In this article, I draw from organizational imprinting theory to illuminate the impact of the Soviet legacy on contemporary Russian economic geography and regional policy. I argue that central coordination in the creation and regulation of Russian urban agglomerations is connected to a socialist imprinted paradigm associated with the Soviet economic regionalization model and territorial-production complexes (TPCs). I conduct a qualitative historical study to analyze the role of the foundational environment and the dynamics in the development of this imprint. I propose that this imprint effect is prone to reproduction in contemporary regional development strategies and community-based paradigms due to exaptation and cultural-cognitive persistence. The article extends the literature of socialist imprinting by demonstrating how imprints may emerge, transform, and affect localized organizational communities in transition economies and highlights the role of imprinted paradigms in policymaking and regional development.

We investigate how the relevance of the Lean Production System (LPS) as perceived by employees of a Russian bank depends on whether LPS practices are labeled with transliterated original Japanese words or translated Russian words. Building on organizational translation scholarship contextualized to Russia, we formulate hypotheses about the mechanism through which labels affect the perceived relevance of practices. The results of an experimental study situated in a Russian bank show that transliterated Japanese labels have a negative impact on the perceived relevance of LPS practices by Russian employees. Further analysis reveals that this negative perception is fully mediated by the label's semantic fit, that is, the extent to which the label complies with the linguistic codes of the Russian language. Specifically, we find that, on average, the transliterated Japanese labels have a lower semantic fit than the translated Russian labels, and this difference in semantic fit explains the Japanese labels’ lower relevance as perceived by the bank's employees. By unpacking the causal effect of the labels used for management practices on the practices’ perceived relevance, this study advances our understanding of how organizations could influence employees’ acceptance of foreign management practices.

Drawing on the job-demand resource theory, the article examines the relative importance and the complementarity of three widely practiced leadership styles – transformational, paternalistic, and authoritarian. It investigates how the three styles relate to followers’ work engagement amongst employees in Russian domestic organizations. It also theorizes and tests the mediating effects of three psychological mechanisms, namely self-efficacy, self-esteem, and job control, on the examined relationships. The findings show that all three leadership styles relate to followers’ work engagement positively. The relationship of transformational leadership is dominant and mediated by all three psychological mechanisms. The remaining two styles also make their unique contributions to followers’ work engagement. Whereas authoritarian leadership influences followers by enhancing their self-efficacy and self-esteem, paternalistic leadership operates more extrinsically by increasing followers’ job control. Surprisingly, our analyses found that the role of control variables such as gender, age, and hierarchical position were insignificant in predicting how the three leadership styles influence employee work engagement. The study is among the first to shed light on the relative importance of the three focal leadership styles, their differential influences and interrelations, and the different mechanisms through which they relate to followers’ work engagement.

Autonomy is a primary motive, as well as source of satisfaction, for those who start and run their own business. Autonomy is not inherent to business ownership – owner/founders must make concentrated efforts to achieve and maintain autonomy. This study aims to increase our understanding of autonomy by investigating how it is experienced, the factors that affect it, and the actions that business owners take to attain and retain it. We study these topics in the setting of an emerging market – Russia – and compare the outcomes with a similar study conducted in the Netherlands. Our cross-cultural comparison reveals that the way autonomy is experienced and attained can be viewed as an expression of survival values in Russia and of self-expression values in the Netherlands. We posit an underlying structural similarity by theorizing the level of experienced entrepreneurial autonomy to be the outcome of the balance of power and dependencies.

In this article, we examine the cross-cultural variation in the perceived effects of idealized influence and individualized consideration leadership behaviors – two behavioral dimensions of transformational leadership – on followers’ organizational identification in two culturally distinct countries: Russia and Finland. We also test whether the followers’ role ambiguity mediates these relationships. Using the self-concept-based theory of leadership as an explanatory framework, our analysis of white-collar employees in four Finland-based multinational corporations and their subsidiaries in Russia shows that whereas in Russia both behaviors facilitate followers’ identification, in Finland only idealized influence does. We also find differences in how role ambiguity mediates the relationship between the two behaviors and followers’ identification in the two countries. In Russia, it fully mediates the relationship between individualized consideration and followers’ identification, whereas in Finland it partially mediates the relationship between idealized influence and followers’ identification.

This article addresses corruption as a negative practice displaying the ‘darker side’ of social capital in Chinese guanxi and Russian blat/svyazi networks. It presents a conceptual framework integrating several research streams to establish a conceptual linkage between social network characteristics and three forms of corruption between business persons and public officials: cronyism, bribery, and extortion. We argue that the forms of corruption in a society are determined by the nature of social network ties and their underlying morality, with particularistic and general trust being key factors. Our framework depicts networks as three concentric circles representing three types of corruption resulting from their corresponding types of reciprocity: open, closed, and negative. We then apply the framework to the practice of guanxi in China and blat/svyazi in Russia. We propose that different network characteristics and different forms of corruption may help explain what we label the ‘China-Russia paradox’ of why corruption and high economic growth have co-existed in China, at least in the short term, but less so in Russia. We conclude with ethical and legal implications for doing business in those two transforming economies and offer suggestions for future research.

Drawing on a dataset consisting of 344 personal interviews, participant observations, and internal documents collected in 26 privately owned business organizations in Russia, the study aims at complementing existing research on Russian indigenous management in three ways. First, it examines the managerial styles of key individuals (i.e. owners and/or CEOs) in the case organizations. Hence, it taps into the existing heterogeneity of managerial styles, the so-called groupvergence, found in contemporary Russian organizations, and documents their idiosyncratic features, such as the transformational nature of authoritarian leadership. Second, the study explores the antecedents of the identified styles to establish what factors contribute to their emergence and thus sheds light on how the heterogeneous managerial styles in Russian organizations come into existence. Finally, the study investigates how the identified styles manifest themselves in organizations by influencing organizational goals and strategies, organizational structures, supporting mechanisms, relationships between organizational members, and reward systems. It therefore elaborates on the organizational implications of the styles and highlights the mechanisms of their sustainable diffusion to lower organizational levels in Russian organizations.