Anti-Crisis Leadership Culture in Russian IT Companies: Methods to Support Project Teams in an Era of Turbulence

This paper is devoted to the creation and application of a model for assessing the degree of development of anti-crisis leadership culture in Russian IT companies. It consists of three parts – systematization of scientific literature on the topic, empirical research and discussion of the practical significance of the results obtained for business. The research sample (N=124) includes employees of leading Russian IT companies, including Yandex, MegaFon, Kaspersky Lab, VK, OZON, CROC, Wildberries and others. The type of empirical research – quantitative; data collection method – questionnaire; analysis tools – reliability analysis, descriptive statistical analysis, normality and multicollinearity tests, correlation and regression analyses, subset relationship modeling method – Euler-Venn diagram – etc. The resulting model explains up to one third of the variability in the productivity of project team members depending on the level of development of anti-crisis leadership competencies of their manager (R2=0.342). As a result of its application it is found that in comparison with organizations from other industries domestic IT companies have a more developed anti-crisis leadership culture and, as a consequence, higher productivity of teams in turbulent times. Thus, according to the responses of respondents from IT companies, their leaders have better mastered 10 of the 11 methods of project team support and cohesion studied, including ethicality, empowerment, empathy, growth opportunities, no-blame culture, trust, regular and constructive feedback, and bounded optimism; lagging behind only in informal team building. Additional arguments in favor of the maturity of anti-crisis leadership culture in IT are the findings that 9 out of 10 employees consider the components of their employer's mission to be relevant and that all IT companies in the sample have completed the process of implementing a network of proactive ad-hoc teams. The study also reveals the ambiguous role of team members' stress levels and the mediating role of their engagement and job satisfaction. Finally, specific recommendations are provided for project managers based on best practices on how to properly capitalize on the benefits of informal communication, overcome common micromanagement mistakes, and build the habit of giving regular feedback. Keywords: anti-crisis leadership, turbulent times, IT