Greetings from the Editor’s desk!
It is my pleasure to bring you the first issue of IIMB Management Review (IMR) for the year 2022 and to give you a brief account of the progress of the journal.
We are happy to share that IMR is now a Gold Open Access journal, supported by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). IIMB covers the publication fee for up to 35 accepted articles published in the journal in an annual volume. We understand that the flip to Gold open access will enable a wider range of our readers to access and benefit from the journal. We invite you to view more details about the journal at https://www.journals.elsevier.com/iimb-management-review/.
The guidance of our Associate Editors and reviewers has been vital in sustaining our academic standards and driving the journal forward. We are happy to inform you that the following Associate Editors came on board between April 2021 and March 2022: Prof. Anand Venkateswaran (Finance) of the D’Amore McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Prof. Ashok Banerjee (Finance & Control) of IIM Calcutta; Prof. Haritha Saranga (Production and Operations Management), IIMB; Prof. Manju Jaiswall (Finance & Control) of IIM Calcutta; Prof. Shivganesh Bhargava (Organisational Behaviour/Human Resources) of the Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay; Prof. Srinivasan Sankaraguruswamy (Accounting) of the NUS Business School, Singapore; and Prof. Sushanta Kumar Mishra (Organisational Behaviour /Human Resources) of IIMB. We thank the outgoing AEs Prof. Avinash Mulky of IIMB and Prof. Mukul Asher of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, for their engagement with the journal and their support.
IMR organises the annual IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC) along with the Office of the Doctoral Programme, IIMB, and this year the thirteenth edition of IMRDC was held on 20, 21 & 22 January 2022 in virtual mode. The Conference Chairs for IMRDC 2022 were Prof. Tirthatanmoy Das of the Economics & Social Sciences area and Prof. Rajeev R Tripathi, Production and Operations Management, IIMB. A total of 75 full papers were submitted to the conference of which 12 were invited for final presentation after a rigorous three-step selection process. IMRDC has established itself as a pre-eminent doctoral colloquium in Management Science and associated disciplines, and has been commended for its “one exclusive discussant per paper” format. Dedicated discussants, from among well-published researchers and academics from distinguished institutions, offered comments and constructive feedback on each of the presentations. Many of the papers presented at IMRDC have gone on to be published in IMR, after due review.
IMRDC 2022 included two keynote sessions. Prof. Alfonso Flores-Lagunes of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University made a presentation titled “Does youth training lead to better job quality? Evidence from Job Corps”, and Prof. J Ramachandran of the Strategy area, IIM Bangalore spoke on “Building a career in the academia”. The IMRDC 2022 Best Paper Award went to Tania Jain of IIMB for her presentation of “Debt contract enforcement and product innovation: Evidence from a legal reform in India”.
Volume 34 –1 carries the usual complement of articles and features. Following is a brief introduction to the contents.
In “Examining the linkages between employee brand love, affective commitment, positive word-of-mouth, and turnover intentions: A social identity theory perspective”, Shweta Mittal, Vishal Gupta, and Manoj Motiani draw on social identity theory and argue that employees’ perceived oneness (love) with the organisation’s brand leads them to exhibit high affective commitment, positive word-of-mouth (PWOM), and low turnover intention. Data were collected from 289 professionals working in public and private sector insurance companies in India and structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data for relationships between the study variables.
The empirical results demonstrated that employee brand love has a significant positive relationship with PWOM behaviour and affective commitment, and a significant negative relationship with turnover intention. Moreover, affective commitment mediated the relationship of employee brand love with PWOM behaviour and turnover intention. The findings suggest that stronger identification (love) with the organisation (brand) leads employees to exhibit high affective commitment, PWOM behaviour, and low turnover intention. The study underscores the role of employee brand love in driving positive employee attitudes and behaviours that are important to organisational growth and success.
In “Does job crafting help deal with paradoxes of people management?”, Soniya Dabak and Zubin R. Mulla examine whether redefining one’s role through job crafting (i.e. making changes to the tasks, relationships and purpose of one’s role) enables not only coping with tensions but a broader range of responses to tensions presented by the organisational context. They conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 people managers from the R&D centre of a large multinational organisation in Bengaluru, India.
According to the results, the types of crafting strategies used suggest that managers engaged actively in task crafting to demonstrate the paradoxical behaviours of enforcing work requirements and providing flexibility, maintaining decision control and empowerment, and self-centredness and other-centredness. Crafting relationships was associated with demonstrating the paradoxical behaviours of maintaining distance and closeness and uniformity and individualisation. Finally, cognitive crafting or redefining the purpose of one’s role helped managers to demonstrate both self-centredness and other-centredness. Adding, emphasising and redesigning different tasks in their roles helped managers proactively alter the way they approached these competing demands to demonstrate paradoxical behaviour. The application of job crafting to the study of paradoxical leader behaviour has implications for leader development and coaching.
In “Are professional fund managers less likely to sell winners? Evaluating how attention allocation impacts behavioural biases”, Kamran Quddus and Ashok Banerjee aim to understand the impact of the fund managers’ trading actions from a behavioural finance perspective. They investigate the role of behavioural biases, such as the disposition effect, and the variation of a fund manager’s tendencies with the business cycle. They examine whether the cognitive constraints faced by fund managers amplify these biases. They investigate the cross-sectional variations in the disposition bias of investors across equity-oriented mutual funds (MFs). Their analysis is based on the monthly holdings data of 2,000 equity-oriented MFs in India.
They find that the Indian equity MFs exhibit a tendency to realise capital gains more readily than capital losses. An analysis of the equity trades of fund managers shows results that are consistent with the loss aversion framework. A cross-sectional examination of the MF sample reveals trading frequency, fund performance, and the number of stocks in a portfolio, as possible factors for the variation in disposition bias. They find that fund managers are more likely to exhibit a disposition bias following price appreciation. However, the behavioural tendency to exhibit biases drops during the phases of business cycle contraction.
The study highlights the link between real economic activities, viz. business cycles, and investor attitude towards risk; similar to developed markets, fund managers in emerging markets are disposition prone. Fund managers who trade more are experienced traders who may realise losses and continue holding winner stocks. Funds with superior returns in the past tend to realise gains more often, and those that hold more stocks are more amenable to sell winner stocks. Attentional considerations explain the low levels of biases observed during economic slowdowns.
Nirakar Barik and A Balakrishnan observe that the question of momentum returns on stocks being related to idiosyncratic volatility (IV), more so of short-term and long-term price movements being influenced by IV has been largely unexamined in the context of the Indian stock market, and proceed to address these issues in “Are momentum profits influenced by idiosyncratic volatility? Evidence from India.” They investigate the relationship between the average expected momentum returns and IV and the possible role being played by IV in explaining the abnormal momentum returns by using the data of daily closing share prices for 473 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange 500 index for the time period 2008 to 2018.
The results show that IV and momentum return on stocks are positively related. Idiosyncratic volatilities have a significant impact on momentum effect on all the three short-term trading strategies and two long-term trading strategies as the resulting alphas are non-zeros and are statistically significant. The study adds to the existing body of literature in the asset pricing domain and could be a source of information to different classes of investors.
In “Predictive power of yield curve -- Evidence from India”, Geetima Das Krishna and Biswajit Nag aim to explore whether the yield curve spread in a government fixed income market can predict future economic activities in India. The authors explain that instead of just showing the predictive power of the yield curve, their aim is to compare the predictive power of an estimated composite index of lead indicators (CILI) with that of the slope of the yield curve. They also examine the predictive ability of both, the CILI and the slope of the yield curve during the period of the global financial crisis of 2008, the domestic macro problems of 2013, and the unexpected and forced disruption caused by demonetisation at the end of 2016. They use the non-agricultural GDP (NAGDP) as the reference series and the quarterly data from 2005 to 2018 of around 27 economic indicators are considered for the construction of CILI. The study suggests that the yield curve spread measured by the difference in the 10-year and 3-month yields has better predictive power to estimate the turns in economic activity compared to the CILI constructed. Thus, the yield curve in India embodies information content that can help forecast future economic activities. However, they observe that both CILI and slope of yield curve fail to capture or anticipate the slowdown caused by demonetisation in advance.
Observing that the two-sided market has disrupted the operating mechanism of the traditional market by facilitating direct trading between buyers and sellers, in “Online platform quality, discount and advertising: A theoretical analysis”, Sangita Poddar, Tanmoyee Banerjee (Chatterjee), and Swapnendu Banerjee investigate the optimal strategies of a monopoly platform with two distinct sides by building a simple model of the two-sided market, incorporating cross-group network externality. They define the two-sided market as a market structure where the intermediary provides a common platform to different groups of agents to transact with each other, by charging an appropriate price to each side. Two-sided markets are marked by the presence of indirect network externality or intergroup network externality which is associated with the value created by the participation of other group users.
The study analyses the issues related to discount offers, informative advertising, and service quality provided by a two-sided monopoly platform and attempts to find how prices and non-price elements such as service quality, advertising levels, and volume of transactions are affected by change in the amount of discount offered to buyers. The authors also analyse the provision of service quality and level of advertisement if a social planner exists in the monopoly platform setup, and compare the results obtained in the two regimes.
The study shows that the policy of price discount by the monopoly platform actually enhances the profit, even when high discount induces the platform to reduce the service quality and expenditure on informative advertising. The price discount offers increase the cost burden of the platform which is in turn adjusted by lower provision of service quality and low level of advertising. However, while high discount coupled with low advertising is favourable from the point of view of the consumers, giving deep discounts will discourage businesses from improving quality which in turn gives trade-off opportunities to consumers. As a result, the volume of transaction also reduces with increase in discount, especially for the quality conscious buyers. These detrimental effects of discounts will have a long-term impact on business and be difficult to correct. Thus, executives of businesses should keep these effects in mind while devising discount strategies. The comparison between monopoly equilibrium and social optimum was made and it was found that the monopoly platform sets higher service quality compared to the social welfare case.
The Round Table feature, anchored by Gopal P Mahapatra and Sadhna Dash, titled “Talent development in a changing world of work”, focusses on the critical area of managing and developing talent for organisations, more so after the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Talent management (TM) practices have evolved with workplace changes, with a focus on the strategic issues related to talent flow within the organisation. Researchers have predicted a shift in focus from the “war for talent” to the “war to develop talent" and TM practices that support the workforce's internal mobility lead the organisation to reap multiple benefits. Technology is now being used extensively in TM to understand the behaviour of employees and match their values with organisational objectives. Talent development (TD) is thus an essential constituent of TM, and leadership development (LD), as a part of TD, is a critical dimension for the sustenance, development, and transformation of organisations.
Despite significant attention, attracting, developing, and retaining talent continues to be a critical challenge for organisations, as also building a leadership pipeline. The round table discussion that follows the initial academic perspective note seeks senior HR leaders' responses, as policymakers and practitioners of large corporates from diverse industries, to share their perspectives on the nature of workplace disruptions, the various initiatives undertaken by them for TM and TD, and the implications they foresee for career management in a fluid world of work. Virtualisation of TD, career self-management and co-creation in career management emerged from the panel discussions as critical evolving practices for effective talent engagement.
Best wishes,
Jishnu Hazra
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review
E-mail address: eic@iimb.ac.in
