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2769 items in total found

Working Papers | 2005

Women and Formal and Informal Science

Anil K. Gupta and Mashelkar R A

Gender imbalance among various streams of professionals is a constant cause of concern to policy planners and institution builders. The situation becomes more serious when we notice that girls often perform much better academically at secondary school level and then there is a sharp decline in their performance at graduate and postgraduate levels. The situation in the field of science and technology is no less serious. There are very few scientific institutions, which have women scientists as directors, or senior leaders of programmes. In this paper, we compare our insights from the formal scientific sector with our investigations in informal scientific sector. The effort to blend excellence in formal and informal scientific sectors would require overcoming the gender imbalances in both these sectors. A review of the current status and offer of some policy and institutional suggestions are also included, which could help in overcoming asymmetry in the knowledge and power of women in formal and informal sciences.

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Working Papers | 2005

How Close Can You Get - The Effect of Proxemics on LMX

Rai Himanshu and Vaibhavi Kulkarni

The study of how human use space to communicate is termed as Proxemics. In an organizational setting, this behavior has been found to be culturally conditioned and thus may differentially affect the degree of mutual influence and obligation between superiors and subordinates. The hypothesis that differential informal interactional levels and dining arrangements would have different effects on the perceptions of leader-member exchange quality was tested with a sample of employees (N=142) from organizations across India. We have discussed the results and their implications in the present study.

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Working Papers | 2005

Revisiting Appraisal Politics from Assessors' Perspective

Dhiman Amit and Manjari Singh

Past research on performance appraisal focusing on assessor's ability to assess accurately has not made much progress because practitioners have not adopted most of the recommendations. One of the arguments has been that enhancing assessor's ability to is useless unless s/he intends to appraise accurately. The focus of this paper is to understand assessor's intention to appraise performance and it draws from political view of organisation, which considers assessor as a politician and proposes that certain contextual factors cause assessor's to adopt goals other than accuracy. Specifically, it is proposed that, instrumentality of outcomes, ambiguity in the process/ policies, and accountability pressures shape the assessor's perception of appraisal politics, which determine assessor's intention to achieve specific goals through appraisal. Accountability research reveals that only specific accountability conditions have favourable affect on decision. While procedural accountability reduces assessor's perception of appraisal politics, the outcome accountability will increase this perception and affect appraisal accuracy.

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Working Papers | 2005

Mediating Effects in the Relationship between 360-Degree Feedback and Employee Performance

Rai Himanshu and Manjari Singh

360-degree feedback has been linked to several positive outcomes like improved performance, better interpersonal communication, smoother work relationships, etc. The paper empirically examines the mediating effects in the relationship between 360-degree feedback and employee performance with a sample of executives (N=198) working in four organisations in Western India. The results show that interpersonal communication and quality of working life have a complete mediating effect. Leader member exchange quality and perceived organisational support were found to have a partial but significant mediating effect. An elementary form of an integrated model, which includes all the four mediating variables and their inter-relationships, has been developed conceptually. This model is examined and built up empirically using structural equation modelling.

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Working Papers | 2005

Organizational Citizenship Performance in Non-Governmental Organizations: Development of a Scale

Kumar Rajiv

Past two decades have seen increasing research in the broad area of beneficial non-task employee behaviors. Several concepts have been proposed to capture such behaviors, like organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), prosocial behavior, organizational spontaneity, extra-role behavior, contextual performance, etc. But "contextual performance" (labeled here as organizational citizenship performance, meaning behaviors that support the organizational, social and psychological environment in which the technical core, i.e., task performance, must function) has emerged as the best specified concept (Organ, 1997). Despite the emphasis by scholars on the twin needs of construct validity and developing culture-specific measures for concepts like OCB, progress is lacking in this direction. This study aims to fill this gap. The research design involved three broad stages: item generation, scale development and assessment of scale's psychometric properties (reliability and validity). Fulltime and paid employees of several NGOs participated in data collection. The emerging scale shows satisfactory psychometric properties. It is expected that this scale would be useful for research as well as practice. Besides bridging the research gaps mentioned above, NGOs can use it to measure organizational citizenship performance. With some modifications, this scale is expected to be useful for other Indian organizations as well.

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Working Papers | 2005

Career Drivers of New-age Employees: Implications for Organisational Reward and Employee Development Systems

Manjari Singh

The paper conceptualises the linkages among individual career drivers, psychological contracts, and organisational reward and employee development systems. The model also incorporates employee reward preferences and skill-acquisition drivers. The career drivers, reward preferences, and skill-acquisition drivers of 104 software professionals in India were empirically examined. Our findings indicate that organisational reward and employee development systems need to be linked to employees' expectations that are based on their career aspirations and preferences, and also that these systems need to have the flexibility to incorporate employee diversity.

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Working Papers | 2005

Expanding Financial Services Access for the Poor: The Transformation of SPANDANA

Sriram M S

The paper traces the evolution of Spandana group of institutions. At the outset we explore the background of Spandana, the motivation for the promoters to set up the organisation and how it has aggressively grown from the time it was set up. The organisation reached a stage where transformation became inevitable and this change happened in a very quick time. As a part of the study, we examine the unique issues arising out of fund movement (in the form of debt or equity) between an organisation incorporated for public purposes and a for-profit entity that would generate profits to the shareholders. The paper examines how these two seemingly contradictory aspects could be reconciled. The structural options available and how they jell with the orientation of the promoters are examined. We examine how the organisation has experimented with various options in carrying out its financial services and trading activities. We conclude that while the current legal environment did place some constraints on how the organisation's design got determined, there were issues about the quality of governance available to the organisation during its initial years. Spandana demonstrates that there is a huge potential for many MFIs to operate both in the urban and rural space. The fact that it could garner a portfolio of Rs. 2.4 billion in a fairly limited area and time demonstrates the size of the potential market that could be served by microfinance. In undertaking activities at such scale, any organisation would face hurdles. This paper looks at the hurdles caused by the regulatory regime that forces organisations to take fairly circuitous routes to achieve obvious results in the organisational form. It also deals with the other services that were being offered by Spandana and how these had to be dropped due to regulatory requirements. The study concludes by drawing important lessons, raising further issues for regulation by bringing out the peculiar circumstances in which Spandana and similar organisations are working.

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Working Papers | 2005

Coffee, Tea or …? : Gender and Politeness in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)

Asha Kaul and Vaibhavi Kulkarni

Research shows that electronic communication has affected written language significantly. The increasing importance of use of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in organizations has multiple implications for use of written language at workplace. This study focuses on the influence of gender and politeness on writing style in CMC, specifically work related emails, in the Indian context. Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) and Leech's maxims of Politeness have been used to analyze samples of 494 work related emails written by both men and women. On the basis of this analysis, an attempt has been made to study the relationship between gender, politeness and email content. On the basis of the data, it is concluded that: 1. Different politeness maxims across genders are used in work related emails. 2. Politeness maxims are used in clusters. 3. Variations in use of politeness maxims across genders are highest in directives. 4. Violations of politeness maxims are higher in men than in women.

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Working Papers | 2005

Food Insecurity in India: Causes and Dimensions

Dand Sejal A and Chakravarty Sujoy

In this study we explore causes of the widespread food insecurity that prevails in India. It has been observed that even though the proportion of the malnourished fell by about 1 percent (FAO, 2002) through the nineties in India, their absolute number increased by about 18 million. Thus the problem of food insecurity in India is not of general systemic failure that arises due to a supply shortage. It is in fact more a problem where certain sectors (mainly the rural agrarian population and the urban informal sector) suffer from a shortage of food in a general climate of increasing production. Delving deeper, we observe that the main determinants of food insecurity in India today are the shrinking of agrarian and informal sector incomes and failures (both due to policy framing as well as implementation) of support led measures to combat poverty. The latter include the near breakdown of the targeted public distribution system (TPDS) in most regions of the country. This study uses existing scholarly work in the area as well as conventional data sources in order to show the extent of food insecurity in India today and the logic of the different patterns of its causality.

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Working Papers | 2005

Gender, Affect and Upward Influence

Asha Kaul, Ansari Mahfooz A, and Rai Himanshu

Upward influence tactics affect the attitude, perceptions and behavior of the supervisors towards their subordinates. This influence may be used both for organizational and personal purposes. With more and more women joining the work place, gender becomes a significant construct given that upward influence tactics may have nuances different for men and women, especially in the Indian context. The hypotheses that made an attempt to understand gender differences in terms of use of upward influence tactics and the moderating effect of the positive and the negative affect, were tested with a sample of employees (N=107) working in a large bank in Western India. The study employed both in-depth exploratory interviews and a survey methodology. While the interview data was subjected to rigorous content analysis techniques, regression analysis was performed on survey data. Results indicated that the gender of the agent and the supervisor, as well as the interaction of gender and affective styles, influenced the choice of upward influence tactics.

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