ISSN 0798 1015

Vol. 39 (Number 19) Year 2018 • Page 30

Russian model of manager as transformative leader

Modelo ruso de gerente como líder transformador

V. N. STEGNII 1; L. N. KURBATOVA 2; A. Y. VNUTSKIKH 3; K.A. ANTIPYEV 4; N.V. VIATKINA 5

Received: 05/03/2018 • Approved: 01/04/2018

Content

1. Introduction

2. Methods

3. Research results of leadership qualities and competences of Russian managers

4. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

At the present time, among sociologists the following hypothesis is becoming the most wide-spread – the functioning effectiveness of society depends, first of all, on the effectiveness of the management system in it. As experts in the management field believe, the effectiveness of the management system, in the first place, depends on work effectiveness of the “strong” manager.

In this connection, a question arises: what does a “strong” manager imply? What qualities of the manager are included in this concept?

Studies in this filed should be divided into European, American and Asian cultural traditions. Differences in interpretation of the European and Asian cultural type of organizational management were noted by A.A. Itskhokin in the middle of the 90s. He distinguishes between the culture as a value phenomenon in the West-European tradition and the culture as spirituality in the East-Asian tradition. Modern sociological approaches preserve this cultural peculiarity of researching the management system (Itskhokin 1995).

In the European and American culture of management, a traditional managerial approach prevails, which appeals to the concepts “management style”, “leadership”, “team management”. A particular role in this context belongs to a cognitive approach. If culture is present, it is present only as a value-normative factor of behaviour. In the opinion of, for example, researchers Yan Bing Zhang, Jake Harwood & Mary Lee Hummert, the cognitive aspect of management is put in the forefront (2005).

The Asian culture of management study bases on the Confucian approach with regard to the socio-economic factor as a characteristic of socio-organizational relations. Thus, for example, А. Tjeldvoll notes that strengthening of competitiveness in the global market economy leads to the necessity of putting “knowledge” in the forefront as a management means (Tjeldvoll 2011). Today, namely, “knowledge” becomes the main resource capable of increasing effectiveness of managing society and social institution. Rajnandini Pillai and colleagues, in their turn, determine leadership in “Confucian Asia” as a model of organizational justice and trust, as well as educating subordinates through their satisfaction with the organization (Pillai, Kohles, Bligh, Carsten and Brodowsky 2011). Management culture in many aspects is determined in the opinion of Steers R.M., Sanchez-Runde C.J. & Nardon L. Culture by the national specifics of the organizational management by the example of China (Steers, Sanchez-Runde and Nardon 2012).

Leadership is highlighted in the management system. However, the Western-American tradition continues to dominate. Thus, “leadership”, in the opinion, for example, of Tony Cartera, is determined as using skills, experience and directions, helping one to improve one’s work. Leadership, in his opinion, in the first place, consists in giving people feedback to consolidate the things that they do well, proposing ways and means for improvement (Carter 2009).

The most widespread model of leadership has become a transformational model, developed by Bernard M. Bass (1999). His idea consists in the fact that a transformational leader “inspires, stimulates intellectually and considers an individuality of a worker”. Diana Boer, Anika Deinert, Astrid C. Homan & Sven C. Voelpel, developing the idea of Bernard M. Bass, put in this concept the following: satisfaction with work and organizational devotion of employees and effectiveness of the leader him/herself (Boer, Deinert, Homan and Voelpel, 2016). One more, very important characteristic of a modern manager as a leader, in the opinion of Darren J. Good & Garima Sharma, is “leadership flexibility as a determining factor of leaders’ effectiveness” (Good and Sharma 2010).

Consequently, the manager of the organization as a social institute must be the leader in one’s subdivision, having a specific style of management (Adizes 2008, pp. 107-205). However, in this case, a socio-status contradiction arises: on the one hand, managers of the linear-functional level of management and subordinates are employees; on the other hand, a manager is a guide of the owner’s interests of the production organization. The relationships of the subordination “a manager and a subordinate” are influenced by the law “unity and struggle of opposites”.

Having drawn the cultural parallel of managers’ influence on perception of the work results by the leaders, Seog Joo Hwang and other researchers have concluded that, on the whole, the manager’s behaviour (the USA and Asia) does not depend on the specifics of the ethnoculture, apart from Japan (Hwang, Quast, Center, Chung, Hahn and Wohkittel, 2015). This, in the first place, is determined by the fact that in the global world, a bureaucratic (according to M. Veber) organization prevails. The difference of Japanese culture from other Asian countries, the “Confucian management model”, which took part in the research, consists in the fact that the culture of “devotion to the group” prevails in Japanese culture, whereas the culture of “devotion to the master” – in Chinese culture (Banhe 1988).

Today, namely in the framework of researching transformational leadership, the most widespread method of study becomes the study of various styles of supervision. The emphasis is put on not only active-positive types of managers, the object of study is leadership based on non-productive socio-production management; let us call this direction as “depressive leadership” (L.N. Kurbatova), although in the Canadian research of Jane Mullen, E. Kevin Kelloway and Michael Teed this phenomenon is called “passive leadership” (Mullen, Kelloway and Teed 2011). However, “passive leadership” is akin to the “liberal style” of supervision or as it is called otherwise – “"laissez faire" style”.

It is worth paying attention to the definition of management concepts. If these authors orient themselves to the management aimed at security of the organization, it is worth considering that the liberal style is effective enough, for instance, in venture organizations, in teams, where the labour is of creative, innovative nature. However, “depressive leadership” reflects the level of social, psychological state, tension of both a manager and a team, as well as an organization as objects of management. This problem is conditioned by the necessity of organizational management to adapt quickly to external socio-economic changes, which have been frequently conditioned by the instability of the political situation at the regional, state and global levels. Therefore, Robert J. Blomme and his colleagues note the necessity of managers to change their organization in conditions of turbulence, which gives rise to unpredictability of the environment of the organization performance. They call this condition of organizational management as “ambiguity” (Blomme 2012).

Consequently, managing a social institution, an organization (of any type, form and kind) is always connected with risks; hence, today, such direction is arising and actively developing as risk-oriented management.

Therefore, when researching leadership, the managerial style independently of the choice of the socio-economic, production and labour vector of management oriented to a “result” and “security”, one proceeds from the necessity of a complex approach based on the systemic and institutional, structural and functional method of analysis.

One of the main not only competences but also missions of a manager is the ability to lead people to the activity connected with implementing the functioning of an institute, personnel (Art of leading, 2007, p. 17-58).

However, in conditions of multiethnic organizational culture, managers have to vary between “transformational” and “transactional” cultures. Therefore, for example, in the opinion of Souher El Amouri & Shirley O’Neill, it is necessary to form the competence in the field of intercultural communication (Amouri and O’Neill 2014). When the staff is monocultural, the “transformational style of management” becomes effective (Junquera, and Del Brío, 2017). At the same time, researchers Gerald Albaum & Joel Herche note the fact that in different countries, there is a specifity of using management styles, which also influences the formation of leadership space of management (Albaum and Herche 1999; De Vos, De Hauw, and Willemse, 2015).

Thus, methodological variety of approaches of studying leadership as a means of management and management style determines the culture of the management style of a modern organization, its organizational culture, thus creating conditions for the effective functioning of the personnel as a basis of organization survival.

However, it is necessary to take into account the following: from the viewpoint of the definition “leaders”, one must understand the essence and content of this concept. Leader is “one of us”, that is, this is one of the group members; however, in contrast to others, this one possesses a stable system of moral values, norms, rules, similar to the group values. This is a human being able to generate ideas, form goals and able to organize a group aimed at their achievement and realization. At the same time, to preserve stability of “submissiveness” along the management vertical, in modern European and American organizations it is customary to appoint the manager from the outside the production and functional group. Therefore, formation of “leadership space” becomes problematic; researchers of different scientific schools fix some or other aspects of an effective manager, which are included into the leadership factor, which creates difficulties for formation of some universal “organizational leader”.

2. Methods

The sociological approach is chosen as the research method; the research programme includes the tasks on revealing significant qualities and key managerial competences which can be inherent in the modern manager; among them the presence of leadership potential becomes important. Status characteristics of the modern manager are assessed from the positions of internal and external identification. Leadership qualities and competences are assessed by the subject (manager) and the object (subordinate) as participants of the unified organizational and managerial process. The structure of qualities and competences is presented in the questions of the questionnaire that are considered in the analytical part of the paper.

A social group of managers by the content and the nature of labour has a specific structure; therefore, the object of this empirical analysis is not the whole group of managers, but only managers of the grass-root management and their subordinates. The subject area of the research is the idea of managers and subordinates about a manager as a leader in the framework of the transformational model of management. At that, the process of identifying the manager with the socio-professional group should be considered not only from the positions of self-assessment, but also through acceptance of others’ assessments.

The measurement units are the score system and percent of the number of interviewed respondents.

The sociological research was conducted in 2014-2015 in Perm. The questionnaire survey was conducted using purposive sampling. In total, 162 employees were surveyed from the number of workers of knowledge-intensive and high-tech companies (59 managers and 103 subordinates). The main criteria of selection were socio-psychological, social and managerial components.

3. Research results of leadership qualities and competences of Russian managers

Considering the structure of leadership qualities, the authors proceed from the fact that the modern model of the effective manager, according to the existing management concept, must correspond to the “transformational leader”. In this research, the authors have obtained the following structure of priority qualities of the manager, in the opinion of both a subject (managers) and an object (subordinates) of organization management (Table 1).

Table 1
Assessment of modern manager qualities by subject and object of organizational management
(coefficient by the five-point system of manager qualities’ assessment*)

*Note: the higher the value of the coefficient, to the greater degree this quality is peculiar to a manager

It is worth paying attention to the fact that managers and subordinates characterize a modern manager almost similarly relatively those qualities which have been determined by the subject of the research. It is possible to identify three groups of qualities reflecting different functional domains in the manager’s activity in the opinion of respondents. The first group included the qualities characterizing personality-communicative qualities (4,41 – 4,17 by the array structure of respondents). The second group of qualities comprised the qualities reflecting organizational and labour domain in the management system (4,17 – 4,07 throughout the whole array). In the third group, there were qualities characterizing the organizational and innovation domain of management (3,99 – 3,62 throughout the whole array).

At the same time, it is necessary to note that some divergences in the ideas of managers and subordinates affect largely those qualities that characterize the leadership potential of the manager: ability to stand up for the team, ability to persuade people, authority, honesty, unity of words and deeds, as well as such qualities which form indirectly a positive image of the manager as a leader – ability to react positively to changes and ability to pursue the technological policy in the organization.

Thus, subordinates are oriented to the image of the “transformational leader” whereas managers – to the image, which to a greater degree corresponds to the “transactional leader”. This contradiction determined the attitude of managers and subordinates to the structure of organizational and managerial competences of the modern manager.

In this case, contradictions in opinions of subordinates and managers about the structure of competences, characterizing the leadership model of the manager, are also observed (Table 2).

Table 2
Assessment of organizational management of modern manager
competences by subject and object (% of the respondents’ number)

First, the social mass determining the structure of requirements of leadership competences is highly “inferior” to the social mass, which reveals itself in the system of manager’s needs. This can be related to the type of managerial consciousness and managerial culture of the modern Russian proprietor and top management of the organization (most often these are the same persons), which influences directly the choice of the managerial behaviour type by the grass-root management. For a proprietor, profit rather than success of the organization and its competitiveness is a priority.

Consequently, managers of the grass-root level, knowing this Russian phenomenon, react to the structure of competence requirements in that way. Second, subordinates, in contrast to managers, are free from the influence of the top management (this influence is mediated through the immediate manager); therefore, they treat more loyally the choice of the structure of transformational leadership competences. Third, managers “overstate” the fact that they have leadership competences. When recognizing the presence of certain leadership competences in managers, subordinates are more reserved in their assessment.

The structure of production, labour and managerial competences of managers has an inverse proportion between organizational requirements and socio-professional needs of managers (Fig. 1).

Figure 1
Significant competences of a modern manager

4. Conclusion

The undertaken research has shown that at the present time, the emphasis in the structure of socio-professional needs of managers is shifted from conceptual abilities, corresponding to the organizational and bureaucratic order, to new standards of individual and personality behaviour of the modern manager. Presence of high uncertainty of the external organizational environment reinforces the aspiration for development of abilities to understand modern tendencies and to manage changes. That conforms to those tendencies which both Western-European and Asian researchers note in their studies (Jones and Connolly 2001; Good and Sharma 2010).

It its turn, complication of technical and economic conditions of organization performance necessitates formation of multifunctional skills in the modern manager. Thus, an effective manager must be aimed at not survival and commercial success, but at a flexible response to the requirements of the environment (Sevastyanova and Stegniy, 2015; Kurbatova 2008).

Comparing competences of the modern manager with the competences of the manager of the late 80s of the XXth century, basing on authors’ studies (Stegnii 1989, p. 19-25), let us fix principled, qualitative differences between these types of managers, which function in different social spaces, different social time. Absolutely different requirements are imposed on them, and they possess absolutely different competences (Allinson and Hayes 2000; Fleury, Fleury and Fleury, 2005).

At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the fact that different researchers and practitioners of management have different attitudes to the competence approach; these attitudes are related to the nature of a production purpose. At that, along with the positive assessment of this management method, which has been mentioned above, there is also negative attitude to such approach. In the first place, it is connected with the system of training specialists. In the modern society, a new system of development of enterprise staff capacity is being formed Nevskaia and Esaulova 2013, p. 77-79).

The conducted analysis of qualities and competences of modern managers of enterprises mainly coincides with the data of other researchers (Diachkov 2012, p. 59-61), which is a confirmation of formation of the manager of new type, satisfying the demands of both managers and subordinates. At that, the search for intersection lines of leadership competences between partner organizations, which should allow enhancing effectiveness of organizations’ performance (François, Favre and Negassi 2008), gets special importance, and orientation to formation of organizational management by the model of “transformational leadership” becomes a priority.

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1. Perm National Research Polytechnic University, 614990, Russian Federation, Perm, Komsomolsky Avenue, 29

2. Perm National Research Polytechnic University, 614990, Russian Federation, Perm, Komsomolsky Avenue, 29

3. Perm National Research Polytechnic University, 614990, Russian Federation, Perm, Komsomolsky Avenue, 29

4. Perm National Research Polytechnic University, 614990, Russian Federation, Perm, Komsomolsky Avenue, 29

5. Perm National Research Polytechnic University, 614990, Russian Federation, Perm, Komsomolsky Avenue, 29