Profesional Destructions of Employees at Enterprises Against the Background of the Problem of Labour Productivity Growth

Abstract

The authors take as a premise the necessity to connect the research of psychological aspects of extreme working conditions with the study of the phenomenon of professional destruction of personality and the issues of labour productivity. Having become chronic in Russia, the problem of labour productivity growth is evidently becoming more acute amid the socio-economic crisis. The research aims at revealing psychological predictors of labour productivity levels, as exemplified by Russian enterprises, and the consistent patterns that connect the predictors, which are significant resources of effective manifestation of “the human performance” in the system of production relations. Two approaches to deal with the problem of labour productivity are singled out. In the framework of the first approach, an employee's independence is limited and, in relation to personality, this manifests itself in high level of controlled motivation, which is the key predictor of productivity level in this model. From the perspective of standardizing business communication styles and allocation of employees' management functions, the advantages of the first approach to raising productivity are concurrence in undertaking all actions and quickness in implementing decisions. The restrictions of the approach are decline in both creative initiative and managers' adaptability. In the framework of the second approach, an employee's independence is higher and, in relation to personality, this manifests itself in a lower level of controlled motivation and a comparatively high level of Self-Regulation as the key predictor of level of productivity in this model. The advantages of the second approach are employers' constant readiness for active communication, their behavioral flexibility, good argumentativeness of their own actions and instructions, active informing of partners, readiness to discuss tasks and common problems, assisting employees in solving these tasks, wide use of rewards for performance and readiness to communicate informally. However, the authors come to a conclusion that, at all the enterprises that have been examined, the spontaneously shaped styles of business communication are far from perfect, both in terms of their adequateness to the corporative culture, and in terms of their structure. The closest theoretical and practical objectives are to continue the research in order to reveal employees' typical professional deformations and work out and implement a system of training courses and measures for their professional rehabilitation, taking into account the processes of optimising style structures and employees' functional interaction. Keywords—psychology of labour, labour productivity, individual style of performance, employees' personality traits, destructions of personality