Features Of Professional Interpersonal Relationships: Organizational Cultures In Russia And United States

Abstract

This article discusses a current problem of the modern society that requires developing a scientific approach to research of interpersonal relationships in the professional world. There are different approaches to understanding how interpersonal relationships and satisfaction show up in the organization. The goal of this research is to deepen the concept of interpersonal relationships in the workplace, while describing their main components. Employees of Russian and US organizations who took part in the research were individual contributors, first line and middle managers in Russia (229 Russian speaking persons living and working in Russia) and in the United States (279 English speaking persons living and working in the United States) (N=508). The study was performed using: Interpersonal checklist by T. Leary (both “Real Me” and “Ideal Me” scales); projective methods of “Incomplete sentences” by J. Sacks and S. Levy (author’s version); content analysis, used for qualitative analysis of the results obtained with the projective methods. Data analysis included content analysis, analysis of the significance of differences (Chi-square, Mann-Whitney U), correlation analysis (Spearman’s rho), analysis of variance, one-factor ANOVA analysis, IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0. The results of our research demonstrated that both countries (using Russian and American organizational cultures as an example) have a unique and sufficiently strong cultural identity despite the multinational, multicultural, multilingual, multireligious qualities of each country. Moreover, in the present article, the authors are demonstrating that workplace interpersonal relationships exist and develop in the space defined by emotional attachment and the amount of social clarity between relationship partners.