Organizational Decentralization and Employee Well-being: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between Italy and Kazakhstan

Decision-making power is a fundamental organisational process, and recent evidence suggests that distributing authority more broadly across employees (organisational decentralisation) may promote employee well-being through stronger organisational identification (Filippi et al., 2024). This pilot study examined whether perceived organisational decentralisation is associated with organisational identification and employee well-being in Italy and Kazakhstan. It also explored whether the decentralisation-identification link varies across a low- versus high-power-distance context and whether the translated measures show acceptable reliability. An online survey of 63 full- and part-time employees (Italy n = 21; Kazakhstan n = 42) assessed perceived decentralisation, organisational structure, organisational identification, burnout, work engagement, job satisfaction, perceived organisational support, power distance orientation, and social dominance orientation. Most translated scales showed good internal consistency, whereas the organisational structure scale and the descriptive social dominance subscale performed poorly. Across both countries, perceived decentralisation was positively associated with organisational identification, and organisational identification was linked to higher work engagement, higher job satisfaction, and lower burnout. Contrary to the original hypothesis, the decentralisation-identification association did not differ significantly between Italy and Kazakhstan. Instead, the identification-well-being associations were stronger in the Italian sample. Kazakhstani employees reported higher perceived decentralisation, organisational identification, work engagement, job satisfaction, power distance orientation, and descriptive social dominance orientation, while Italian employees reported higher burnout. Because the study used a small, non-probabilistic, cross-sectional sample, the findings should be treated as preliminary and hypothesis-generating rather than causal. Keywords: organisational decentralisation, organisational identification, employee well-being, power distance, cross-cultural comparison, Italy, Kazakhstan.