1. Rival and A. Rutkowski conjectured that the ratio of the number of automorphisms of an arbitrary poset to the number of order-preserving maps tends to zero as the size of the poset tends to infinity. We prove this hypothesis for direct products of arbitrary posets P = S1 x ... x S(n) under the condition that max(i) \S(i)\ = o(square-root n/log n).