2011. vol. 8. No. 2

The paper analyses the problem of personality self-determination within professional and social environments. A model of self-determination is proposed, based on combination of self-consciousness features (social identity, self-attitudes, motives, values) and decision-making strategies. The practical direction of this work lies in the business psychology sphere, more specifically, in the study of personality self-determination issues within contemporary business contexts. An attempt at creating a typology of self-determination features is presented.

The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of moral psychological factors that influence the economic self-detemination process in contemporary Russian organisational leaders. Moral psychological mechanisms that stimulate and inhibit economic activity are described. The results of an empirical study indicate that moral evaluation of money and the business world by organisational leaders is closely associated with their attitudes toward observing the moral principles of behaviour within their business activity. Combinations of different levels and modalities of these indicators suggest distinct psychological types that differ in economic activity characteristics.

The paper considers image as a social psychological phenomenon. An original model of image formation is presented, and the association of image to personal identity is demonstrated. The mechanisms of image formation are analysed, particularly the self-determination mechanism, and the role of the latter in the image formation process is shown. Results of an empirical study are presented, demonstrating the association between image and self-attitude, the evaluative dimension of identity.

The paper analyses the conceptual differences between organisational identification and organisational commitment. There are different points of view regarding the relationship of these two constructs in the contemporary organisational psychology literature: some authors view these constructs as overlapping, whereas others consider them independent. Because of this existing confusion, it often happens that different researchers either use different labels for the same processes and phenomena, or, on the contrary, tend to ascribe completely different meanings to the same concepts. The aim of the paper is to review the similarities and differences between these constructs, and to draw conceptual borders between them.

The paper presents brief history, structure, and areas of application of the ergonomic control list method. An example of its successful large-scale implementation (Position Analysis Questionnaire) is also presented. A case study describes the experience gained in a consulting project for the benefit of a regional government body. The application of the control list method allowed to unify the evaluation criteria used by local government experts to determine the priority order for pending problems. The project also resulted in stronger cooperation between members of different departments who had hardly been able to establish a common ground before this collaborative project.

The paper analyses the association between job satisfaction, a number of personality traits, and subjective notion of salary. A new step was made by analysing the association between these variables separately for different types of occupations. Regression analysis indicates high influence of certain personality traits on job satisfaction in artonomic occupations, and low influence in occupations of other types.

The paper presents the results of a comprehensive clinical psychological study of coping behaviour in contemporary Russian organisational leaders. Specific social psychological and personality characteristics peculiar to this professional group were discovered that influence the choice of coping strategies. Two leader types were described, “adaptive” and “maladaptive”, with essentially different repertoires of coping strategies used under stressful circumstances.

The paper discusses the problem of deprivation and its specific features in first-year college students undergoing a change of cultural/educational environment. The notion of “cultural/educational environment of a higher education institution” is proposed. The phenomenon of deprivation in educational process in students is described. The results of a comparative study of deprivation, adaptation, frustration, coping strategies and defense mechanisms in first-year student graduates from city and village schools are presented. The psychological and pedagogical conditions facilitating the overcoming of deprivation in students are pointed out. Measures are proposed and guidelines given for organizing a psychological service to assist the overcoming of deprivation in students of a higher educational institution. The results of a formative experiment are presented.

A study was carried out to test a hypothesis about the different impact that sign and its meaning  can have upon concept formation. False memories approach was used to create expectations of a certain meaning in the subjects, who subsequently had to form an artificial concept in the absence of a sign. The concept formation under sign-absence condition was compared to that under the absence of both sign and meaning condition, and under the presence of both a redundant sign and a meaning condition. The results indicated differences in the concept formation under the latter (presence of both sign and meaning) condition, compared to the former two conditions. The results suggest that sign plays a more important role, compared to its meaning, in the process of concept formation.

The paper discusses the invariant aspects of a mental task representation by the solver. An experimental study was conducted with schoolchildren who solved the same textual algebra tasks with systematically varying demands. The results indicated that the subjects regardless of their competence level practically did not pay attention to the demand variation. The invariants discovered in the equation-making algebra tasks suggest the existence of a phenomenon similar to the linguistic phenomenon of usage, that is, conventional usage of a language unit by all native speakers of a given language.

The paper describes an original approach to assessment of social intelligence in engineers using  conflict-situation tasks associated with their professional activity. The study looked into the associations between the results of social intelligence assessment and professional competence of engineers. Using Spearman non-parametric correlations, significant positive associations were revealed between social intelligence and indicators of the engineers’ professional competence.