Relationships between manager and employees in Russia versus the West

Work in Russia is very hierarchical. The boss always remains your boss, and you know and feel your status. In the West, business-unit like organization is popular. People work cooperatively on projects, adopting different roles at different times

This has a huge impact on performance assessments. In a business-unit-type organizations people are eager to praise their colleagues’ performance because they hope their colleagues will do the same for them in the future. In Russia one must be more careful and assessments may be muted – everyone looks average.

As some theorists assume there are inner-oriented and outer oriented cultures. Americans tend to be internally oriented, they manage by setting objectives targets: you do the job on time and you get a bonus, in other words: you control your destiny. Russians tend to operate with a more external orientation.

Problems arise as the foreign managers, looking critically at how each group operates, decide to assign cultural blame. Foreigners think Russians are lazy, Russians claim foreigners can’t understand their country. In the end everyone gives up, saying, “this is just how thing are in Russia”, which is the worst conclusion to draw.

The only way to handle such a situation is anticipate it; you know you are tasked with creating one effort across culture, so get ready to deal with it. At start, work out a flexible strategy for handling the cultural differences, coming up with several scenarios just in case one doesn’t work out. This is a great tool to use in all countries where people feel they are being controlled by nature, like in Russia.