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SPONTANEOUS SOCIALIZATION AS A SITUATIONAL VARIABLE IN A THEORY OF MACROECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS
Inna KOVALENKO1, Nikolai KOVALENKO2
International Humanitarian University, Ukraine
Abstract. The purpose of the article is to analyze the reasons for the failure of the macroeconomic and social transformation of society on the example of 1985-1991 restructuring ("perestroika") in the Soviet Union. It is proposed to consider spontaneous socialization (SS) as a situational variable, the presence or absence of which significantly affects the success of transformations. The research methodology consists in applying the system approach, as it is understood in management, involving models of M. Belbin's command roles and I. Adizes's managerial competencies. It is shown that the success of transformations in an organized community depends on its composition in terms of the presence of a certain combination of command roles and managerial competencies. The structure of the last includes numerous habits and stereotypes that have arisen historically and are changing from society to society, often contradicting each other, especially when comparing Western and Eastern cultures. Some command roles and managerial competencies in a particular transformation contribute to success, others lead to failure. For the success of the transformation, a certain "similarity" of the composition of the prevailing command roles and competencies is necessary. The success of the transformation of society essentially depends on the presence or absence of SS, the filling of which is connected with the components of Belbin and Adizes models. A forceful change in the situation without taking into account the prevailing level of the SS leads to a failure of the transformation in the long run.
Key words: spontaneous socialization, macroeconomic transformation, situational theories, voluntary associations, M. Belbin command roles, I. Adizes codes.
JEL Classification: A13, D23, M14
1. Introduction
The end of the 20th - the beginning of the 21st century was marked by the intensification of the processes of change, accompanied by numerous bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions, reconfiguration of companies in the world of business, at the global level - the disintegration of old states and the birth of new ones, international alliances, etc. Although the conscious transformation of any system always begins with a situational analysis of its internal and external environments, nevertheless, with all the care of such an analysis, many transformations have failed. From the general methodological point of view, this means that, most likely, the problems were not systematically addressed, not all situational factors has been taken into account. The task of identifying situational factors is far from being univocal, as evidenced by a rather large number of situational theories in management, which work each in their field of applicability, leaving many free "gaps" in the space of situations. We propose to expand the list of situational variables, adding to it the
factor of spontaneous socialization, whose role is clearly visible in a number of events, especially when carrying out macroeconomic and social transformations.
2. Review of the literature
The success of reforms in the states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union depends on the extent to which they are carried out systematically, i.e. the whole set of factors that make up the context of reforms is taken into account - what is the specific situation in which the reforms take place. The situational variables themselves are diverse, they must be identified and different authors combine them into different clusters. Among the most developed are the situational theories of R.R. Blake and J.S. Mouton (Blake, 1978), E. Fiedler (Fiedler, 1967), P. Hersey and K.H. Blanchard (Hersey, 1996), V.H. Vroom and A.G. Jago (Vroom, 1988, 1992), and others. The Nobel laureate in economics F. Hayek refers to the essential elements of situations "the customs and conventions" that arise in a society historically (i.e., exist long enough) and "are not the fruit of conscious design"
Corresponding author:
1 Faculty of Linguistics and Translation, International Humanitarian University. E-mail: [email protected]
2 Institute of Law, Economics and International Relations, International Humanitarian University. E-mail: [email protected]
(that is, they act at the level of the unconscious) (Hayek, 2011, p. 29). As examples, he cites local autonomy, family values and voluntary associations. This list can be expanded by adding the various cultural dimensions that were formed in the evolutionary development of society and settled in the person's unconscious (such as the continuum between the polar states of collectivism-individualism, authoritarian-democratic governance, masculinity-femininity, etc.) (Hofstede, 2004; Kovalenko, 2016). Hayek draws attention to the fact that in order to preserve the "orderly work" of human society, his "non-compulsory customs and conventions" should be considered as "inalienable factors".
When these (along with others) situational variables are not taken into account when carrying out reforms, this leads to serious negative consequences for both particular companies, countries and entire regions. In this paper, we focus on the importance of the factor "voluntary associations", which Hayek has pointed out. For the European Hayek, associations are natural, as are natural, say, the numerous joint-stock companies and church communities in the world where he lived.
Meanwhile, for countries of traditional cultures -as antipodes of technogenic countries - conscious association in voluntary communities is not a simple (not "natural") matter. For successful functioning of voluntary associations, some qualities are required from individuals as their components, among which SS plays an essential role (Fukuyama, 2004). It means the readiness of strangers to incorporate themselves into formal associations for joint activity in moving towards the stated goal. With a good reason, SS can be regarded as a situational variable: this quality is evolutionary, in different societies the measure of its presence (or absence) varies depending on the specific conditions of the place, time and features of historical development. SS speaks about the extent to which people are able to organize themselves. In a society with a developed SS, people are able to create and maintain vital functions of stable voluntary institutions of different sizes (at the level between the family and the state): churches, trade unions, parties, charitable institutions, various enterprises, etc. The significance of the factor SS is also strengthened by the fact that it positively correlates with the level of economic development: the latter increases with the growth of the first (Fukuyama, 2004, p. 249). In economic language, the existence of the SS is equivalent to possessing a special kind of capital, which can be called social capital. You can win it, fight for it, finally, "invest" in a business. The contractual obligations of the company with share capital give the opportunity to start a joint business for those who are not bound by friendship or kinship; however, their further success depends on their willing to cooperate with their colleagues and with other people - that is, from the presence of SS. A rich and complexly organized civil society is not an inevitable consequence of advanced
industrial development. On the contrary, countries such as Japan, Germany, and the United States have become the leading industrial powers largely due to the fact that they had a healthy support in the form of social capital and the SS, and not vice versa (Fukuyama, 2004, p. 549). If this capital is available, the transition to the capitalist phase (into which the post-Soviet countries entered) is facilitated, if there is none - and market relations are hindered and, if they arise, then in a distorted, deformed form - as happened in post-perestroika countries.
The purpose of this work is the operationalization of the concept of SS with the help of management methods developed to study the regularities of the managerial process.
3. Statement of the main material
Management as a methodology created a number of models, the applicability of which went beyond the tasks for which the models have been created. The two of them are M. Belbin team roles (Belbin, 2004) and I. Adizes codes (Adizes, 2006) theories. In this article, we will show how these two models can be applied to analyze the reasons for the failures of some societies because of unsuccessful transformations.
The work of the manager can be represented in the form of a superposition of certain types of activity (I. Adizes) and methods of solving typical management problems (M. Belbin).
In Belbin's model, managerial competencies are called team roles. There are such eight roles: Chairman, or Coordinator (ch); Shaper (sh); Plant (PL); Monitor (mo); Implementer (Im); Team Worker (tw); Resource Investigator (ri) and Completer (co) (Belbin, 2004).
In the Adizes model, the actions of the manager are reduced to four main types: the production of results (p), administration (a), entrepreneurship (e), and the integration of people around achieving the goal (i) (Adizes, 2006).
Each manager is characterized by its own set of four PAEI codes and eight team roles, which determine to what extent his activity will be successful or failing.
It should be taken into account that the identified roles / codes were analyzed in the conditions of existing organizations (Adizes, 2006) or artificially created "teams" in the classrooms of business schools (Belbin, 2004). We will apply these models both for organizations that are consciously created for joint activities (such as an enterprise, joint-stock company etc.), and for much larger historically emerging communities (such as states or ethnic entities). Since joint activities of both systems should be organized, it is at this stage that the composition of groups begins to affect the presence (or absence) of individuals with suitable management characteristics. They should be ready to take the initiative to organize the activity first, and then - to
coordinate it and preserve the organization for more or less long periods of time.
As Adizes has shown, success in both the short and long term depends largely on the presence of the quality defined by the code I. The manager will show good (and even outstanding) results if he has high values of at least two of PAEI codes, one of which must be the indicator I. At the same time, Belbin showed that although an individual with any team role can exercise managerial activity, but best of all - from the point of view of achieving success - this can be done by individuals who have the roles of the Chairman - Coordinator (ch) or Shaper (SH). Since we are interested in long-term success, we will not consider the role of SH - in a typical case, Shaper splits the group, does not contribute to its unity. (This is confirmed by statistical analysis: it was shown in (Kovalenko, 2014) that the correlation coefficient (CC) connecting I and SH is statistically significant and negative).
Now a question arises: is there a connection between I and CH competencies or are they independent variables, each of which contributes to effective work?
Different individuals have different values of I. Let us imagine some community S of people with a predominance of large indicator I. They will easily unite themselves around the common cause, provided if there is an individual - organizer or, in the language of team roles, CH. The most favorable situation will arise when one individual has well represented both roles -I and CH. It should be noted that such a combination, generally speaking, is not obligatory one, and whether it is implemented in practice - requires verification. But if I and CH are compatible (in the language of mathematical statistics, the CC that connects them is non-zero and statistically significant), the S community will unite around the dual-role possessor (I-CH) - and a group with a large SS score will emerge. In the language of physics or chemistry, we would say that such a group would have a great binding energy.
In a case when the S-community does not have individuals with a high CH value, it is likely that there will be difficulties in creating a stable and able-bodied community.
Let us return to the question of the compatibility of I and CH, which requires separate consideration. This problem was considered in (Kovalenko, 2014), where correlation links between models of managerial competencies have been studied. Using the example of university students specializing in economics and management, it has been shown that the CC, which links the role of CH with code I, is zero (with a statistical error of 5%).
Such a result can be understood qualitatively if to expand the content of the relevant managerial competencies. CH - manager "... is able to identify the abilities and skills of employees and use them in the interests of the cause. He includes them in the
decision-making process, gently but persistently directs the discussion in the right direction and ensures that the proposals are relevant to the merits of the case. The Coordinator rarely resorts to simply declaring his decision, he is always looking for an opportunity to take into account the interests of all interested parties ... He is emotionally stable, can be assertive if necessary and is a pragmatic person" (Kovalenko, 2016, p. 406). At the same time, the I-manager is a soft, sensitive, people-oriented individual, he "... does not want to make decisions on his own. He is not independent and is based on the opinion of the group ... Such a manager creates an excellent moral climate, but does not form the goal and direction of work" (Adizes, 2006, p. 71). The organization under the management of the I-manager "... lacks formalization and the desire for efficiency".
With such polar characteristics, it is not surprising that the SS connecting these roles is zero. Therefore, it is quite real that when people with large indicators of I can gather together, they will not be able to organize themselves, because of the lack of the CH - role. To achieve positive synergy when grouping individuals with high I indicators, it is necessary to "import" an employee with the missing role of CH.
We illustrate it with two examples. Let us take the USA, for which the SS is large (Fukuyama, 2004, p. 548). Americans are great organizers. F. Fukuyama believes that the traditional impression of Americans as supporters of an extremely individualistic approach to life is not entirely true - because of the highly developed SS. The Americans, if they are individualists, are very sui generis. They are easily grouped together (for example, in a joint-stock company or church community), but inside of them they defend their right jealously to remain autonomous persons (Fukuyama, 2004, p. 92). Vivid heroes-individualists in popular western movies, all these "lonely wolves" and "tough nuts", are consistently and resolutely fighting for the common interests of their group. They have a pronounced active role - CH. It can be assumed that in the business world of the United States, the leading team role is the Coordinator-Chairman, described above. Regardless of the level of development of SS, the Coordinator-Chairman CH will promote further development of SS among employees and leads the team to the achievement of the goal.
The second example is taken from the past of the Russian Empire. History has given Russia great natural wealth that cannot be said about the social capital. Even at the dawn of its statehood, in the YIII century, the Slavic tribes, steeped in endless strife, which exhausted their strength, came to the conclusion that they cannot organize themselves. "Our land is large and abundant, but there is no order in it: come and reign and own us", the chronicler wrote of the appeal of the Russian princes to the Varangians (Solov'yov, 1988, p. 120). Although historians today believe that such a simplified idea of the formation of a management
system in Russia is untrue, the sheer survivability of this legend and the fact of addressing it in the most serious publications testifies to the fact that an important feature of Russian society is seized in it - and it seems that this is the underdevelopment of the ss. To organize themselves, for the ancestors of contemporary Russians it was necessary to turn to an external force. This fact can be considered as evidence of the lack of sufficient organizational skills in the ancestors of modern Russians (in the language of team roles - the role of ch). Since that time, the tendency of Russians to "import" from outside organizational principles in their actions has been formed. The ancestors of Russians guessed that the lack of organizational skills can be compensated for by addressing to those who have them (a kind of "outsourcing"). Such people, they believed, in those days were the Varangians. As social experience accumulated in society, people more and more acted in accordance with this experience. Such a habit was eventually fixed on the unconscious level and today it claims itself in exceptionally large role of the state in the life of society - as an "external" force, which should organize, coordinate the actions of people, turning them into a collective, unification, community. Russian history has always been primarily a history of statehood. If for Hayek as a representative of Western civilization "non-forced customs and conventions" consist in following the principles of individualism - the rights of free individuals to make independent decisions, then for Russians natural behavior is associated with submission to state requirements. Instead of spontaneous socialization, forced socialization works. This circumstance can be regarded as an evolutionary response to the lack of spontaneous SS in a community that wants to preserve itself as a subject of history. Russian scientist A. Zinoviev believes that only thanks to the role of the state "... poor human material could function more or less tolerantly in the prevailing historical conditions - no worse than what could be estimated as good. In any case, the Russian people could be preserved as a historical people only as a communist people. With any other system, they are doomed to degradation and destruction" (Zinov'yev, 2009, p. 208).
The tendency to uniting and strengthening the role of the state was exacerbated by external circumstances -threats emanating from numerous conquerors. English historian A. Toynbee, describing the West as the "archagressor of the modern era," recalls that Russian lands many times have been repeatedly subjected to Western aggression throughout the history (he calls 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709, 1610). He believes that the priority of statehood in Russia emerged as a response to a constant external threat: "Russian authoritarianism is caused by Western pressure. Western expansion threatened the Russian lands, and they were forced to submit to a new yoke, the yoke of the indigenous Russian power in Moscow, without which they could not survive" (Toynbi, 2012).
Strictly speaking, the proposed interpretation of episodes of Russian history from the standpoint of a low representation of the team role CH in the Eastern Slavs needs experimental confirmation. Indirectly, it has been shown by the results of a sociological study of students of the International Humanitarian University (IHU), whose ancestors formed their mentality during the times of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Over the years, IHU has been conducting research to determine the distribution of team roles among students of different faculties (economists, lawyers, linguists). In the latest study (2015), testing students for team roles showed that, with a sample of 106 students from different specialties, the proportion of those with whom the role of CH ranked first or second in the list of 8 roles, varied from 4% (Faculty of Linguistics and Translation) to 11% (Faculty of Economics and Management). At the same time confident first places were occupied by typical "Slavic" qualities, expressed by the roles of TW and CW, which describe honest workers and "good people" (Dobrovol'ska, 2015).
Studies of team roles were conducted in small training groups - "teams" that run virtual organizations. Their conclusions can be generalized to larger and more realistic entities, which are a collection of more or less large groups controlled by their teams. In each of them, there is a certain set of team roles. Depending on the conditions of historical development of this or that community, a certain set of command roles is realized in its administrative part, some of which can be presented frequently, others less frequently, and still others are practically absent. It is quite possible to imagine a situation where for some reason in certain community the role of the Coordinator-Chairman is poorly represented - and we get a picture recorded by the chronicler for the Slavic tribes of the YIII century: they had few Coordinators - Chairmen. Today, this is reflected, in particular, in the fact that the heroes of Russians - in life, literature, cinema - are very far from American ideals. For example, today there are a lot more films of psychological, melodramatic stories than blockbusters, the inner world of heroes and the relationships between them are much more important for the plot than external events, they are rather just "kind people" than American "supermen". These are, for example, the heroes of E. Ryazanov's films: the disinterestedly honest insurance agent Yuri Detochkin ("Beware of the car"), the modest statistician Anatoly Efremovich Novoseltsev ("Office Romance"), shy doctor Zhenya Cherkashin ("The irony of fate"). In the language of the team roles, these characters correspond to the team role that Belbin called "Team Worker" (tw). It is characterized as follows: "This person has the ability to contribute to the creation ofgood human relationships and is not very attuned to the task. All members of the team are his friends; he creates an atmosphere of unity in the group. He understands people well, their mood
and feelings. He consistently works to achieve harmony and tries to avoid disagreements, to prevent them when the slightest sign appears. He is not inclined to compete" (Kovalenko, 2016, p. 416).
It follows then that a society consisting primarily of individuals with characteristics I and TW will feel very uncomfortable if in the process of transformation the leaders transfer them to an alien space of rationality, pragmatism and ruthless competition, where other team roles / codes dominate. This experience was carried out once by three top managers of large communities (states) after a night spent in Belovezhskaya Pushcha (Belorussia). Over time, these transformations resulted in the destruction of the economy in their organizations (countries), the impoverishment of workers, and large cultural losses. Transformation without taking into account the properties of SS cannot be successful.
4. Conclusions
Under macroeconomic and socio-economic transformations involving historically different communities or groups of different sizes, the SS (with its antipode - forced socialization) can be considered as a situational variable. The success of the transformation in the community essentially depends on the presence or absence of SS in it, the filling of which is connected with Belbin's team roles and the competence codes of Adizes. A forceful change in the situation without taking into account the prevailing level of the SS leads to a failure of the transformation in the long term. For managers (and politicians) it is necessary to know the ABC of team roles / codes: a, CH, SO, E, I, IM, MO, P, PL, RI, SH, TW. Further research is needed to find the connections between the various situational variables and Belbin and Adizes models.
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Инна КОВАЛЕНКО, Николай КОВАЛЕНКО
СПОНТАННАЯ СОЦИАЛИЗАЦИЯ КАК СИТУАЦИОННАЯ ПЕРЕМЕННАЯ В ТЕОРИИ МАКРОЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИХ ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЙ
Аннотация. Цель статьи - проанализировать причины неудачи макроэкономической и социальной трансформации общества на примере перестройка 1985-1991 годов в Советском Союзе. Предлагается рассматривать спонтанную социализацию (СС) как ситуационную переменную, наличие или отсутствие которой существенно влияет на успех преобразований. Методология исследования заключается в применении системного подхода, как это понимается в менеджменте, с использованием моделей командных ролей М. Белбина и управленческих компетенций И. Адизеса. Показано, что успех преобразований в
t^i-ï^t Baltic Journal of Economic Studies Vol. 3, No. 4, 2017-J--
организованном сообществе зависит от его состава с точки зрения наличия определенной комбинации командных ролей и управленческих компетенций. Структура последних включает в себя многочисленные привычки и стереотипы, возникшие исторически и изменяющиеся от общества к обществу, часто противоречащие друг другу, особенно при сравнении западных и восточных культур. Некоторые командные роли и управленческие компетенции при конкретном преобразовании способствуют успеху, другие - приводят к неудаче. Для успеха трансформации необходимо определенное «подобие» состава преобладающих командных ролей и компетенций. Успех трансформации общества существенно зависит от наличия или отсутствия СС, наполнение которой связано с компонентами моделей Белбина и Адизеса. Силовое изменение ситуации без учета преобладающего уровня СС приводит к неудаче трансформации в долгосрочной перспективе.
