Approaches to understanding labor productivity and factors affecting its growth

The article deals with approaches to understanding labor productivity as an economic category and an indicator of activity performance. The study showed the presence of different points of view on the determination of labor productivity, which gave grounds to single out the categorical, measuring and factorial approaches, according to the criterion for interpreting labor productivity. It has been substantiated that the dominant factors of labor productivity growth have changed with the transition from the industrial stage of development to the post-industrial stage. The industrial period was dominated by the technical-technological and organizational-economic factors of growth, then in the post-industrial period socio-technological factors become of priority importance, at last in the neo-industrial period innovations and digital technologies begin to play the leading role. It is established that the factors affecting labor productivity act ambiguously. Some of them provide only an increase in labor productivity, these are accelerator factors. These include technical and technological, organizational and economic, socio-psychological, investment, innovative, information (digitalization), intellectual. Other factors have a bidirectional effect, their influence can contribute to both the growth of labor productivity and its decrease, these are multiplier factors. These comprise the competitive environment, economic policy, institutional factors, consumer preferences. The peculiarity of the action of factors-multipliers is also in the fact that their positive influence is carried out more slowly than the negative effect, which is always faster. In addition the paper indicates the obstacles to accelerator factors currently taking place in the industry of the Russian Federation.