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Abstract

From 2000 to 2015, Vladimir Putin presided over Russia’s retreat from a nascent, market-based economy to a more familiar, yet problematic state-centered system. Grounded in statist ideology, Putin successfully 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 would become instrumental in achieving Putin’s comprehensive agenda for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of Russia’s formal institutional context. In this article, we 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 to 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.

Keywords

institutional theory deinstitutionalization transition economies Russia leadership

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Institutional Erosion and Its Effects on Russia’s Corporate Leadership

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