Social Communicative Competence as a Factor Influencing an Individual’s Professional Successfulness: in the Context of the Psychological Sex

Abstract

The article studies the characteristic influence of an individual’s social-communicative competence on their professional achievements, as well as the specific sex psychological causality of the examined personal qualities. Within this study, professional successfulness is considered as the integral unity of its external and internal aspects, namely, career growth, social recognition and creative self-realization, accompanied by high personal satisfaction with professional work.

The following set of psychological examining methods was used to accomplish the research tasks: «Success» questionnaire (A. V. Alekseeva), diagnosing the value-semantic predispositions that determine high importance of certain aspects of professional success, G. N. Protasova’s questionnaire «Social-communicative competence», the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (modified by A. V. Alekseeva), deter­mining not only masculine/feminine components of psychological sex, but also a stereotypification degree in this field and respondents’ psychological sex self-attitudes.

According to the performed empirical study, a status as a professional success is logically accompanied by an individual’s clear desire to improve their status position and, in turn, correlates with high stereotypification of their psychological sex. An individual’s perception of a professional success as career growth is also accom­panied by their high tolerance to frustration; the masculine component of psycho­logical sex appears stronger in this case. The desire for recognition as a measure of professional successfulness correlates with a strong focus on success; a psychological sex self-attitude is a prerequisite for such aspirations and reflects the conformity of existing and desired masculine/feminine personal traits. The creative aspect of professional success is accompanied by marked autonomy, which factor is psychological masculinity, as well as by an individual’s tolerance to uncertainty, which psychological sex prerequisite is developed feminine personal traits.

Thus, an individual’s social-communicative competence and their psychological sex significantly affect their professional successfulness, namely the androgynous integrity of masculine/feminine qualities creates the most favourable conditions for professional creativity.