Men and psychologists: features of national motivation

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

"Russia is dangerous because of the meagerness of its needs," Otto Bismarck said in the century before last. It is dangerous not only for enemies, but also for itself. Western systems of motivation for effective work somehow take root in large cities, but fail outside of them. Yes, and the Soviet Union perished primarily because the socialist concept of "moral and material incentives for shock work" did not work.

In the Russian provinces, the majority are people who will not be forced to work by money, power, or fame, because they do not need them. And what you need? The "Expert" correspondent received the answer to this question in a conversation with Valery Kustov - General Director of EFKO, which manufactures products under the well-known trademarks "Sloboda" and Altero. Our conversation took place in his office at a fat and oil factory in the city of Alekseevka, Belgorod Region.

Vague dreamy motivation

“Indeed, when I saw the results of a sociological survey of the local population, my condition was close to hysterics,” says Valery Kustov. - It turned out that these people have no material needs, emotional ones too. That is, there is nothing to motivate them with. Every second person said that he did not need a toilet in the house. Twenty-eight percent do not see the need for a shower, thirty-five percent for a car. Sixty percent answered that they would not expand their personal subsidiary plots, even if the opportunity presented itself. The same number, sixty percent, openly confessed to strangers - interviewers that they did not consider theft to be shameful. And how many more were simply ashamed to say about it! At the same time, a significant number of "non-believers" noted that they simply had nothing to steal.

It turned out that there are no leaders with whom we could start working: five percent, in principle, are ready for entrepreneurial activity, but they predict a very negative reaction of others to their actions and do not dare. We could not rely on them: five percent against ninety-five is a war in which it is clear who the loser is. We were killed. We did not see a single model of either a standard or non-standard solution at that time.

- Why did you need motivated peasants?

- For the development of our fat and oil production (EFKO produces sunflower oil, mayonnaise and soft butter. - "Expert") needed their own agricultural resources. Our factories located in the Belgorod region were surrounded by ruined farms. We decided to start with them. After all, after the collapse of the collective farms, each villager received a land share - five to seven hectares of land, which he did not have the opportunity to cultivate. We rented one hundred and fourteen hectares. We had material resources, seeds, fertilizers, equipment, but, of course, we could not cultivate all this land ourselves. Therefore, it was necessary to awaken the desire and enthusiasm of the villagers to work.

- What did you offer them?

- Interest-free loans, shares, power, income, the possibility of self-realization.

- And they refused?

- In general, yes. The work just didn't work out. Many believe that the first steps of the head of an agricultural holding are very simple: we will own, and they will work, we take responsibility for large-scale production, and all the problems of the peasants do not exist for us. But there are problems in rural areas, and they made us notice: we received burnt harvesters, metal pins in the fields …

It was then that we realized that the situation needed to be clarified, and invited a group of Moscow sociologists to conduct a study, the author and scientific supervisor of which was Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of the Higher School of Economics Azer Efendiev.

- What else did the study show?

- A lot of things. It turned out that, on average, every ninth to tenth family surveyed lives at the level of poverty (from several standard options they chose the answer "We live very poorly, we do not always even eat our fill"), fifty-nine percent are simply poor ("Thank God, somehow the ends we make ends meet, we eat modestly, we are dressed in strong, but old, new clothes and we don’t buy anything into the house - we have no money "). That is, the standard of living of seventy percent of the surveyed rural families turned out to be unsatisfactory.

At the same time, the prevailing motivation in the environment is vaguely dreamy. When asked whether they strive to achieve a higher standard of living, whether they are making the necessary efforts, every second chose the answer: "We dream, we hope that somehow the situation will improve." A third of the respondents expressed humility with the current situation and humility. And only every fifth person has some kind of achievement motivation, the desire to improve his life through additional serious efforts.

So, a catastrophic motivational situation emerged: passivity, daydreaming, minimization of needs and, accordingly, efforts, just laziness.

- Who is more motivated: "wealthy" or poor?

- Of course, the "prosperous" are more. The poorer a person lives, the more developed the evasion of activity. And this, in fact, explains why he is malnourished. And with such a motivational structure, one can expect, on the one hand, an deepening and widening of poverty, and on the other, a breakthrough to higher living standards on the part of a small part of the rural population. That is, a sharp polarization will occur, which can lead to a social explosion in the countryside.

In general, peasants tend to relieve themselves of responsibility for their lives. The vast majority believe that their personal well-being depends on how society as a whole develops. To the opposite opinion ("with all the vicissitudes of our life, in the end, everything depends on the person himself") was inclined by twenty-two percent - three times less. Fifty percent agreed that they were "what life has made them." And only a third refer to their own choice.

- What do sociologists associate such passivity with?

- There are many reasons for this, and not all are clear. One of them is that over the centuries the most enterprising and agile left for the cities, while those who did not like changes at all remained in the villages. And therefore, the last ten years have been just torment for the peasants. The current villagers experience excruciating stress even when the collective farm chairman is renamed the general director or words like "shares" or "AO" are pronounced.

- And who steals more: poor or not so?

- The most interesting thing is that they steal all the same. Theft is recognized as a social norm, it is legitimized.

Empathy is the key word

- Desperate to find a solution, we called a group of psychologists to the Belgorod region, headed by a professor Nikolay Konyukhov … They did a huge amount of work - each of the peasants they studied passed the Semantic Differential test (three hundred and sixty assessments, comparisons), MMPI (Minnesota Multiphase Personality Questionnaire - five hundred and fifty-six questions) and several others. In total, each peasant answered fifteen hundred questions.

- And what is the result of this grandiose work?

- Very simple. We have found a fulcrum, or, more precisely, the ground on which to build the entire system of motivation.

It turned out that the only meaningful things for the peasants are the opinions of the people around them and sincerity. Public opinion is so significant that peasants do not want to talk about it with researchers. For example, when they were asked the question: "Is the opinion of your neighbor Vasya important to you?", The answer was: "What do you mean, yes I am him, but he goes!" And when they asked not his verbal consciousness, but his soul (through tests), it turned out that for the sake of the opinion of this neighbor, he is ready to jump on the moon.

And sincerity, openness. Their level of empathy is several orders of magnitude higher than representatives of other cultures.

- Excuse me, what is "empathy"?

- This is an emotional and sensory perception. Psychologists conditionally divided all the inhabitants of Russia into two cultures - the rational-achievement culture, whose representatives most often live in cities, and the empathic one, the inhabitants of the periphery. They are as different from each other as heaven and earth.

For example, in a peasant, in contrast to a city dweller, the effectiveness of the audio channel is minimal. That is, they hear my speech, but do not perceive. I can call them through a sound amplifier even in the bright socialist future, even in the capitalist future, they don't care. Instead, they have developed visual and kinesthetic perception.

- That is, they believe only in what they see or feel? Why?

“These channels protect them from illusion. These people have a very difficult life behind them, and they know that the most dangerous thing is the introduced systems of values and ideas that cannot be felt and tested. Their life experience says one thing: if anyone helps you in difficult times, it is a neighbor, and that's it. And nobody else.

- That same neighbor Vasya? And that is why the opinion of neighbors and fellow villagers is so important for them?

- Yes. In the course of the survey, situations were simulated when the villagers had to make a decision on their own. They immediately rejected it if it did not coincide with the opinion of the majority. For them, the person with whom they constantly interact is important. Their history led not to read books on psychology, but to study a person through their own emotional-sensory perception.

- So they are good psychologists themselves?

- Very. When our psychologists conducted interviews, it was very important for them to observe the roles of leader and follower. Experienced specialists tried to create emotional contact and feel the same as the interlocutor - this is their professionalism. So, many of these psychologists said that already in the third minute of the conversation they were not the leaders, but the followers. They were told not what the peasant thinks, but what the interviewer wants to hear. No matter how they tried to build their defense, these seemingly uneducated, in sweatshirts, people counted them faster. Their level of adjustment is higher than that of certified psychologists. This is understandable. When a person's inner perception is the basis for survival, of course, this channel develops.

Therefore, these people get emotionally tired very quickly. Then they have a feeling of emptiness, which they are very afraid of, and with it emotional overstrain. And this is a scuffle, vodka and everything else. Therefore, they take great care of their emotional integrity, they are careful in communication.

- Careful in communications? You said they were open, sincere?

- The most important thing for the peasants is their micro-group, a very narrow circle of people, where they can be completely open. After all, they do not just open their souls and feel. They need to understand: who you are in relation to him, what to expect from you. The issue of predictability for a rural dweller is not a desire or scientific interest, but an objective need that ensures the existence of himself, his children, and his family. The peasants know that the person who is close by is the only thing they can rely on in difficult times, there is nothing else. And therefore, when communicating, a huge amount of emotional energy is wasted. And outside the micro-group, the villagers are careful in contacts.

- Your company, apparently, is not included in his microgroup?

- If only that, it would be much easier to build motivations. There's another joy in there - Blair's double clamp. This is a psychological phenomenon when contradictory feelings coexist in a person at the same time, and this state of tension, fluctuations is characteristic of him. And if it suddenly turns out that at some point in time some unipolar emotional state prevails, then with a high degree of probability it will soon be replaced by the exact opposite. And if today the villagers treat EFKO well, then tomorrow everything can change at once - for no apparent reason.

- If they treat you well, is it really bad for you?

- Yes. The whole history tells them that there is no good and evil, these are two sides of the same. It is good to be a leader, they will give you a flag, even money, but you will have blisters and you will plant health. For them, there is nothing unambiguous, everything has two sides. The more you try to convince them of something, to form an emotional center in one plane, the faster in the opposite plane another center is formed by itself.

Here, it would seem, we, the investors, have come - what happiness! We give them loans, we build hospitals, schools. Do you think they have a surge of positive emotions?

- Not?

- It's good that by this time we already knew a lot. We did not praise ourselves, but said that we had come to help, but there are no free gingerbread. To win the sympathy of the peasant, we must present two opposites so that the emotional center shifts completely imperceptibly. We say that we bring them both something good and something bad, but there is a little more good.

- What is the bad thing that comes with you, do you report?

- We inform you that we are taking power from them, we now have a controlling stake. But the peasants receive schools, hospitals, food, equipment. And they make a choice.

Rules and information

- For the peasants, public opinion is most important, and it legitimized the theft. Probably, it is very difficult for you to fight against theft?

- In fact of the matter. They steal collective farm property, but in the villages the doors are still not closed. They will not steal from their neighbor in the microenvironment, because the neighbor is, as we have already said, the only thing that you can rely on in difficult times. And the neighbor knows it. If it becomes known that Vasya stole from a neighbor, Vasya will become an outcast. And there is nothing worse for him, because the system of interpersonal dependence for him in terms of emotional significance is at the level of life and death. We use this.

We tried to create a form of socio-economic relations in which a person would be included in the team. I, a peasant, should receive money that ensures a normal existence. And at the same time, everyone around, other members of the microenvironment should depend on the results of my work. The guarantee of my effective activity is not the received material equivalent, but the reaction of the external environment. As soon as I start to work poorly, it makes everyone worse. And this is already a factor that ensures my efficiency by several orders of magnitude better than money. For Vasya's neighbor, it is not money that is important, but the fact that I do not do it in a way that makes him feel good. And I know that if I don't do him well, he will take the awl and straighten me in the right direction. It is a system of individualism and interdependence, checks and balances.

- Does everything now rest on the mutual control of the peasants?

- Almost yes. And in any other way it will not work out. We have had such cases. The tractor driver drove his tractor home to a neighboring village to dine, and wasted extra time and fuel. Previously, we tried to punish such people - we deprived them of bonuses, did not allow them to work on good equipment. But the peasants are a whole. An attempt to commit a negative sanction against one leads to the collapse of the environment. It seemed to us that the peasants needed discipline, not us. When we give this tractor driver, relatively speaking, on the head, we do them better. And they see negative interference in their environment and perceive us as an enemy. They rally and fight with us, but they forget about how to deal with their own.

The existing system now almost excludes our intervention. It is based on two things: rules and information. We proposed rules, a mechanism for the formation of sanctions, their adoption, and withdrew. We do not provide their implementation, but information.

- How?

- For example, an internal newspaper is published. In it, we will now write that the tractor driver, his last name, first name, patronymic, from such and such a collective farm went home to dinner on a tractor, used up fuel for the same amount. The profitability has decreased, which means that everyone will receive less. This is enough for the peasants to rush to find out, and Vasya subsequently acted responsibly.

- How are EFKO's relations with peasants formalized?

- EFKO has created a new type of collective-joint-stock organization of agricultural production on the basis of collective farms. We became co-owners of the former collective farms, allocated the investments necessary for the development of ruined farms and brought in our experience in organizing. This option combines two most important elements: on the one hand, experience of effective market competitive business management is introduced, and on the other, the social nature of the organization of agricultural production is preserved.

Sociologists also told us that we need to pay special attention to collectivism. In a country where it has been formed for centuries, and individualism was viewed as one of the most unforgivable qualities of a person, stable positive individual motivation cannot quickly develop. In Russian culture, the priority of personal initiative and activity has not yet taken shape and it is not yet known whether it will take shape.

- And this form of cooperation justifies itself?

“Many of the elements of this design work, and they work great. You can go to any farm and see: not the heroes of labor, not the foremost workers, not the graduates of the Higher School of Economics, but ordinary cattlemen, milkmaids, machine operators within their farm know the volume of sales, the cost structure, and the algorithm for forming personal profitability.

Something is not yet entirely clear to us. But the main thing is that the peasant must realize that he is not the owner, no, but a part of this life. The part that took responsibility. Our task is to form in the psyche of every inhabitant a sense of belonging to the territory. We succeed in this. Therefore, the level of chaos in our territories is decreasing with a fairly large dynamics.