Actual small and medium business management practices in Russia: typical management mistakes and organizational pathology

Management culture in Russia has been repeatedly destroyed at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the 20th century and developed in isolation. The main hypothesis of this study is that there are two types of management model in Russia: blind copy or rejection of management world experience using. This is one of the main reason of protracted management crisis. This article analyzes the results of a survey of 230 senior managers of 24 small Siberian enterprises in 2007-2013. All of these enterprises were financially solvent and asked for advisory services for the purpose of further growth and development of their businesses. Under the organizational pathologies, we understand the reasons why organizations are stuck in a certain stage of their development or age prematurely and the reasons why organizations do not achieve their goals. The surveys were based on the questionnaires and the lists of management mistakes and organizational pathologies determined by A.I. Prigozhin during his consulting practice. The most common management mistakes are: “regarding the work on the organizational development strategy and Vision to be ineffective”; “demotivating management style”; “tendency to see the problem outside the organization”; “ignorance of the management techniques and absence of case analysis”; • “ignorance of the case study methods and modern motivation schemes”; “fear of managers to delegate authority."The common reason for these mistakes lies in the fact that managers consider employees to be a technological element of business. The most common organizational pathologies are: “stagnation” (inability of an organization to change); “domination of structure over function”; “inversion” (when the results of the managerial decisions become counterproductive); “bureaucracy” (formal employee moral as a sign of premature aging of the organization); “ungovernability” (when the managerial decisions are not fully complied with and corporate operations are uncoordinated); “subjectless” (when employees do not take the responsibility or do not want to take it, because of the lack of motivation, or when they cannot take it, because of the lack of authority). It is obvious that companies are strongly disintegrated inside themselves. They are sick and their sickness results in stagnation. The pathologies registered in the studied companies are representative of the crisis management, a phenomenon known as the “founder's trap”. The sources of this phenomenon include: • The fear of losing business, distrust of the owner of hired managers; Lack of Vision and chaotic development. • Paternalism of Russian managers; “Subjectless” of the managerial staff (the term of A.I. Prigozhin); The legacy of the era of the “repressive” command-and-control management; Lack of the model of national management that generates skepticism of the owner towards the hired managers; This is proved by the fact that the organization of all the activities of the business is completely dependent on the owner's decision. Therefore, Russian small and medium business remains at the stage preceding “the management revolution” - the division of ownership and management functions. The paradox of this is that subconsciously the majority of the owners understand modern approaches to efficient management, but in actual practice continue to use the outdated methods.

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