Editorial
Greetings from the Editor’s desk!
It is my pleasure to bring you the first issue of the year 2023. From the calendar year 2023 onwards, IIMB Management Review (IMR) will be brought out in digital form only, the print format formally closing out with Volume 34, No. 4, the December 2022 issue of the journal. Readers will now have free access to all articles published in the journal, to read and download, going forward, from ScienceDirect® - https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/iimb-management-review - IMR is also a Gold Open Access journal, with the article processing charges (APC) borne by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), on behalf of the authors.
As IIMB celebrates its Golden Jubilee this academic year, we are happy to say that the IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC) 2024, scheduled on 2nd and 3rd February 2024, is one of the Golden Jubilee events planned through the year, and we look forward to the active participation of doctoral students from institutions in India and overseas. For updates on IMRDC 2024, do visit https://www.iimb.ac.in/imr-doctoral-conference
Please find below an introduction to the articles published in Vol 35 Issue 1.
Madhu B Sahoo and Jeff Brice Jr. emphasise that in enabling team success and the psychological well-being of team members, understanding the parameters that contribute to inclusion becomes paramount. In “The influence of helping behaviour and voice of pleasant members on their team inclusion”, they explain the indirect effects of positive affect on team inclusion via helping behaviour. Using social exchange theory as a weaving argument, they propose that helping behaviour from a pleasant individual in the team appeals to other team members for its high social exchange affect value, saliently resulting in team inclusion for the target. Further, they explain the contextual effects of voice (Voice refers to an improvement-oriented behaviour that challenges the status quo) by proposing escalation in inclusion within teams for people engaging in helping behaviour and high on voice. High voice results in perceptions of dedication for the target individual toward the collective.
A sample of 105 business students, enrolled in a management course, participated in the study. The researchers find support for their proposed model. In other words, pleasant team members who engage in helping behaviour are more likely to be included by their teams because of the increased expected value in other members’ perceptions. The researchers also find that there is an increase in acceptance for an individual with helping behaviour when they are vocal about it. The research connects two extra-role behaviours and explains their interactive role in team inclusion, which has implications for organisations seeking to promote inclusiveness in teams.
In “Investigating ICT for team creativity: A team sensemaking perspective”, Amina Talat, Shamila Nabi Khan, Samra Chaudary, and Nathan R. Neale identify team autonomy and cognitive diversity as enablers of team creativity, and explore the role of team sensemaking as a facilitation mechanism. Their study investigates how both team autonomy and cognitive diversity lead to team creativity through team sensemaking. It models the missing link of team sensemaking as a mediator between team autonomy−team creativity and cognitive diversity−team creativity. It draws support from sensemaking theory to propose that team sensemaking is an integral intermediary factor that encourages information exchange and knowledge integration for better team creativity when teams are more autonomous and cognitively diverse.
Data from a sample of 304 members of teams working in the ICT industry of Pakistan was collected through self-administered questionnaires. The results suggest that managers in knowledge-intensive industries should promote cognitive diversity and autonomy to develop team sensemaking, which in turn may stimulate creativity.
In “How does strategic planning influence the performance of financial institutions? An empirical study of Ethiopia”, Meseret Ebabu Ejigu and Tigist Abebe Desalegn investigate the impact of strategic planning (SP) on the performance of financial institutions in Ethiopia, as also the mediating role of strategic innovation (SI) and the moderating role of the political environment (PE) on the relationship between strategic planning and financial performance. In their study they employ a series of hierarchical linear models or multilevel modelling (MLM) to examine institutional characteristics related to the outcomes of interest and MLMED for mediation hypothesis. They use a data set consisting of 142 managers from 35 financial institutions, which include banks and insurance companies, and cross-sectional survey to test their hypotheses.
Their results establish the significant and positive impact of strategic planning on financial and non-financial performance. Strategic innovation has a positive mediating effect on the relationship between strategic planning and financial performance of financial institutions. Additionally, the findings confirmed a significant positive mediating impact of strategic innovation on the association between strategic planning and financial innovation of financial institutions in Ethiopia and a statistically significant positive mediation impact of strategic innovation on the relationship between strategic planning and non-financial performance. Further, the findings indicate that the political environment has a positive and significant moderating effect in the relationship between strategic planning and performance indicators.
In “A structural equations approach to policy evaluation: Case study of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme”, Sarabjeet Dhody Natesan and Rahul Ratnakar Marathe focus on the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA) and analyse the output in terms of the impact of the scheme. The scheme purportedly allowed the government to provide a safety net and ensure social security, stem rural to urban migration, and provide gender and economic security for the largely poverty-stricken rural population of the country. The empirical study analyses the primary data responses of 311 mid-level implementers of MGNREGA, the Block Development Officers from Tamil Nadu, implementing the MGNREGA. It uses the Structural Equation Modelling approach to highlight paths critical to the implementation of a welfare policy.
Aligning the MGNREGA implementation study with the larger policy implementation literature, the implementation variables adopted for the study were accountability, power devolution, clarity over the process, implementer’s workload and attitude, planning adequacy, resources and strategic communication. Keeping the importance of networks in policy implementation, the networks were built into the model. Simultaneously, it was tested whether the demographics of implementers exerted any moderating effect on the implementation of MGNREGA. Three implementer variables—accountability, power devolution, and process understanding—were grouped under the construct Administrative Factors, consistent with the job description of the block development officer. The outcomes of MGNREGA, socioeconomic, infrastructure and environmental objectives came from policy guidelines and were designated the outcome variables. Building upon earlier researched policy implementation variables, using the conceptual model MGNREGA implementation factor model (MIFM), the study focused on validating the model, testing the hypotheses and documenting the entire process. Seven hypothesised relationships were tested with the help of this model.
Reviewing the outcomes, this study has documented the methodology to synthesise the factors that affect public policy implementation from policy literature and align local area requirements to them. Further, it provides a process to test their statistical significance. It explores the moderating effect of demographics of the implementers and the networks of implementation on the implementation of the MGNREGA. The researchers view their process documentation as bringing additional depth to the MGNREGA literature, in particular, and to policy implementation in general.
Observing that despite being highly prone to litigation, MSMEs have limited options to deal with litigation issues in comparison to large enterprises, Sanjay Kumar Mishra and Hemant Kushwaha explore the potential for offering business legal expense insurance (BLEI) in India, specifically, among MSMEs in India, in “Managing litigation risk through business legal expense insurance: Facilitators and inhibitors for MSMEs”. The study highlights the stakeholders of the BLEI value chain, products and services offered, types of risk covered by BLEI and the claim and settlement process. Based on the 10-year average annual legal expense of a sample of 1822 micro, small, and medium enterprises and using the chain ratio method as a forecasting technique, the study suggests that the potential size of the market for BLEI among MSMEs may range between ₹291 billion (the US$3.84 billion) to ₹417 billion (the US$5.50 billion). Apart from the size of the MSMEs, India also offers the critical elements of the value chain for BLEI to succeed. However, for the market potential to be realised, it requires improvement in the efficiency of the legal system, enabling regulation for the insurance industry, and access to technology and digitisation.
The usage of advancements in technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and blockchain can help address the issue of accessibility and transparency within the BLEI value chain and help deliver services to customers.
In “Dynamics of time-varying currency beta on Indian industries: A Markov switching approach”, Soumya Saha, Gagari Chakrabarti, and Sankarshan Basu aim to identify currency beta at the Indian industry level and determine whether it is time-varying. They use the Markov regime switching (MRS) model to capture the nature of currency beta, that is, how currency beta varies across industries and to check whether time-varying currency beta is regime-dependent like other financial variables. Monthly data of 10 different sectoral indices from the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) were collected as a proxy for the industry in the Indian market.
Their study finds that currency betas are different in sign and magnitude for different industries. The most notable observation is that the currency beta fluctuates more in the auto industry, capital goods industry, and TECK sectors than in other sectors. (The BSE TECK indices have constituents from media & publishing, information technology & telecommunications sectors while BSE IT indices have constituents only from the information technology sector.) Among all industries, the IT sector has the fewest fluctuations in currency beta. During different crisis periods, the nature of currency beta reveals different volatility for different industries. The results of the study also exhibit strong evidence of the regime-switch behaviour of the currency beta. The regime shift in currency beta across industries is caused not only by economic crisis periods but also by some business- and industry-specific factors. The findings are important to hedgers and portfolio managers who want to hedge and diversify currency beta during normal and turbulent market situations in an emerging economy like India.
Ankur Jain and Anupama Kondayya observe that the developmental view of leadership emphasises that leadership capability is built over time, and that challenging experiences play a crucial role in developing leadership capability. Individuals who use challenging circumstances in their lives to develop such capabilities can rightly be termed as leaders in the making. In the Round Table feature, “Leader development: How ‘leaders in the making’ manage uncertainties”, they address how leaders in the making approach uncertainties, gain confidence in handling them and build the much required leadership capability to manage uncertainties. The article includes a discussion with senior corporate leaders to understand how they approached uncertainty early in their careers and later on. The discussants drew on their past experiences of handling uncertainty and challenges. They further reflected on how these experiences shaped their journey as leaders and helped them make critical decisions in uncertain situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It emerged that leaders in the making assume agency to take action despite uncertainty and little opportunity, overcome the fear of failure to use failures as learning opportunities, reframe past challenges to seek meaning, draw upon the collective energy of people, and adhere to personal values in trying circumstances.
With best wishes,
Jishnu Hazra
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review
E-mail address: eic@iimb.ac.in