Editorial
Special Issue: IMR – 7th INDAM Conference
Greetings from the Editors desk!
It is my pleasure to bring you the final issue of the journal for the year 2023, which is a special issue featuring a selection of papers presented first at the seventh biennial Indian Academy of Management (INDAM) conference, apart from our regular component of articles and features. This special section of the issue is introduced by our guest editors Professor Vishal Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad and Professor Sushanta Kumar Mishra of IIM Bangalore.
Vol 35, No. 4 also marks the fourth issue to be brought out only in digital form. As readers would recollect, as of calendar year 2023, IMR is being published only in digital form. Readers have free access to all articles published in the journal, to read and download, 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 IIM Bangalore, on behalf of the authors.
We are also progressing with arrangements for the IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC) 2024 scheduled on 2nd and 3rd February 2024, one of the events to mark the Golden Jubilee of the Institute. We invite you to participate in the conference and learn more about the delegate registration process here https://www.iimb.ac.in/node/12180
This issue also carries our regular component of articles and features, apart from the selection of INDAM Conference papers.
In “An exploratory analysis of new firm foundings by trading community members and their survival”, Dalhia Mani, Abu Rehan Abbasi, and Rejie George explore the impact of trading community affiliation on founding rates and survival. They examine prior literature in the emerging market context which suggests the importance of kinship-based ties , and prior work on Indian trading communities, which describe strong norms, resources, and social ties supporting entrepreneurship, and hypothesise that: 1) Trading community members are disproportionately responsible for new firm foundings compared to new firm foundings by non-trading community members; and 2) Firms led by trading community members are more likely to survive than firms led by non-trading community members.
They use a large company registrations dataset published by the Ministry of Company Affairs (MCA) India, which tracks the registrations, status, and signatories of companies between 1991 and 2014. Overall, the results strongly support the hypothesis that Indian traditional trading communities enjoy higher founding and survival rates.
In “Exploring the drivers and facets of culture in the formative stage of a public-funded R&D organisation”, Ravisankar J, Sushanta Kumar Mishra, Swapnil Garg, Nobin Thomas, and Kunal Kamal Kumar focus on the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), a public-funded organisation, that is ranked among the top five world space research organisations, and which has been able to develop closely guarded space technology indigenously.
Based on in-depth interviews with a unique set of older respondents, 24 scientists and engineers who joined ISRO in its formative period, whose ages ranged from 66 to 94 years, they present a holistic organisational cultural model by juxtaposing its facets and drivers.
The study (1) describes the processes and mechanisms by which pioneering leaders fostered organisational culture in its formative period; (2) decodes the key elements of the culture of an R&D organisation in the Indian context; and (3) addresses how the constraints of public-funded organisations are negotiated through the critical factor of culture.
The study strengthens the established influence of founding leaders on organisational culture. In the context of ISRO, the initial leaders also built an enabling culture through organisational values and design, and are designated as cultural drivers in the envisaged model. The study presents a holistic cultural model and discusses strategies to manoeuvre the constraints of a public-funded organisation by developing a solid work culture.
Observing that organisations need transformational leadership to improve their performance in continuously changing environments, Nguyen Phuc Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thuy Hang, Nguyen Hiep, and Orla Flynn study the strategic roles of organisational culture and transformational leadership and their joint effect on organisational performance in their paper, “Does transformational leadership influence organisational culture and organisational performance: Empirical evidence from an emerging country”. The authors used primary data from 982 employees from 600 manufacturing firms in Vietnam in their study. They adapted multiple items from existing literature for construct measurement. Four dimensions of transformational leadership were measured: idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration. Four dimensions of organisational culture – involvement, consistency, adaptability and mission – were considered, and two dimensions of organisational performance -- business performance and organisational effectiveness, were measured.
The results reveal that the four transformational leadership dimensions substantially influence organisational culture. The findings confirm previous studies’ observations that organisational culture plays a significant role in promoting organisational performance. The results also show a positive association between corporate culture and firm performance. The study clarifies the relationship between transformational leadership and firm performance. The empirical results demonstrate that three dimensions of transformational leadership (idealised influence, inspirational motivation and individual consideration) have a positive direct effect on organisational performance, supporting previous studies, but that there is no significant relationship between intellectual stimulation and organisational performance. Consistent with other research studies the results show that organisational culture fully mediates the association between all transformational leadership dimensions and firm performance.
In “Evolving an integrated framework for ambidextrous HRM: A special case of platform-based gig work”, Ekta Johar and Manjari Singh draw attention initially to ambidexterity as an organisational capability that can help resolve the tension between flexibility and efficiency by pursuing new and existing strategies simultaneously. Further, ambidextrous HRM can facilitate the development of such organisational capabilities that address the tension between adaptability and stability within an ambiguous and turbulent environment.
Their study has the following three objectives: (1) to gain an in-depth understanding of ambidextrous HRM from the perspective of dynamic capabilities view; (2) to elaborate on the significance of the need for ambidextrous HRM in the context of turbulent environments and heterogeneous markets within agile structures and for enabling ambidextrous organisational capabilities; and (3) to show the relevance of ambidextrous HRM systems for organisations operating in the platform-based gig economy.
Their three-dimensional framework highlights the viability of various HRM systems (fit-seeking HRM, flexibility-seeking HRM, and ambidextrous HRM) under diverse environmental conditions (first axis), along with specific organisational design (second axis) that supports such systems in developing organisational capabilities (third axis) needed for survival and success in their respective environments. By identifying the platform-based gig economy as the relevant context for ambidextrous HRM, the study seeks to make a practical contribution to the literature by addressing the challenges posed by new forms of work.
Observing that in the absence of complete information and to reduce post-purchase dissonance, customers tend to consult their reference groups before making purchase decisions, in “The role of reference group influence: A benchmarking study with working and non-working groups”, Semila Fernandes and Rajesh Panda seek to answer the following questions. How do working women and non-working women differ in their susceptibility to reference group influences (e.g., informational reference group, utilitarian reference group, and value-expressive reference group)? How do working women and non-working women differ in their reference groups susceptibility for different product categories (e.g., private necessity, private luxury, public necessity, and public luxury)? Primary data were collected offline using shopper intercept interviews at shopping malls and residential neighbourhoods. One thousand forty-four responses, including 545 working women and 499 non-working women, from Bangalore, India, were considered, which were analysed using analysis of variance and validated through discriminant analysis.
The empirical findings revealed that working women were more susceptible to reference group influence than were non-working women. Overall, informational reference group and utilitarian reference group showed significant differences between working women and non-working women based on the influence exercised by different types of group influence. Value-expressive reference group showed no significant difference between the two samples. The findings reaffirm that it is imperative to devise different marketing approaches accordingly and that women cannot be considered a single homogenous target market.
In the introduction of their article, "Reducing the patients-at-risk (PaR) in a response-adaptive trial: A numerical study”, L. Ramprasath and Mohammed Shahid Abdulla observe that in the context of clinical trials the main objective of a response-adaptive randomised trial design over a static randomised control trial (RCT) design is to minimise the number of patients allotted to the inferior drugs and treatments. This is easier to achieve if, based on the responses, the superior drug is identified early on during the trial. The problem of balancing ethical and statistical considerations has been extensively studied in the literature for both binary and continuous responses. Although many response-adaptive designs in the literature promise higher allocation to the superior treatment, this is not always guaranteed due to the variability of the designs.
In their study, the authors are interested in an ethical-optimal (Et-optimal) design, proposed by Biswas and Bhattacharya (2011), to find the better of two treatments when the responses are continuous. They introduce a new criterion for response-adaptive trials, called patients-at-risk (PaR) the motivation for which comes from the popular risk measure, value-at-risk (VaR), used in financial risk management. They also provide an illustration of applying this criterion in a real clinical trial.
Against the background of the vulnerability of the hospitality and tourism sectors to shocks from pandemics, which often affect their stock returns negatively, in “Household pandemic Internet search intensity and stock returns: A case of tourism industry resiliency”, Garima Goel and Saumya Ranjan Das use a novel approach to capture the daily pandemic attention sentiment (PAtten,) from the Google Search Volume Index (GSVI). They aim to examine the following research questions: What is the relationship between PAtten and tourism industry stock returns? Is there any marginal effect of PAtten on stock returns even after controlling the COVID-19 confirmed cases? What firm characteristics offer resilience from the deterrent effect of PAtten? Do government policy responses and Google mobility trend information influence the impact of PAtten on stock returns? Do country characteristics like cultural distance, financial stability (FSI), regulatory quality (RQ), and health infrastructure matter for the effect of PAtten on stock returns? The study uses daily data from 157 hospitality and tourism industry firms across 22 countries.
The results suggest that PAtten significantly negatively impacts the tourism industry’s stock returns. The results are robust, including alternative measures of pandemic information, firm characteristics, macroeconomic controls, government policy indices, and Google mobility trend information. Firms with higher market capitalisation and lower valuation measures are shown to be better immune to the pandemic effect. Furthermore, government policy responses fail to subsume the deterrent effect of PAtten on stock returns. Finally, a country’s cultural dimensions such as collectivism, a stable financial system, better GE, and an improved health system help to mitigate the downside risk of stock price movement due to pandemic-induced uncertainty. The results provide insights for investors, managers, and policymakers.
With best wishes for the new year 2024!
With best wishes,
Jishnu Hazra
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review
E-mail address: eic@iimb.ac.in