Reinvestigating the Nature of Persistence of Shocks in the Macroeconomic Variables Relating to the Indian Economy with Special Reference to Structural Changes and Seasonality

Over the last two decades, there is a substantial debate on the persistence of shocks, in terms of their transitory and permanent nature, caused to the macroeconomic aggregates. Macroeconomic variables with transitory shocks will revert back to the long-run deterministic path eventually, whereas variables with permanent shocks will move according to random walk having no fixed predetermined path. These two series known as Trend Stationary (TS) and Difference Stationary (DS), respectively, have their significance in the specification of the regression equation and testing competing economic theories. Consequently there are a good amount of studies to classify the macroeconomic aggregates as TS vs. DS. In this context, relatively new developments of seasonal integration and presence of structural breaks in the macro variables has aroused a need to reinvestigate these hypotheses afresh. This paper makes an attempt to examine some of these issues by making use of the Indian data.

     

Stay close! The role of leader distance in the relationship between transformational leadership,work engagement,and performance in undergraduate project teams

The author aimed to show that (a) transformational leadership is related to project teams’ performance via work engagement and (b) leader distance moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement. The proposed moderated mediation model was tested using 180 students in an undergraduate management course and working in project teams. The findings supported only the relationship between work engagement and performance, and thus transformational leadership does not appear to be useful in undergraduate project teams. However, the nonsignificant moderator effect revealed an unexpected finding for a direct and marginally significant relationship between leader distance and work engagement.     

Transformational Instructor‐Leadership in Higher Education Teaching: A Meta‐Analytic Review and Research Agenda

Researchers have shown that transformational leadership is applicable to higher education teaching, that is, transformational instructor‐leadership. However, such research is fractionated across diverse fields. To address the fractionated literature, the purpose of the current study was to conduct a meta‐analytic review of transformational instructor‐leadership and to analyze research in which such leadership has been empirically associated with student outcomes. For the meta‐analysis, the Hunter–Schmidt approach was adopted, and thus, correlations were corrected for attenuation due to measurement error. The findings indicated that transformational instructor‐leadership was positively associated with students’ motivation, satisfaction, perceptions of instructor credibility, academic performance, affective learning, and cognitive learning. Moderator analyses revealed that culture, course delivery, instrument, and gender were all significant moderators of the relationship between transformational instructor‐leadership and specific student outcomes. The findings also showed that there were significant differences between the transformational leadership dimensions, thus supporting the notion that each dimension is conceptually distinct. The present meta‐analysis drew from varied disciplines in contributing the first integrative review on transformational instructor‐leadership. Future research needs to extend the literature with regard to context sensitivity, common method variance, causal conclusions, mechanisms, outcome measures, and control variables. Practically, higher education institutions should consider training transformational instructor‐leaders.