Institution Building: Experiences, Lessons and Challenges

--Kavil Ramachandran

I feel privileged to have been invited to deliver this speech. I had the fortune of interacting with Mr. Yasaswy closely for over a decade. He was one of the geniuses with a huge sense of practical wisdom. We used to spend hours discussing many things. Every such conversation was enriched with new knowledge and ideas. One of my last conversations with him was in the context of the visit of the current head of the Mewar royal family of Rajasthan to Indian School of Business (ISB). We shared our thoughts on the legacy of 76 generations of continuous service of the Mewar dynasty to the society even post-independence, and the challenges of building an institution across the centuries. Our efforts to recollect the names of families and organizations with similarly rich heritage did not yield much. We concluded that institutions are rare and building and preserving them are not easy tasks.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Importance of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in Enhancing Customer Service Indicators: A Review

--Y L N Kumar

This review presents the possible relationship between Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs) in enhancing customer indicators. Though ample research has been conducted on OCBs in the recent past, the relationship between OCBs and customer service indicators has probably not been studied in the Indian context. The study of this relationship attains greater importance since OCB is a discretionary kind of behavior which is not dependent on formal reward systems of the organization, and leads to customer citizenship behavior.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Productivity in Small and Medium Enterprises of India: A Cobb-Douglas Production Function Approach

--Niharika Joshi Bhatt

This paper estimates the Cobb-Douglas production function and further uses it to derive the marginal productivities of labor and capital. Dickey-Fuller test was used to detect the presence of unit roots in times series; and step-wise regression was used to test multicollinearity. The results indicate that labor is a better determinant of output than fixed capital.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

The Role of Visual Merchandising in Apparel Purchase Decision

--M Krishnakumar

As retail business is moving towards new phases, the emphasis is slowly changing from the product to the space—the store—where all the things happen. The shopping ambience becomes so important now, with retailers being interested in giving their stores a contemporary and consumer-friendly design. Consumer behavior, which was earlier termed as ‘overt behavior’, is a continuous consumption process related to pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase issues. A store has to display the product in a way that it attracts the customer. Visual merchandising is an art of displaying the things in an attractive way so that it could attract the attention of the customer and persuade them to buy the product. An effective visual merchandising will play a significant role in the consumers’ purchase decision. This paper investigates the attitude of consumers towards visual merchandising in apparel purchase decision.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

A Comparative Study of the HRM Practices in Small and Medium Enterprises

--Sameer Sudhakar Pingle

Small to medium businesses are the backbone of any economy because they contribute to the national income, employment and innovative activities. There exists a lack of professional approach towards Human Resource (HR), and the managers are unaware of the developments taking place in management in general and HR Management (HRM) in particular. The HRM practices in small and medium firms were found to be very different, and previous literature also shows that the results vary with countries. This paper attempts to study the HRM practices in Indian firms. The HRM practices have been extracted from literature and analyzed using Likert scales. It was found that the HRM practices were different in small firms as compared to medium firms.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Book Review
Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours