Rethinking Management Theory and Practice for the Indian Context: An International Management Perspective

The Indian economy characterized variously as a slumbering giant, powerful tiger, and the most promising market has witnessed a slowdown, occasional disturbances in the industrial relations space, and attention of the world in the last five years. In this special issue, we raise pertinent questions and present research on multiple dimensions of the dynamic and rapidly changing business environment of India. The suitability of management models and frameworks developed in the North American contexts in emerging markets like India and China is questioned. One example of how the well‐established models in the literature on success of international joint ventures were insufficient to explain the success of three international joint ventures in the insurance space in India is presented as case in point. Finally, the nine papers that materially contribute to the theme of this special issue are introduced. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Servant leadership across cultures

Servant leadership is anchored in the human drive to bond with others and contribute to the betterment of the society. An emphasis on service motivation, as demonstrated by empowering and developing people with empathy and humility, differentiates servant leadership from other leadership frameworks. In this study, we analyzed the degree to which five aspects of servant leadership, Egalitarianism, Moral Integrity, Empowering, Empathy and Humility were endorsed as important for effective leadership across cultures. While each of these dimensions was found to be associated with effective leadership, there was considerable variation in degree of endorsement of components of servant leadership across different GLOBE culture clusters. The dimensions of Egalitarianism and Empowering were endorsed more strongly in Nordic/European cultures but less so in Asian and similar cultures. On the other hand, servant leadership dimensions of Empathy and Humility were more strongly endorsed in Asian cultures than European cultures. Further, significant relationships were found between several societal cultural values and aspects of servant leadership which help us understand why nations differ in endorsing this leadership construct.     

Assessment of Consumer Behavior Towards Environmental Responsibility: A Structural Equations Modeling Approach

This paper analyses the factors impacting consumer environmental responsibility using a structural equation modeling approach. Consumer environmental responsibility is the intention of a person to act towards remediation of environmental problems not as an individual user with economic interests but as a responsible citizen having concerns about the social and environmental wellbeing of society. Therefore, awareness of environmental problems and knowledge of remedial alternatives will help individuals to pursue their chosen action and bolster a genuine desire to act and determine the measures for alleviation of environmental challenges. The four dimensions of an environmentally responsible consumer – opinion and beliefs, willingness, awareness, and an ability to act – are analysed. During the analysis, the dimension of ‘ability to move’ is found to be critical, because it has a direct influence on the capacity of the consumer to act. This research is intended to guide policy‐ and decision‐makers of regulatory bodies in understanding consumer behavior towards improving environmental performance index. It also helps organizational managers to make their supply chains green, and competitive, which in turn improves brand image and overall organizational performance. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Relationship between perceptions of corporate social responsibility and organizational cynicism: the role of employee volunteering

This study explores the role of positive corporate social responsibility (CSR) perceptions of employees in reducing cynicism toward the organization. As employee involvement in CSR activities through volunteering could influence the perceptions of CSR among employees, the moderating impact of employee volunteering on the relationship between CSR perceptions and cynicism is also tested. Considering that managers and non-managers can have different perceptions of CSR and organizational realities, the relationship between CSR and organizational cynicism is compared among managerial and non-managerial staff working in large organizations. The analysis of 348 questionnaires collected from 191 managers and 157 non-managers showed that positive perceptions of CSR were negatively correlated with organizational cynicism for both managers and non-managers, with significantly stronger negative correlations among managers. Employee volunteering did not significantly moderate the relationship between CSR and organizational cynicism in both groups. The implications of these results on human resource management theory and practice are discussed.     

A sequential approach to cross-impact analysis

A knowledge of the likelihoods of future scenarios is needed for planning in industry and government. The approach in this article employs the knowledge and the experience of “experts”, in the form of subjective probabilities, to determine the likelihood of the events. The necessary and sufficient conditions that the elicited information from the experts must satisfy in order to consistently compute the likelihoods of the scenarios are derived. A sequential procedure is developed that uses this information in generating the probabilities of the scenarios. Approximation schemes and sensitivity analysis are recommended to implement the approach with less time, effort, and cost.     

Equilibrium in abstract economies without ordered preferences and with a measure space of agents

We report a generalization of Aumann's (1966) existence theorem to economies without ordered preferences and with externalities in consumption. Our work can alternatively be viewed as a generalization of the Shafer–Sonnenschein (1975) theorem to economies with a continuum of agents.     

The curse of the superstar CEO

When struggling companies look for a new chief executive today, the one quality they prize above all others is charisma. But once they've recruited a larger-than-life leader, they often find that their troubles only get worse. Indeed, as the author's new research painfully reveals, the widespread belief in the powers of charismatic CEOs can be problematic. Why? First, Khurana says, there's no conclusive evidence that charismatic leadership affects an organization's performance. And yet--as Kodak's story over the past decade reveals--when a company is faltering, boards feel compelled to oust the incumbent chief executive and bring in a corporate savior. Second, the insistence on finding a charismatic leader, combined with the undefinable nature of charisma, results in selection processes that are overly conservative and even irrational. Boards end up considering only candidates who have already achieved the rank of CEO or president at a high-performing, high-profile company, even if they are not right for the job. Third, charismatic leaders deliberately destabilize organizations. This can result in a more vibrant company, as it did at General Electric during Jack Welch's tenure, but it can also leave a troubled legacy for the organization to overcome, as GE, Ford, and Enron have all found. Faith in a company, a product, or an idea can unleash tremendous innovation and productivity. But the extravagant hopes invested in charismatic CEOs resemble not mature faith but a belief in magic. If we are willing to reconsider our notion of leadership, this age of faith can be followed by an era of faith and reason.     

Anonymous monotonic social welfare functions

This paper presents two results about preference domain conditions that deepen our understanding of anonymous and monotonic Arrovian social welfare functions (ASWFs). We characterize the class of anonymous and monotonic ASWFs on domains without Condorcet triples. This extends and generalizes an earlier characterization (as Generalized Majority Rules) by Moulin (Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988) for single-peaked domains. We also describe a domain where anonymous and monotonic ASWFs exist only when there are an odd number of agents. This is a counter-example to a claim by Muller (Int. Econ. Rev. 23 (1982) 609), who asserted that the existence of 3-person anonymous and monotonic ASWFs guaranteed the existence of n-person anonymous and monotonic ASWFs for any n>3. Both results build upon the integer programming approach to the study of ASWFs introduced in Sethuraman et al. (Math. Oper. Res. 28 (2003) 309).     

Institutional investors, antitakeover defenses and success of hostile takeover bids

In this study we investigate the question of whether institutional investors enhance or reduce efficiency in the market for corporate control. In particular, given unequivocal evidence that target stockholders gain in successful takeover bids, we investigate the impact of institutional ownership in target firms on the adoption of the type of antitakeover defense as well as the outcome of takeover bids. We find that target firms are more likely to adopt value-reducing antitakeover defenses and successfully thwart takeover bids when a higher percentage of target common stock is owned by ‘pressure-indeterminate’ investors (investment counsel firms in particular). On the other hand, the probability of a successful takeover rises with the ownership of both ‘pressure-sensitive’ and ‘pressure-resistant’ investors. The above findings support the view that institutional investors do not play a homogeneous role in the market for corporate control.     

A characterization of egalitarian equivalence

Summary Consider a solution (an allocation rule) for an economy which satisfies the following criteria: (1) Pareto efficiency, (2) monotonicity, in the sense that if the set of attainable allocations of the economy becomes larger then the solution makes no consumer worse-off, (3) a weak and primitive notion of fairness with respect to some commodity, say commodityh, in the sense that in an exchange economy in which the aggregate endowment consists only of commodityh, the solution is equal division. We show that in the class of economies which includes non-convex technologies the only such solution is egalitarian equivalence with respect to commodityh. It is also shown that this characterization of egalitarian equivalence holds in convex exchange economies if we add a weak version of a positive association requirement.We are grateful to William Thomson and three anonymous referees for extensive comments on an earlier version. We also acknowledge helpful comments of the participants of the Social Choice and Welfare Conference held in Caen, June 1992.