External seminars

Differences in national culture are commonly invoked to explain cross-country variability in the support for autocratic leaders, that is, leaders who concentrate all decision power in their hands. However, national culture—broadly defined as the prevailing beliefs that are transmitted across generations in a country—correlates with many other contextual factors (e.g., formal institutions), making it complex to isolate purely cultural effects from related confounds. To model how national culture affects the support for autocratic leadership over time and across contexts, this study employs an empirical strategy based on migrants’ data, that is, individuals with different cultural backgrounds who now live in the same country. I first construct a novel measure of support for autocratic leadership using secondary data, showing its correlation with validated measures of autocratic organizational leadership, centralized organizational structures, and acceptance of hierarchy. Then, I show that migrants’ support for autocratic leadership correlates with the culturally-endorsed autocratic implicit leadership theories (i.e., the average “preferences” for autocratic leadership) prevalent in migrants’ countries of birth. Additional analyses confirm a similar pattern, suggesting both a limited cultural assimilation and an inter-generational transmission of the support for autocratic leadership from first- to second-generation migrants (i.e., native individuals with at least a foreign parent). These relationships—based on more than 10’000 individuals representing more than 60 national cultures—hold after controlling for several covariates and country fixed effects, and indicate that deeply held cultural beliefs can affect the support for autocratic leadership even in the case of substantial and swift contextual changes.

There is ample evidence that work conditions affect employees’ well-being. Much of the research to date takes a static approach, but losses in work quality (i.e., increased job stressors and reduced job resources) are thought to be related to deteriorations in well-being, whereas gains in work quality (i.e., reduced job stressors and increased job resources) are believed to improve well-being. The concept of losses and gains plays a pivotal role in Hobfoll’s conservation of resources (COR) theory, which argues that losses have a stronger impact on individuals’ well-being than gains do. To date, however, this Principle 1 of COR theory still awaits a thorough empirical test. Using data from three longitudinal studies (Ns = 10,756, 579, and 2,441), we investigated the effects of changes in work conditions on employee well-being. In line with COR theory, the effect of a loss in work quality (i.e., deterioration in work conditions) was generally stronger than the effect of a gain (i.e., improvement in work conditions). Interestingly, however, we found a more consistent pattern for the effect of certain stressors (e.g., social stressors) than others (e.g., workload). By testing a central principle of COR theory, this research advances theoretical understanding of how work affects well-being. Furthermore, by revealing that previous studies may have underestimated the detrimental effects of deteriorating work conditions and overestimated the positive effects of improved work conditions on employees’ well-being, this research also has implications for organizational interventions.