Ruth May, Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business
"Institutional Erosion and its Effects on Russia’s Corporate Leadership"
In the Author's Words
Vladimir Putin has presided over Russia’s retreat from a nascent, market-based economy
to a more familiar, yet problematic state-centered system. He has leveraged the Russian
people’s culturally embedded proclivity for personal networking in assembling his
administrative coalition of former KGB, military and government ministry connections
known as the siloviki. This circle of trusted advisors has been instrumental in achieving
his comprehensive agenda for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of Russia’s formal
institutional context. In this article, my co-authors and I provide a dual-level perspective
of the longitudinal erosion in Russia’s independent media, electoral process, judicial
independence, and civil society, along with the corresponding effects on the attitudes
and behaviors of Russia’s corporate leadership. Our insider view of organizational
leadership comes from more than 20 years of interacting with Russian executives through
research, training and consulting, as well as the personal accounts provided by our
Russian associate who worked closely with a single corporate leader in banking from
2000-2015. Russia’s institutional erosion presents significant challenges for conducting
business as well as opportunities for research in the midst of a nearly unimaginable
institutional reversal in one of the world’s most important transition economies.
May, Ruth C., Rayter, G. R. & Ledgerwood, Donna. E. (2016). Institutional erosion and its effects on Russia’s corporate leadership. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 23(2),191-207.
Faculty Profile: Ruth May