Abstract

Organizational narcissism occurs when members have unrealistic beliefs about their organization’s attributes, such as being extraordinary, omnipotent, and omniscient. Since this belief may harm organizational efficiency, investigating the antecedents of that feeling of grandiosity would provide significant insights for future research. Our first study, which was conducted to investigate the moderating effect of organizational collectivism and individualism on the relationship between employee engagement and organizational narcissism, revealed only the presence of the moderating effect of individualism on the proposed relationship. Interestingly, the results of our first study also showed that both collectivism and individualism have positive relationships with organizational narcissism, although collectivism and individualism are considered two opposite poles of the culture in an organization. A key finding was, thus, that an organization can be both collectivist and individualist, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. The current study aimed to reinvestigate the effect of organizational culture on the relationship between organizational engagement and organizational narcissism, but this time, a cluster analysis was conducted to indicate the effect of engagement on organizational narcissism in four different combinations, in which collectivism and individualism are high or low in each pattern. Four hundred thirty-three white-collar workers from Istanbul, Turkey, participated in the study. The most robust result of the study was that the relationship between organizational engagement and organizational narcissism has the strongest coefficient when the levels of collectivism and individualism are both high.