Robert C. Giambatista

Narcissism and teamwork skill acquisition in management education.

Recent scholars (Twenge & Campbell, 2009) have documented a continuing trend, generation by generation, of increasing levels of narcissism in the American population. This ongoing trend has often been associated with the millennial generation, who, on average, register increased levels of subclinical narcissism when compared with previous generations. Higher narcissism levels come with important implications for the classroom and workplace. In this study, we argued that one relevant concern would be teamwork skills. We argued that individuals higher on narcissism, and particularly those high on the subdimensions of entitlement and superiority, would be overconfident and would acquire fewer behavioral skills in a behaviorally based learning environment. We found some evidence to support these concerns and discussed our study and its implications for scholars, managers, and educators. We close with a call to readers to not conflate the millennial generation with narcissism generally, nor to overreact to the documented rise in narcissism levels, but to focus on its most problematic aspects in individual students and employees who demonstrate these attributes.

Burning Man Values Examined: Gratitude as a Culturally-Driven and Value-Based Organizational Mainstay

Gratitude expression is examined as a culturally-derived principle that can be adopted as a best practices strategy that can make organizations more dynamic and human relationships more meaningful. Burning Man is presented as an exemplar of gratitude implementation by crafting the expression of gratitude into an elevated organizational phenomenon (including a cultural principal of unconditional gifting). Burning Man has also crafted a “Culture of Appreciation” as a set of organizationally-derived practices complementary to processes of gratitude implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion of gratitude and appreciation as an organizational mainstay.

Millennials, learning, and development: Managing complexity avoidance and narcissism.

In this conceptual paper, we consider the challenge of managing millennials from two perspectives. We describe the millennial generation as coming of age awash in technology, resulting in a tendency toward what we label complexity avoidance. We then briefly review the findings of others who identified rising levels of narcissism associated with the generation. We turn to Argyris’s (1970) Organizational Development Intervention and Method model to describe how these characteristics present challenges to learning, development, and management in general. We then turn to recommendations for facilitating the learning and development of generationally typical millennials and then for millennials who also possess narcissistic traits.