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849 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2018

The Teaching of Soft Communication Skills in Entrepreneurship Development Courses at the+ 2 Level in India

Sushmita Chakravarti and Saikat Chakraborty

IUP Journal of Soft Skills

Entrepreneurs play an important role in the economic development of emerging economies such as India, and Entrepreneurship Development Programs (EDP) at various life stages boost it. EDP’s impact at the +2 level is strategic and timely as it adds self-sufficiency to the young who are either forced to or willingly take up entrepreneurship after their +2 education. Creating a new venture and the sea of uncertainties and risks involved in entrepreneurship can be daunting and frustrating, testing the tenacity of the +2 students’ soft skills, especially soft communication skills. Soft communication skill helps in information gathering, customer handling, teamwork, communicating with stakeholders, establishing relationships, and in tackling the challenges involved in venture creation. This paper thus argues for the teaching of soft communication skills in entrepreneurship development courses at the + 2 level, and highlights the need for and benefits of taking such initiatives, whilst suggesting certain broad guidelines in this regard.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Web content analysis of online grocery shopping web sites in India

Tamushree Banerjee and Arindam Banerjee

International Journal of Business Analytics

This article evaluates online grocery shopping web sites catering to customers primarily in India. The process of evaluation has been carried out in 3 parts using Rapidminer. In part A, the authors have studied the similarity in content that resides on the grocery shopping web sites. Using unstructured data from homepage of grocery shopping websites and the keywords specified for the web sites, the authors have made an effort to establish a cosine similarity index amongst them. In part B, the authors have analysed the customer reviews from the web sites. Studying the resulting association rules, authors have attempted to identify the attributes that drive customer happiness. In part C, the authors have documented the web traffic metric parameters (attributes) measured by search engine optimization (SEO) tool web sites. Hence, the created a correlation matrix to determine the parameters that are significantly impacting per day revenue for the web sites.

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Journal Articles | 2018

A New playbook for diversified companies

Ulrich Pidun, Ansgar Richter, Monika Schommer, and Amit Karna

MIT Sloan Management Review

When do diversification strategies pay off? (1) Multi-business companies can enhance performance by developing a cohesive set of business and operating models. (2)Diversifiers also do well to tailor their corporate parenting strategy to the needs of their business units. (3) Assigning clear roles to each unit and allocating capital accordingly can help companies translate strategy into action.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Relationships between job characteristics, work engagement, conscientiousness and managers’ turnover intentions

Upasna A. Agarwal and Vishal Gupta

Personnel Review

Purpose

Integrating the job demands-resources theory and the conservation of resources theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a moderated-mediation model examining the relationships between motivating job characteristics, work engagement, conscientiousness and managers’ turnover intentions.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected using a survey questionnaire from 1,302 managers working in eight Indian private sector organizations. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis were used to test the hypothesized relationships between the study variables.

Findings

The study found evidence of the mediating role of work engagement for the relationship between motivating job characteristics and managers’ turnover intentions. Conscientiousness moderated the relationship between work engagement and turnover intention. The total and indirect effects of motivating job characteristics on turnover intention were moderated by conscientiousness.

Research limitations/implications

The study was cross-sectional, so inferences about causality are limited.

Practical implications

The findings of this study reaffirm the crucial role of job characteristics in influencing work engagement and turnover intention. By examining work engagement as a mediator for the job characteristics-turnover intention relationship, this study explores the process through which job characteristics are associated with turnover intention. The findings of the moderating influence of contentiousness on the relationship of direct and indirect effects of job characteristics suggests that individual personality can influence social exchanges as well as managerial attitudes and behaviors in multiple ways.

Originality/value

The study provides an insight into the underlying process through which job characteristics are related to managers’ turnover intentions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, such a study is the first of its kind.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Is It the Message or the Medium? Relational management during crisis through blogs, Facebook and corporate websites

Vaibhavi Kulkarni

Global Business review

This is a quasi-experimental study comparing three modes of communication during crisis to examine whether they lead to differences in perception of relational maintenance. Crisis communication by an airline company was marginally modified to mask the organization’s identity, following which participants were exposed to crisis communication through a Facebook page (n = 47), corporate blog entry (n = 58) or corporate media release (n = 50). Contrary to the existing literature, the study did not find any significant differences based on participants’ exposure to different mediums. However, participants relying on Facebook for information about the crisis reported a better understanding of the crisis. The study underscores the importance of perceived user control and familiarity with the medium in determining stakeholder perceptions. It also calls for additional empirical studies to investigate the effectiveness of social media vis-à-vis conventional communication routes, especially when the same information is presented through different mediums.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Walking the tightrope: gender inclusion as organizational change

Vaibhavi Kulkarni, Neharika Vohra, Supriya Sharma, and Nisha Nair

Journal of Organizational Change Management

Purpose

The study focuses on the inclusion practices and processes of five large organizations across diverse sectors where women are underrepresented. The purpose of this paper is to examine how organizations facilitate changes in behavior and mindset through formal and informal practices.

Design/methodology/approach

In-depth interviews of CEOs, HR team members, and diversity and inclusion leaders in the five organizations were used as data in this study. Coding was done over several rounds via content analysis for the development of themes around how organizations work toward women’s inclusion.

Findings

The findings indicate that in their inclusion practices, all five organizations took into consideration societal biases that often render women at a disadvantage. Some of the cultural biases regarding family role expectations and safety-related norms were recognized and incorporated in their practices, while other gender-based stereotypes impeding inclusivity were addressed with zero tolerance of prejudicial behaviors. Organizations achieved this balance through various communicative practices including lateral and informal communication, generalized and particularized conversations, and creation of alternate spaces for dialogue.

Practical implications

By examining women’s inclusivity initiatives of five large organizations working in India, this study helps create an understanding of how organizations can bring about such change, keeping in mind the societal and cultural context, for a more nuanced and achievable inclusion. This study also demonstrates how informal narratives enable deep-rooted organizational change such as inclusion. Such narratives facilitate in enhancing employee’s readiness to change, thereby laying foundations for a sustained impact.

Originality/value

Very few studies that focus on women’s inclusion practices also take into consideration both the demands of the organization as well as the societal expectations placed upon women. This study highlights how organizations try to manage this tension and refrain from “homogenizing” or fitting women into existing practices and routines.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Post-adoption experience of hybrid rice in India: Farmers' satisfaction and willingness to grow

Varsha Khandker and Gandhi Vasant P

Agricultural Economics Research Review

Through this study we try to understand the post-adoption experiences of hybrid rice technology of the Indian farmers and its influences on their level of satisfaction, as well as their willingness to continue with the use of this technology. We find a number of factors, such as agronomic potential, agroeconomic potential, effective demand, distribution, location, geography and cropping pattern impacting farmers’ levels of satisfaction as well as their willingness to continue with cultivation of hybrid rice. Farmers in the predominantly rainfed regions, characterized by low crop yields, are more satisfied than others and they are also willing more to grow hybrid rice in future. From policy perspective, the results indicate the need for appropriate targeting of the technology while ensuring adequate supply of seeds and other inputs.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Contextualising educational decentralisation policies in India

Viaya Sherry Chand and Samvet Kuril

Economic and Political Weekly

The impact of the local contextualisation of successive rounds of educational decentralisation reform on organisational learning and capacities of rural educational governance structures is examined. From locating schools in local self-government in the mid-1990s, the focus shifted in the 2000s to school accountability. This shift induced a reconstruction of the “risk” posed by the earlier round of reform and the identification of aspects of organisational learning to be retained or discarded. Such an ability to choose is an important indicator of organisational capacity for reform. The next round of reforms should include academic supervision in the accountability mandate.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Solving semi-open queuing networks with time-varying arrivals: An application in container terminal landside operations

Vibhuti Dhingra, Govind Lal Kumawat, Debjit Roy, and René De Koster

European Journal of Operational Research

Semi-open queuing networks (SOQNs) are widely applied to measure the performance of manufacturing, logistics, communications, restaurant, and health care systems. Many of these systems observe variability in the customer arrival rate. Therefore, solution methods, which are developed for SOQNs with time-homogeneous arrival rate, are insufficient to evaluate the performance of systems which observe time-varying arrivals. This paper presents an efficient solution approach for SOQNs with time-varying arrivals. We use a Markov-modulated Poisson Process to characterize variability in the arrival rate and develop a matrix-geometric method (MGM)-based approach to solve the network. The solution method is validated through extensive numerical experiments. Further, we develop a stochastic model of the landside operations at an automated container terminal with time-varying truck arrivals and evaluate using the MGM-based approach. Results show that commonly used time-homogeneous approximation of time-varying truck arrivals is inaccurate (error is more than 15% in expected waiting time and expected number of trucks waiting outside the terminal) for performance evaluation of the landside operations. The application results are insightful in resource planning, demand leveling, and regulating the number of trucks permitted inside the terminal.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Does implementing problem-solving projects affect decisional style? Developing governance capabilities in school management committees

Vijaya Sherry Chand and Ketan Satish Deshmukh

Journal of Development Effectiveness

Faith in the power of local decision-making underpins decentralised democratic governance, but the evidence for its effectiveness is mixed. It is in this context that school management committees (SMCs) were established in 2009–10 in India. Training these SMCs received has been criticised for focusing only a set of high expectations built around an idealised set of roles and responsibilities, and not on the members’ decision-making capabilities. We describe how problem-solving projects can be employed to develop such capabilities, through a field experiment in 50 SMCs, with another 50 serving as controls, that studied decisional styles of 603 SMC members. The analysis was based on a confirmatory factor analysis of a two-factor (vigilant and maladaptive styles) model, with the variation among SMCs controlled through a two-level model and path analysis. There was a significant positive effect on the vigilant decision-making style of those who participated in the programme (β = 0.195, p < .05), though maladaptive styles increased in both the treatment and control groups. Given that SMCs are expected to remain a feature of local governance structures, the importance of functional partnerships between the SMCs and school principals is indicated.

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IIMA