Comprehensive Assessment of Consumer Cooperation Organizations’ Labor Potential in the Central Federal Region.

Labor potential of consumer cooperation organizations serving rural population is a key element of progressive economic development of these organizations as well as a factor of improvement in living standards of rural people. A great part of solutions of production and social challenges depends mainly on the efficiency of human resource management. Nevertheless, the currently applied methods of management fail to provide the required level of productivity and quality of labor that makes critically important to enhance the methodology of labor potential management in cooperative organizations. Functional and structural analysis, general economic and financial analysis, economic and statistical groupings have been used as part of the comprehensive approach to the research on the problem. In addition, we have applied particular methods of economic research, namely, a subject and object approach, graphical and tabular formats to present information. The 4-year-results of formation and usage of labor potential in consumer cooperation organizations of Belgorod, Kursk and Lipetsk Regions of the Central Federal District of Russia have been studied. According to the research findings, the number of employees in consumer cooperation organizations is constantly decreasing, the level of their wages is low, labor potential is being used ineffectively and a motivational function of wages is poor. The methodological approach to the comprehensive assessment of the organization’s labor potential has been proposed; the quantitative and qualitative components of this category have been singled out; the range of the organization’s labor potential assessment indicators has been divided into stages – the initial assessment (the quantitative component analysis), the secondary assessment (the qualitative component analysis) and the assessment of the organization’s labor potential performance (the analysis of financial and economic indicators of the organization and its staff’s performance); based on information of cooperative organizations’ activity in Belgorod, Kursk and Lipetsk Regions, the main components of each assessment stage have been evaluated. This elaborated methodological approach shall give the opportunity to characterize the state of labor potential in the organization and to elicit trends of its formation improvement and ways of increasing its efficient usage quite effectively and rationally.