Personal characteristics of effective managers in organizational cultures of different types

Abstract

Since the 1990s Russian enterprises have been experiencing difficulties in transitioning to the market-innovative model of development. In the context of the current variability of management paradigms, we had an opportunity to study the internal and external regulators of organizational changes that are typical for a transitioning economy. Organizational culture (OC) was studied as an external factor, while the personal traits of middle managers were viewed as internal factors because these managers are the agents for values and for behavior models, from corporate directives to "front-desk" personnel. The goal of this theoretical and empirical study was to determine the personality traits of middle managers who were deemed effective by top management in companies transitioning to the market-innovative model of development in the context of different types of OCs.During the preliminary stage, we conducted a comparative analysis of the requirements for the personal traits of middle managers who are working in stable conditions as well as in conditions of transfer to the market-innovative model of development, and we selected the relevant methods of empirical research. During the first stage of the empirical part of our research we defined a group of four enterprises with OCs of different types, identified their effective mid-level managers based on expert evaluations by the top leadership, and formed test groups. During the second stage we studied the personal characteristics of these managers.We determined that the personality traits of managers deemed effective by their leaders form integral complexes, which in turn correlate in a certain way with the type of OC of an enterprise. We identified four models of an effective manager: Mentor, Dictator, Innovator, and Businessman; these managers have varying degrees of work productivity, value priorities in the development of OC, personal self-concepts, organizational leadership skills, and types of decision-making. It has been demonstrated that in the evaluation of the effectiveness of a manager of an enterprise, the correspondence of his/her personal traits to the characteristics of the OC prevailing in the company is a more important factor than his/her agreement with the long-term goals of the company and, therefore, with the more promising type of OC. This phenomenon opens a way to utilize such functions of OC as internal integration but prevents external adaptation, which in turn becomes a serious psychological obstacle in the development of an enterprise. 70 L. N. Zakharova, E. V. KorobeynikovaThe OC of an enterprise has a powerful potential to attract employees with certain sets of psychological traits. Important tasks for the psychological support of the organizational development of an enterprise could be the development of a criteria database for the evaluation of managers and the development of a management talent pool based on the market-innovative vector of development of an enterprise with relevant changes in the OC.