Guest Editorial

Introduction to papers from IMR – 7th INDAM Conference   

This special issue features four articles presented at the seventh biennial Indian Academy of Management (INDAM) conference held at the Indian Institute of Management Rohtak from January 6-8, 2022. The past six conferences were hosted at different institutions: XLRI Jamshedpur in 2009, IIM Bangalore in 2011, IIM Ahmedabad in 2013, IIM Lucknow (Noida campus) in 2015, IIM Indore in 2017, and IIM Tiruchirappalli in 2020. INDAM conferences provide an avenue for experts from academia and industry to present their research work and practices on various management-related themes.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented disruption in economic activities globally. Usual and established ways of working have been disrupted, and some have been rendered obsolete overnight. For example, one impact of the pandemic is the way we work. The pandemic has led to the next great disruption – remote work – that organisations will have to cope with in a post-pandemic world. Remote work is, perhaps, the most significant organisational design shock of our lifetimes. While work from home was a possibility for many before COVID struck us, it has become a reality with which we will have to live for a long time. Given the pandemic, the 2022 INDAM conference was held online. 

The pandemic inflicted massive loss of lives and jobs, yet promoted temporary recovery of natural systems. Every business leader and thinker reflected upon its implications on the long-term economic, environmental, and social well-being of the masses. As the world recovers from the pandemic, the relevance of the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) needs reinforcement, careful thinking, and adoption of management practices that will help achieve it. An exogenous shock of the scale and magnitude of this pandemic is likely to create major shifts to the post-crisis societal and business landscape. The INDAM 2022 conference aimed to provide academicians, practitioners, and policymakers a platform to discuss the triple bottom line: business resilience, ecological sustainability, and social well-being in a post-pandemic world.  

Focused research and exploration are needed to understand what combinations of purpose, tasks, people, and infrastructure will be needed in the coming future to enable organisations to sustain and succeed in the new world that we will be inheriting post-COVID. The conference aimed to integrate the disparate yet interconnected themes of business resilience, ecological sustainability, and social well-being and provide recommendations and insights to policymakers, practitioners, and organisational theorists. 

We hope this special issue on the INDAM 2022 conference will bring useful insights for scholars and practitioners and enrich its readers. In keeping with the focus of IIMB Management Review (IMR), our focus has been to publish conceptual, empirical, and applied research in the special issue. The empirical research published in IMR focuses on testing, extending, and building management theory. The goal has been to expand and enhance the understanding of business and management through empirical investigation and theoretical analysis. For this special issue of IMR, we featured the best papers contributed towards the INDAM 2022 conference across multiple tracks that align with the special issue theme.  

Process of shortlisting articles for this special issue: 

We followed several stages in shortlisting the papers. In the first stage, we went through the papers selected for paper presentation at the INDAM 2022 and shortlisted 41 papers from various tracks matching the theme of this special issue. Table 1 presents the breakup of manuscripts (track-wise) selected for this special issue. Next, we invited the authors of these research papers to submit their revised manuscripts to the special issue. Out of the 41 papers invited for the special issue, we received 15 manuscripts. These 15 manuscripts went through rigorous review following the IMR standards for the publication of research articles. Eleven manuscripts were rejected after the first round of review. We accepted three manuscripts for publication after the first revision and one more paper after the second revision.  

Table 1: Track-wise break up of papers invited for submission in the first stage 

Addressed to management practitioners, researchers, and academics, IMR aims to engage rigorously with practices, concepts, and ideas in the field of management, with an emphasis on providing managerial insights in a reader-friendly format. In line with the aims and scope of the journal, the selected four articles are from organisational behaviour and IT areas.  

The first article of the special issue is “Narcissus walking the extra mile: A moderated mediation model” by Ankit and Nishant Uppal. This study investigates the indirect positive link between narcissism and peer-rated prosocial behaviour through impression management motives. The moderating impact of interpersonal influence on the indirect relationship is also investigated in this study. To test the moderated-mediation model and discover the relationship between narcissism and peer-rated prosocial behaviour via impression management motives, the responses of 382 prospective corporate managers were gathered. The mediated association was moderated by interpersonal influence. 

In the second article, “Future of workplace design from a socio-technical perspective” by Parvathy Venkatachalam and Rajhans Mishra, the authors use a multi-level perspective (MLP) to identify the changing elements of the workplace. They perform a discourse analysis on the social media platform to gather stakeholders’ perspectives on the workplace to identify (a) changing dimensions of the workplace, (b) emerging challenges, (c) the necessity for the adoption of new technologies, and (d) learnings from the pandemic with respect to the workplace. The authors propose a conceptual model through the socio-technical perspective that informs the workplace policy design. 

The next study, “Spiritual triple bottom line framework -- A phenomenological approach” is by Sachin Batra in which he proposes a spiritual triple bottom line framework (STBL) to develop and measure the three bottom lines: individual prosperity, impact on people, and impact on the planet through the lens of spirituality. The results are presented as an interpretation of the individual’s perceptions of spirituality and their spiritual experiences. The result comprises three themes of spirituality and its nomological linkage i.e., inner sustainability with a triple-bottom-line framework (external sustainability). The themes are: the source of spirituality, the process of experiencing spirituality, and the outcome of being spiritual. 

The last study in this special issue, titled “Lokasamgraha: An indigenous construct for social entrepreneurship” by Diwakar Singh and Richa Awasthy, investigates the role of the indigenous construct lokasamgraha in social entrepreneurship. The authors identified lokasamgraha through content analysis of the Bhagavad Gita and investigated commonly accepted tensions in social enterprises using the lens of paradox theory. They developed a framework to explain how lokasamgraha can assist social enterprises in managing tensions and achieving the triple bottom-line. Furthermore, the authors validated this framework by citing a lokasamgraha-based social enterprise in India.  

We have tried to select high-quality studies from various management areas for this special issue. These studies look at an important and relevant management issue and present rich insights to academicians and practitioners about the problem. We hope the special issue will extend management scholarship and initiate new dialogues.  

Vishal Gupta, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad 

Sushanta Kumar Mishra, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore