Profile of Russian Mentality

УДК 005.525

V. V. Pyankova

Supervisor  — Volkova O. V.

Siberian State Aerospace University,

Krasnoyarsk

PROFILE OF RUSSIAN MENTALITY

The article reveals the essence of concept of mentality and presents the main features of Russian mentality.

        Profiles of mentality of different nationalities always play a significant role in all spheres of society. As for its connections with managerial aspects of life, we can say that profiles of mentality are fundamental factors in its formation and development.

The mentality is a set of stereotypes in worldview, thinking, activities and behavior of people, which are based on the value system and manifest themselves in culture. They are determined by geographical and historical factors of development. In other words, profiles of mentality it is the things that motivates us to behave a certain way and not otherwise.

In the formation of mentality are two major factors that affect on it: internal and external. Let us consider each of then [1].

Most features of Russian mentality were formed by various domestic influence, such as history, evolution and geographic location. For example, in time of serfdom, which existed in the  XV-XVIII centuries, life of the peasant was divided between “work on himself” and “work on the host”, hence the ratio of workers to participation in a particular project. If he considers his participation in project like “work on itself” his relation to the means of project, to the organization of project and to the results of project will be positive. Otherwise, his motivation and responsibility are sharply reduced and all the effect of exclusion becomes apparent. In fact well-known German philosopher Karl Marx, who introduced the concept of alienation from the means and results of labor, talked about that too.

Agriculture, which always was close to Russia, also left its mark on some features of Russian mentality, such as: the tendency to seek and find the causes of failures in the external world and not in ourselves (large dependence of the results of sowing on the weather), the ability of Russian people to carry an incredible amount of work in a short time (the peasant had to work continuously in the seed time), permanent shelving of the job on “tomorrow” (waiting for better conditions for the start of sowing) and so on.

A variety of nationalities of the Russian state, constant competition between them and, in some ways, opposition between them also reflected on the Russian mentality. Russian people are eager to find common enemy which prevents the execution of major works, they eager to consider small domestic troubles and uncertainty as a result of the internal enemy, increasing of activity and initiative of staff in a situation when there is external or internal threat to the process of project implementation.

Also it is important to say about the time of the USSR, which unlearned Russian people how to be free. For example, after the restricting of the economy to a market type many owners of large firm were faced with the problem of giving the responsibility to their executive directors for the performance even of small operational affairs just as their executive directors were not  able to take on themselves such responsibility [2].

Talking about the external factors, it is necessary to point out those features of the Russian mentality which were formed as the result of borrowing from the neighboring countries. For example for Asian people, as for the Russians, kinship is one of the main reasons of approving someone to the post.