Journal Press India®
We are pleased to present the July-December 2018 issue of MANTHAN to our readers, which focuses on diverse areas of commerce and management including organizational behavior, marketing, leadership challenges, employee engagement and performance management system. An interesting paper by Dr. Ujjal Mukherjee and Prof. Vinayak Bhat on the Indian IT industry, concentrates on the important dimensions of personality traits and their influence on organisational citizenship behavior. Their findings reveal that personality traits like extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness has a significant impact on organisational citizenship behaviour. The ever important topic of dealing with leadership challenges has been addressed in this issue by Dr. Poonam Verma in her paper on the role of inward looking leadership. The paper discusses some of the common modern leadership traits along with what is suggested by our relics and observes that self-discipline and self-control tend to be major success factors in managing situations as an effective leader. The paper highlights research that shows inward looking approach as helping in good judgement and real wisdom within ourselves.
Marketing, which is an integral part of the discipline of commerce, has been the focus of some of the papers in this issue. The paper by Prof. Mohammed Abdul Azeem and Sharafat Hussain examines if sensory factors influence customers’ selection in case of Quick Service Restaurant industry. Using factor analysis and multiple regression, the study concludes that sensory factor is the most influencing factor for customers to select a QSR contrary to the general belief of promotional and monetary factors. This study also adds to theoretical insights of the Sensory marketing literature. In view of the emerging digital platforms playing a pivotal role in shaping brand choice, the paper by Dr. Yukti Ahuja and Indu Loura explores story-telling as a technique for marketers to engage consumers and leverage the consumer input to connect in a meaningful way. The paper discusses the relevance of story-telling in the digital age and its effectiveness in ensuring the consumer insight deliverables and continuous engagement. Another interesting paper with a marketing focus is by Dr. Jagdish Bhagwat and Anurag Tiwari that examine customers’ perception for the purchase of school bus, an area that fits in the category of a pseudo B2B marketing scenario as the marketers do possess sound knowledge of the product but the customer is usually unaware of the technical features and attributes. This research addresses customer perception on various technical issues in purchase of school buses in Indore region for urban, semi-urban and rural groups.
This issue also includes papers with human resource management as the area of thrust. Prof. Anant Deogaonkar and Dr. Bijal Zaveri present a paper that focuses on understanding of the employee perception about performance management system in telecommunication industry. Based on literature review, they recommend an innovative conceptual model of performance management system. Saumya Aggarwal, Bhawna Rajput and Shweta, in their paper on evaluation of pro-environmental behaviour, examines the relationship between environmental attitude and environmental behaviour, with emphasis on barriers to pro-environmental behaviour. Using Principal Component Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, their results indicate the existence of negative relationship between attitude and barriers; attitude and behavior; and barriers and behaviour. Another empirical study on employee engagement and its effect on job satisfaction has been contributed by Dr. Pratiksha Tiwari, Rashi Nagpal, Tanya Mirg and Nitika Jain. The paper applies exploratory factor analysis to contemplate representative commitment and suggests ways to deal with worker commitment that have been demonstrated to enhance profitability and effectiveness, and lessen staff turnover. Archana Bakshi and Dr. Kanwaljit Kaur, in their paper on ‘Empirical evaluation of factors leading to happiness’, discuss happiness as a multidimensional concept and explore its major dimensions through a primary study. The factors found to be significant for happiness include personal life; environmental conditions; self-esteem; professional attributes; cultural traits; physical fitness; spiritual aspect and institutional factors.
We hope our readers find this issue of MANTHAN interesting and insightful and we look forward to feedback and suggestions from our readers and authors.
Dr. Himanshu Sekhar Rout
Dr. M. C. Pande
Editors