IMAGE OF THE MANAGER AMONG SUBORDINATES AS A FACTOR OF GROUP PERFORMANCE

Abstract. In the conditions of a modern market economy, the effectiveness of groups ' activities becomes one of the main factors determining the prospects for their further existence and development. A tough competitive environment raises the question of attracting all possible factors of influence on labor results. Most of the technical, technological and economic factors have now exhausted their resources. One of the most promising is the socio-psychological factor of influencing the effectiveness of group activities, in particular, through various aspects of the process of manager perception by subordinates. The image of the leader in the minds of subordinates is one of the important perceptual components of the phenomenon of leadership. [3] The purpose of this work is to study the relationship between the image of the leader and the effectiveness of the group's activities.

Keywords: management decision, manager image, perception process, crisis, bankruptcy, management process, goal, subgoals. 

From the analysis of data from many studies of the phenomenon of leadership, it can be concluded that the role of the manager in ensuring the required efficiency of the group's activities is enormous. The positions of a number of authors indicate that "due to skillful influence on subordinates, the manager is able to ensure up to 90 % of the success of the group's activities". In this regard, a significant number of works have recently appeared devoted to an in-depth study of the role of the manager in improving the effectiveness of various groups. At the moment, a significant number of studies have already been conducted to study the perception of the manager by subordinates and the influence of perceptual processes on the effectiveness of activities. Depending on the research tradition, they can be combined into four main approaches: personal, behavioral, situational, and cognitive. 

As part of a personal approach the main thing in the perception of the manager by subordinates is the presence and degree of development of individual personal characteristics that determine his image. One of the modern personality theories is the five-factor model of personality traits, the so-called "Big Five". Based on the analysis of data from the fundamental work of B. Bass and R. Stogdill, the authors of the model identified five factors that they consider as determinants of an effective manager: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, benevolence, and consciousness. This model is an attempt to generalize everything previously obtained results of the influence of individual personal characteristics of the manager on the perception of his subordinates, and later on the results of group activities. The disadvantage of the personal tradition of studying perceptual processes in a group is stability, i.e. the lack of opportunities to develop the personal qualities of a leader. Nevertheless, the methodological principles and techniques developed in this tradition are often used by many modern researchers of perceptual processes in the group. The relationship of individual personal characteristics of the manager with the effective performance of subordinates is proved by the results of many studies. 

Another research tradition is the behavioral approach, which postulates the significance for perceptual processes in the group of features of the manager's behavior in the situation of interaction with subordinates. 

The behavioral approach assumes the presence of a stable character of the manager's behavior, which is designated as the style of interaction of the manager with subordinates. There are such behavioral styles as authoritarian, democratic, and permissive, as well as variants of these styles. To describe the style, a number of scientists use such pole continuums of behavior as" task-oriented manager "and" relationship-oriented manager". The style is described as stable and unchanging regardless of the type of activity. This is the reason for criticism of this approach. Nevertheless, the relationship between the behavioral characteristics of the manager and the results of the activities of subordinates is a reasonable fact. 

In the situational approach, an important feature of the manager's perception by subordinates is the change in their perception of the manager depending on the development of the interaction situation. The starting point of this approach to research is that the personal or behavioral characteristics of the leader that appear during interaction in collective activities are interrelated with the conditions of interaction of the group with the leader and, in particular, with the type of activity of the group. In the view of subordinates, in order to ensure the necessary impact on the group, the manager must answer the following questions: meet the requirements of the situation and adjust your behavior depending on its changes. This approach refutes the rigid determination of the activity of subordinates by the personal and behavioral characteristics of the manager and introduces the concept of the probabilistic nature of the manager's influence on the results of the group's activities. Within the framework of the approach, a number of attempts are made to establish the dependence of the effectiveness of subordinates ' activities on the characteristics of the manager's personality and behavior that are relevant for certain situations of activity. 

The area of the perceptual component of leadership that we are most interested in is represented in the cognitive approach. It combines a number of areas related to the perception of information flows in the process of forming an idea of the manager. We distinguish two main mechanisms for the perception of information flows that reflect perceptual phenomena that affect the results of group activities. This is a mechanism for information exchange between participants in the interaction and an attribution mechanism for perceiving information from the outside world. 

Based on all of the above, we can conclude that it is necessary to consider the image of the leader among subordinates as a factor that combines the main components of the phenomenon of leadership. Moreover, it is formed on the basis of personal and behavioral characteristics of the manager, under the influence of the features of the interaction situation and cognitive mechanisms of information processing [1]. 

The image of the manager reflects the result of the perception process. The degree of acceptance of the manager, understood as the difference between the image of the ideal and the image of the real manager, allows you to determine the manager's compliance with the expectations of subordinates. In the case of confirmation of the relationship between the image of the manager and the degree of its acceptance by subordinates with the results of activity, we suggest using these perceptual phenomena as factors of group performance [3]. 

The reform of the Russian economy has begun and continues amid a deep crisis in almost all its spheres and industries. Low efficiency " lack of effective incentives for entrepreneurial activity, large structural imbalances, exhausted resources of the distribution system – this is not a complete list of the legacy left to us by the administrative and command system. The negative consequences of price liberalization and the crisis of Russian market reforms have exacerbated the problem of solvency to the extreme and put on the agenda the question of the prerequisites for mass bankruptcy of enterprises. 

In these circumstances, measures to prevent crisis situations, as well as measures aimed at restoring the solvency of enterprises and stabilizing their financial condition, i.e. anti-crisis management, are of particular importance. 

Modern reality forces managers of organizations to constantly make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. In the conditions of financial and political instability, commercial activity is fraught with various crisis situations, which may result in the insolvency (bankruptcy) of an organization – a legal entity [5]. 

It is established that in the practice of organization research at the level of management decisions, two types of management decisions prevail, namely: decisions as a result of optimizing a specific task and decisions as a process of preparing them in a specific organizational system.

A management decision is a volitional influence of the subject of management, carried out in accordance with the chosen purpose of functioning. The process of developing an impact end with making a decision. Management of organizational systems is carried out by making a decision, therefore, a management decision always fixes a certain stage of the management process [4].

It is important for an organization to properly conduct a dialogue with its contributors. It is very important to highlight the fact that you should not wait for a crisis to appear in order to start the process of forming an image and a positive attitude, but should anticipate negative phenomena. To do this, it is necessary to approve the management of external and internal communication during a crisis, which synthesizes all the work carried out over a certain period, most clearly, clearly and profitably covering the situation of the enterprise. This exercise should include an analysis of selected potential crises, which examines their severity, the procedures that need to be implemented, the composition of the anti-crisis committee and the role assigned to each of its members, as well as the media that will be contacted if necessary [6]. 

As a result of the analysis of numerous studies related to the peculiarities of socio-perceptual processes in management, we came to the conclusion that the image of the manager is influenced by the following main phenomena:: 

1) motivation, which reflects the influence of such phenomena as a person's needs, motives, goals, and attitudes; 

2) past experience that reflects the influence of human stereotypes, beliefs, and behaviors; 

3) the internal state of a person, which reflects the influence of the psychological, emotional, physiological, or mental state of a person; 

4) public opinion, which reflects the influence of norms, principles, rules and requirements that exist in society regarding behavior in a particular situation [3]. 

We assume that these phenomena will be transformed to one degree or another in the image of the leader among the representatives of one group. They may be associated with various inaccuracies in the description of the manager's image by their subordinates, as well as phenomena that contradict the basic properties and general principles of building and functioning of the image described above. These are so-called "perceptual errors" that are somehow related to these phenomena.