (and succeed at their) innovative, proactive, and risky strategies.
“It’s all about resources: Narcissistic CEOs and entrepreneurial orientation during disruptions” by Richa Chugh from the Victoria University of Wellington, Audra I. Mockaitis from Maynooth University, Stephen E. Lanivich, University of Memphis, and Javad E. Nooshabadi, Maynooth University, was published in September, 2024.
The article is FREE to access: https://doi-org.may.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/02662426241269774
We would be interested to hear your thoughts about our publication.
Explore the Elgar Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Management
The Elgar Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Management is available now! Access the first chapter and introductory content for FREE here.
The Elgar Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Management, edited by Professor Audra I. Mockaitis (Maynooth University) and Professor Christina L. Butler (Kingston University), is the first reference book of its kind in the field. The book reflects the eclectic and interdisciplinary nature of cross-cultural management. It includes entries from scholars in cross-cultural psychology, business and management, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and political science. These contributions form a collective discourse about the evolution and trajectory of the field. Authors present a range of perspectives, theories, and concepts. They challenge traditional paradigms. Together, they offer new multi-paradigmatic explanations to cross-cultural phenomena. Suitable for scholars, students and practitioners, the collection presents the state-of-the art in the cross-cultural management field.
Elgar Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Management Launching in October 2024
The presses are still hot as a new book is coming out in October, 2024. Edited by me and Professor Christina L. Butler from Kingston University, UK, the Elgar Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Management is the first reference book of its kind in the field.
The book reflects the eclectic and interdisciplinary nature of the field of cross-cultural management, with entries from scholars in the cross-cultural psychology, business and management, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and political science disciplines, contributing to a collective discourse about the evolution and trajectory of the field. Authors present a range of perspectives, theories, and concepts, challenge traditional paradigms, and collectively offer new multi-paradigmatic explanations to cross-cultural phenomena.
Suitable for: scholars from various disciplines, as a guide to new developments in the field; students in any major that has a cross-cultural component to the curriculum (e.g., psychology, management, international business, sociology….) as a useful reference; and anyone with a curiosity about cross-cultural management.
The collection presents the state-of-the art in the cross-cultural management field. Written by eminent scholars from across the globe, entries include summaries, commentaries, and new perspectives on both theory and research. There are 78 chapters, or entries, in eight subject groups:
- Conceptualizations and Components of Culture
- Similarities and Differences across Cultures
- Interacting across Cultures
- Developing Cultural Awareness
- Cultural Identity and Diversity
- The Cross-Cultural Management of People
- Organizational and Institutional Perspectives
- Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Management
Available to purchase on the publisher’s website , AMAZON, Barnes & Noble, and other places!
ISBN: 978 1 80392 817 3
Professor Audra I. Mockaitis 