The Role of Self-Affirmation Values in Achieving the Well-Being for Russian Workers

Abstract

The paper details the results of a secondary analysis aimed at revealing the social role that self-affirmation values play for Russian workers. For this purpose, the specifics of the relationship between such values as “power-wealth” and “achievement” are successively compared with subjective well-being indicators pertinent to hired workers in Russia and their colleagues in other European countries. In addition to traditional indicators of subjective well-being (satisfaction with life and household income evaluation), the role of a worker’s motivational potential is also taken into account. The data produced by the European Social Survey (ESS) in 2006–2018 is used as the information base. The object of the study was workers who had paid jobs at the time of the survey. In contrast to the “scarcity” hypothesis proposed by R. Inglehart and C. Welzel, the “wealth fixation” hypothesis is substantiated in theory and empirically tested for Russian workers with high self-affirmation values. This hypothesis was confirmed: when family income reaches higher values and when subjective evaluations of such income are also high, self-affirmation values grow as well. The analysis showed that positive relations between subjective well-being indicators and self-affirmation values are one of the important distinguishing characteristics of Russian workers. The final conclusions allow for making the claim that the well-being of Russian workers mainly depends on their individual efforts and how they perform at work. The trend towards weakened relations between self-affirmation values and subjective well-being indicators noticed in Russian workers in the period between 2006 and 2018 are believed to be a sign of the decrease in Russian workers’ motivational potential that had emerged by 2018.