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This study examines the effects of narcissism and bonus-based incentive plans on managerial decision-making performance. Using an experiment, the authors first examine decision choices under two levels of an incentive threshold (high and low). Narcissism is measured using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). Typically, the NPI is used as a single monolithic construct in analyses; however, in this study, the authors subdivide it in two ways to gain more nuanced information about its impact on decision making. First, the authors split the NPI into three levels – high, medium, and low (Hascalovitz & Obhi, 2015), and then decompose it into its adaptive and maladaptive components (Campbell, Hoffman, Campbell, & Marchisio, 2011) to examine how these subdivisions affect performance. Results show that the different levels of incentive thresholds affect performance among narcissistic individuals. Results indicate that individuals higher in narcissism and higher in levels of adaptive and maladaptive narcissism outperform their low-trait counterparts in a lower-threshold environment, but not in a high threshold environment.

Disasters and other emergencies are increasing, with millions of people affected by events like earthquakes, fires and flooding. The use of mobile emergency alert systems (MEAS) can improve people’s responses by providing targeted alerts based on location and other personal details. This study aims to understand the factors that influence people’s willingness to share the personal information that is needed to provide context-specific messaging about a threat and protective actions.

Drawing on protection motivation theory (PMT), this study proposes and tests a model of willingness to use personalised MEAS that incorporates key factors related to an individual’s appraisal of a potential threat (i.e. perceived vulnerability and severity) and coping capacity (i.e. response efficacy and self-efficacy), with deterrents like response cost and privacy concern. This study uses survey data from 226 respondents in New Zealand and SmartPLS to assess the model.

The results show how willingness to use MEAS is influenced by people’s appraisal of an emergency threat and their perception of how using MEAS would help them to cope effectively. Fear and perceived severity are significant motivators of MEAS use, along with coping appraisal. However, when the negative influences of privacy concern and response cost are strong enough, they can dissuade use, despite knowing the risks.

The study addresses a gap in research on the use of alert systems like MEAS, which require sharing of personal information and continuous engagement such as the real-time disclosure of one’s location. It confirms the significance of factors not studied in prior research, such as privacy concerns, that can dissuade use. This study also extends the application of the PMT in the context of emergency management.

Given the substantial resources of the United States, the failure of the American federal response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been both tragic and avoidable. The authors frame this response as an artifact of power-addiction among administration officials and examine the US federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of maladaptive denial by government officials, including President Trump.

The authors use qualitative research methods for this study by analyzing key events, public statements by administration officials from multiple credible media reports and US federal government websites. The authors analyzed these data using Weidner and Purohit's (2009) model describing maladaptive denial in organizations and power-addiction among leaders.

The authors' analysis identifies maladaptive denial – and the concomitant power-addiction – as significantly contributing to the Trump administration's failed response to COVID-19. Maladaptive denial and power-addiction characterized Trump as a candidate and for the three years of his presidency preceding the COVID-19 crisis. Whatever normative “guardrails” or checks and balances existed in the American system to restrict the administration's behavior before the crisis were ill-equipped to significantly prevent or alter the failed federal response to the pandemic.

The article applies the model of maladaptive denial in organizations (Weidner and Purohit, 2009) to the public sector, and explores the lengths to which power-addicted leaders and regimes can violate the public's trust in institutions in a crisis, even in the US, a liberal democracy characterized by freedom of political expression. While organizations and change initiatives may fail for a variety of reasons, this case revealed the extent to which maladaptive denial can permeate a government – or any organization – and its response to a crisis.

Given the illegal nature of the gig economy in some cities, this study aims to draw on protection motivation theory to examine the formation of Uber drivers’ self-protective behaviour against legal risks.

In-depth interviews with 10 Uber drivers in Hong Kong were conducted to yield eight maladaptive perceptions, which were then validated using online surveys completed by 232 Uber drivers. These results were then used to examine a mechanism through which threat appraisal, coping appraisal and maladaptive perceptions influence drivers’ unwillingness to work and weekly working hours.

Eight maladaptive perceptions were found to empirically fit a bidimensional conceptualization of cognitive and affective components that significantly reduce workers’ unwillingness to work illegally in the gig economy. The effects on Uber drivers’ unwillingness to work and weekly working hours varied across threat appraisal, coping appraisal and maladaptive perceptions.

Platform companies should find the results insightful because they demonstrate ways of negotiating with governments about its legality of the gig economy. The findings can also assist governments with policy development to make sense of illegal gig work or to legalize the gig economy.

This study complements the overoptimistic discussion of the gig economy to investigate why people engage in illegal work in this context. Protection motivation theory is applied to a new domain to explore gig workers’ maladaptive perceptions of illegal working.

This paper aims to show the role of employees’ self-regulation in defining the effect of job demands on employees’ burnout. Moreover, the paper also highlights the importance of a high-performance work system (HPWS) on the relation between job demands and employee self-regulation.

Data has been collected from public sector hospital nurses through a survey strategy following a time-lagged approach. This data has been analysed to validate the measure and to test the hypotheses through structural equation modelling.

Results of this study indicate that job demands affect employees’ burnout through adaptive regulation (recovery) and maladaptive regulation (self-undermining). Adaptive regulation minimizes while maladaptive regulation supports this effect. Moreover, results also highlight the role of HPWS in mitigating the negative impact of job demands on adaptive regulation.

This study serves as a guide for managers to minimize the burnout of their subordinates in the face of increasing job demands. This study also emphasizes the use of HPWS in organizations so that the burnout of the employees may be decreased by increasing adaptive self-regulation or recovery.

This study enriches the literature on the job demand resource theory by showing how employee job demands, employee self-regulation (psychological processes) and HPWS (organizational processes) collaborate to determine the extent of job burnout of employees.

Children with disabilities that exhibit maladaptive behaviors as a result of abuse and neglect require consideration of a more comprehensive, alternative method of assessment to determine the source and patterns of the behaviors. The need exists to go beyond an assessment of the current level of intellectual functioning, individual academic achievement, and functional behavior to a more ethological approach that considers the dynamics in the home and social settings that influence development. The careful analysis of the child’s social and academic records; patterns and frequency of movement for those in out-of-home placements; interviews and records of primary care givers; along with the intellectual and academic assessments enables special educators, social workers, school staff, and health care professionals to more effectively address the individual needs of the child. This paper discusses assessment methods that utilize a more comprehensive approach to determine the factors that lead to high levels of maladaptive behavior in special needs children. Additionally, alternative intervention strategies are recommended that include establishing the child’s perceived primary care giver with the most stable environment to facilitate the child’s development of more appropriate behaviors.

Adopting the theoretical framework of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT; Ellis, 1962, 1994), we examine the cognitive antecedents of functional behavior and adaptive emotions as indicators of emotional intelligence (EI) and test central assumptions of REBT. In an extension of REBT, we posit that adaptive emotions resulting from rational cognitions reflect more EI than maladaptive emotions, which result from irrational cognitions, because the former lead to functional behavior. The results of the first study using organizational scenarios in an experimental design confirm central assumptions of REBT and support our hypotheses. In a second correlational study we replicate the connection between rational cognitions and EI by measuring real person data using psychometric scales. Both studies indicate that irrational attitudes result in reduced job satisfaction.

University academicians are struggling to engage in teaching, supervision, research and publication. The purpose of this paper is to determine how academicians cope with the various burdens of academia work stressors to overcome burnout.

A cross-sectional study was conducted from January to July 2017. In total, 327 research university academicians were selected using a proportional stratified randomized sampling. Validated measures were used to collect data on perceived work stressors (teaching, research, interpersonal conflicts and career development), coping strategies (adaptive and maladaptive coping) and perceived burnout (emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization and personal accomplishment (PA)). The data were gathered via computer assisted self-interviewing (CASI). The research statistical model was tested by two-steps of assessment replicating covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) with bootstrapping procedure to generalize the sample to the hypothesized model.

Overall data fit the hypothesized model well (CMIN/df=1.788, GFI=0.833, CFI=0.921, TLI=0.916, RMSEA=0.047) with various degree of explanatory value for EE, depersonalization and PA were 60, 49 and 22 percent, respectively. Academicians were resilient against the burden of teaching. However, they did adopt coping mechanisms to overcome research challenges and interpersonal conflicts. The effects of research and interpersonal conflicts on tri-dimensional burnout mediated by maladaptive coping (f² effect size=0.37) had a larger effect than interpersonal conflicts toward burnout mediated by adaptive coping (f² effect size=0.02).

Academicians adopt maladaptive coping for research and interpersonal conflicts to suppress burnout. An integrative approach at both organization and individual levels is crucial to enhance appropriate coping mechanism to curb with burnout among the academicians of a research university.

This is the first study in Malaysia which uniquely estimate the effects of academician’s work stressors toward burnout with introducing coping strategies as mediators toward work stressors and burnout relationship which has been analyzed via CB-SEM.

Sexual harassment on public transport puts women at risk of mental health problems, apart from disrupting their lives and the harmful social consequences. This is especially the case for Pakistani women, for whom sexual harassment has been on the rise for the past decade. This study aims to explore how Pakistani women use strategies to cope with sexual harassment when using public transport and its mediating role in their issues with mental health.

Given that the data collection task on such a culturally sensitive topic was crucial, a mobile application for anonymized data collection was used, which appeared to be an effective strategy. Using the mobile application, 1,054 women who use public transport submitted their responses; however, the analysis is based on 250 usable responses. Their experience of harassment was measured using the Sexual Harassment Experience Questionnaire, their mental health using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales and their coping strategies by the Brief Cope Inventory.

The results indicate that adaptive coping is a significant negative mediator between sexual harassment and mental well-being, whereas maladaptive coping is non-significant. Adaptive coping, i.e. “Acceptance” to admit the reality that the problem exists with all, and “Religion” to seek help spiritually to deal with the problem. Unfortunately, the findings show no suitable coping means to deal with the impact of sexual harassment on women who travel on public transport. This study also illustrates that using the right technologies can encourage participants to submit responses for culturally sensitive topics.

This study provides insight into the experience of street harassment in Pakistani women and how it is related to mental health. This study also explores the role of adaptive and maladaptive coping as an intervening variable between street harassment and mental health.

Observes that the published literature on resistance to organisational change has focused more on organisational issues rather than individual psychological factors. The present study investigated the role of both adaptive and maladaptive defence mechanisms in individual resistance. Surveys were conducted in nine organisations undergoing major change and responses were obtained from 615 employees. The results indicate that five maladaptive defence mechanisms are positively correlated with behavioural intention to resist change, namely, projection, acting out, isolation of affect, dissociation and denial. The adaptive defence mechanism of humour was found to be negatively correlated with resistance intention. Identifies two intervention strategies which can be used by management to address the effects of defence mechanisms on resistance during periods of change in organisations.