Organisational Life-Cycle: The Characteristics of Developmental Stages in Russian Companies Created From Scratch

Zusammenfassung

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Although plenty of organizational life-cycle research in developed countries may be found in the literature, there is a remarkable lack of such research for transition economies like Russia. This article presents the results of 593 Russian entrepreneurial firms surveyed with a focus on organizational life-cycle issues. A model of the life-cycle was developed including three stages: start-up, growth and formalization. It is found that the development of Russian newly established companies is characterized by an unusually slow change of centralization and formalization level as the firm moves from one stage to another and by preserving the owner's control over the firm even after the transition to professional management.

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Organisational Life-Cycle: The Characteristics of Developmental Stages in Russian Companies Created From Scratch

Introduction

The popularity of the organisational life-cycle (OLC) concept has grown among researchers studying various management aspects. Such research leads to a better understanding of the life-cycle concept and gives a comprehensive picture of an organisation's major characteristics at each life-cycle stage. Studying a variety of management aspects at different life-cycle stages also provides a powerful change management tool based on changes in management practice and the internal logic of organisational development.

Over the years much has been written about the life-cycle concept1, yet there has been remarkably little attention given to life-cycle empiric models (Smith et al. 1985; Hanks et al. 1993; Flynn 2001; Lester et al. 2003; Mulford 2004; Hoy 2006). Some Russian researchers have studied life-cycles (Yakovenko 1991), but companies started from scratch later than the 1990s have not been thoroughly studied in terms of their development dynamics within the life-cycle concept. That may be caused by both the relatively young age of Russian companies and a low interest in such issues. There have been a few papers by Russian researchers who have either interpreted existing models or tried to create a theoretical model on no empiric grounds (Semenkov 2001; Zheleznyak 2001; Filonovich200 1 ; Konstantinov et al. 2002; Ivashkovskaya et al. 2004; Kushelevich/Filonovich 2004).

This research project of studying Russian companies' life-cycles aims at filling in the gap in Russian life-cycle research. The project includes two stages. The first stage was the pilot project carried out in 2005-2006 to test the methodology for a large-scale research effort (for the pilot project outcomes, see (Shirokova et al. 2006)). This project studied companies represented by the Graduate School of Management alumni. In the long run, this re...

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