ISSN No. 0975-7708 SAMIKSHA - United

The Research Journal of United Institute of Management, Allahabad, U.P., India

SAMIKSHA

United Institute of ManagementAllahabad

ISSN No. 0975-7708

Bi – Annual Journal

Volume IV No. 1 January - June 2013

The Effects of Demographic Characteristics on Organizational Commitment of EmployeesDr. Vivek Tiwari, Dr. S. K. Singh

Construction of an Optimum Equity Portfolio with Reference to Banking and Finance Sectors in IndiaP Varadharajan

Hospital Administrators’ Perception towards Healthcare Services of Specialty Hospitals in North IndiaDr. Maithili R.P. Singh

E-Commerce Based Websites: Complications And Perception GapGaurav Chandhiok, Baldev Kr. Asnanie

6 T’s of An Effective Performance Management System (PMS)Abdul Qadir

Stress in Teachers Engaged in Higher Educational Institutes: A studyDurga wati Kushwaha, Dr. R. K. Lodhwal

Employee Engagement- Building Positive Employment Relations At M/S. Heritage Foods, HyderabadProf. Dr. Y. Vinodhini

Facebook Gaming - An Indian Perspective Sub-Theme: Social NetworkingDr. Vijay Kumar Chaurasiya, Gyanendra Pratap Singh, Mayank Tandon

Women in Technology - Empirical Analysis of Role ConflictDr. B. Aiswarya, Dr. G. Ramasundaram

Book Review Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of IndiaNidhi Choudhari

EDITORIAL BOARD

Printed and Published by Dr. Jagdish Gulati on behalf of the United Institute of Management, UPSIDC Industrial Area, Naini, Allahabad (U.P.) India. Printed by Shantanu Publishers, Mumfordganj, Allahabad, 211002.

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Editor: Prof. T.B. Singh

Volume IV, No. 1, January - June 2013United Institute of Management, Allahabad

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SAMIKSHA

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEFProf. T.B. Singh

PrincipalUIM, Allahabad

Bi – Annual Journal

CHIEF PATRONMr. Girdhar Gopal Gulati

ChairmanUnited Group of Institutions

PATRONDr. Jagdish Gulati

PresidentUnited Group of Institutions

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD

Mr. Gaurav GulatiVice-President, UGI Allahabad

Mr. Vikas MehrotraAsst. Prof. (HR & Supply Chain Mgmt.)

Dr. Rahul RajanAsst. Prof (Accounting & Finance)

Dr. Vishnu Prakash MishraAsst. Prof (Marketing & I.T.)

Mr. Amitabh SrivastavaAsst. Prof (Operation Research)

Mr. Prakash KundnaniLecturer (Accounting & Finance)

Ms. Sarika YadavLecturer (Strategic Management)

Mr. Rohit Kumar VishwakarmaLecturer (Marketing)

Mr. Ajay Kumar YadavLecturer (Computer Application)

ADVISORY BOARD

Prof. S.K. SinghHead & Dean, FMS, BHU

Prof. A.K. TripathiProfessor, Computer ScienceInstitute of Technology, BHU

Prof. K.M. SharmaFormer Director, MONIRBA,University of Allahabad

Prof. A.S. SahayChairman - NMP, MDI, Gurgaon

Mr. M.P. GargExecutive DirectorRecron Synthetic Ltd., Allahabad

Prof. B.N. Asthana Former Vice ChancellorKanpur University

Mr. Naresh AgrawalChairman, Sunstar Overseas Ltd.

Mr. A.K. JainChairman & Managing DirectorBPCL, Naini, Allahabad

SAMIKSHAJournal of UIM, Allahabad

From the Editorial Board

feel privileged in presenting our Research Journal SAMIKSHA Volume IV No. 1 which

is intended to bring out the hidden literary talents in the academicians, corporate Iprofessionals, research scholars and students. I would like to place on record my

gratitude and heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed to make this effort a

success.

This Journal provides a glimpse into a few of the many high quality research activities

conducted by the talented faculty from different institutions like IIM, IIT, IIIT, NIT and

other renowned management & technical institutions. The Journal is a compilation of

outstanding papers from numerous disciplines submitted by professors, corporate

professionals and research scholars who have been involved in academics, faculty-

mentored research, and creative activities.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to prominent academicians related to

esteemed Organizations/Institutions and is greatly appreciable and essential for the

advancement of academic environment and improved learning process. We would like to

thank all the contributing authors for providing such a rich variety of outstanding research

papers, articles and book review on a broad range of exciting and latest topics.

The review committee of our Journal SAMIKSHA is positively valuable by helping the

Editorial Board to make decisions regarding acceptance of papers, providing

criticisms that help the authors to improve their papers as well as, maintaining the

quality and pertinence of our journal SAMIKSHA also. Their validity, relevance,

importance and originality are supported by a peer reviewing process.

The Journal SAMIKSHA is valuable to the dissemination of knowledge

about the latest research in the field of business, management science and

technology.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you most sincerely

for your ongoing interest and support for our Journal.

Prof. T.B. Singh

Editor-in-Chief

Contents

Volume IV, No. 1, January - June 2013

SAMIKSHA

The Effects of Demographic Characteristics on Organizational Commitment of Employees 01Dr. Vivek Tiwari, Dr. S. K. Singh

Construction of an Optimum Equity Portfolio with Reference to Banking and Finance Sectors in India 09P Varadharajan

Hospital Administrators’ Perception towards Healthcare Services of Specialty Hospitals in North India 17Dr. Maithili R.P. Singh

E-Commerce Based Websites: Complications And Perception Gap 25Gaurav Chandhiok, Baldev Kr. Asnanie

6 T’s of An Effective Performance Management System (PMS) 36Abdul Qadir

Stress in Teachers Engaged in Higher Educational Institutes: A study 40Durga wati Kushwaha, Dr. R. K. Lodhwal

Employee Engagement- Building Positive Employment Relationsat M/S. Heritage Foods, Hyderabad 47Prof. Dr. Y. Vinodhini

Facebook Gaming - An Indian Perspective Sub-Theme: Social Networking 55Dr. Vijay Kumar Chaurasiya, Gyanendra Pratap Singh, Mayank Tandon

Women in Technology - Empirical Analysis of Role Conflict 70Dr. B. Aiswarya, Dr. G. Ramasundaram

Book Review Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India 75Nidhi Choudhari

*Assistant Professor, Rajarshi School of Management & Technology, U.P. College, U.P., India.

**Professor, Ex Head/Dean, Faculty of Management Studies, Banaras Hindu University,

INTRODUCTION

It is well said my Peter F. drunker that "Unless

commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but

no plans". Organizational Commitment is highly valuable.

Studies have highlighted that commitment has a great impact

on the successful performance of an organization. This is

because a highly committed employee will identify with the

goals and values of the organization, has a stronger desire to

belong to the organization and is willing to display greater

organizational citizenship behaviour i.e., a willingness to go

over and beyond their required job duties.

Organizational commitment is a significant research topic

having both real-world and theoretical implications.

Organizations are intended to have extra highly committed

workers, because the research results display that

organizational commitment leads to vital outcomes such as

higher motivation, higher organization citizenship behavior,

decreased turnover and organizational support (Kwon and

Banks, 2004). Managers could benefit from understanding the

predictors of committed manpower because they can initiate

the interventions when the problem exists. They can adopt, for

example, the appropriate leadership behavior in order to

improve the level of organizational commitment and, in turn,

the levels of job satisfaction and job performance (Yousef,

2000). Research shows that understanding organizational

commitment can provide insight into how organizational

commitment is related to the intentions to leave. The turnover

is always costly to the organizations in all sectors given the

large investment made in the selection, training and

development of personnel (Stallworth, 2004, 2003). Also there

are some findings that any effort to improve organizational

commitment is beneficial in lowering stress levels in the job

concerning areas such as staffing and the perceived pressure of

the job (Savery and Syme, 1996).

Organizational commitment has been studied in the

public, private, and non-profit sector, and more recently

internationally. Early research focused on defining the concept

and current research continues to examine organizational

commitment through two popular approaches, commitment-

The present investigation is directed to examine

empirically the impact that demographic factors have on the

organizational commitment level of employees. Age, Tenure,

Education level and Marital Status of employees have been

treated here as independent variables and their impact has been

check on the organizational commitment level of employees one

by one. The respondents were the employees of Diesel

Locomotive Works, Varanasi, India and the data has been

collected from 600 employees (300 each from White and Blue

collar employees) who belong to different age groups, work

experience and having different educational backgrounds,

working in the different department of the organization

through disproportionate stratified sampling. Primary data

has been collected by the researcher through a standard

structured questionnaires based on likert scale.

The results of the investigation indicate that except

education level rest of the three demographic variables viz.

Age, Tenure and Marital Status do affect the Organization

Commitment of employees. Further it has been found that

employees showing higher level of commitment in case of (i)

Age are those who are 25 years above, (ii) Tenure, employees

who have 10 years plus experience and (iii) those who are

married. The level of commitment is same for different

employees possessing different levels of education.

Keywords: Organizational Commitment, Age, Tenure,

Education level, Marital Status, T-test, ANOVA, Post Hoc.

The Effects of Demographic Characteristics onOrganizational Commitment of Employees Dr. Vivek Tiwari*

Dr. S. K. Singh**

*[email protected]

**[email protected]

related attitudes and commitment-related behaviors. A variety

of antecedents and outcomes have been identified in the past

thirty years (Angle and Perry, 1981; Mowday et al (1979; Hall,

1977).

The present study deals with a few demographics

antecedents and checks whether they are a significant force in

determining the commitment level of employees towards their

organizations or in other words whether level of commitment

varies (or depends) with these demographic factors.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Abdulwahab Pourghaz et al (2011), worked on the topic

Do Demographic Characteristics Make a Difference to Job

Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment and Burnout among

Travel Agency Drivers? (A Case Study in Iran).Results

revealed that the mean scores of job satisfaction and affective

commitment in 21-28 years old group were higher than 29-39

years old and 40 years old and upper. Females showed

significantly higher mean scores on job satisfaction in

comparison to males, but males obtained higher mean scores

on emotional exhaustion and depersonalization than did

females. Drivers who had 1-4 years job tenure obtained higher

mean scores in comparison to those drivers had 5-8 years and 9

and upper years job tenure on job satisfaction, affective,

normative and total scores of organizational commitment. But

drivers who had 9 years and upper job tenure showed higher

mean scores in comparison to drivers who had 1-4 years job

tenure on emotional exhaustion.

Adnan Iqbal (2010) did a study in the name; An Empirical

Assessment of Demographic Factors, Organizational Ranks

and Organizational Commitment. The results of the data

showed that length of service is significantly associated with

organizational commitment, whereas, education level is

negatively correlated with organizational commitment.

Furthermore, no significant correlation was found between

organizational commitment and age. The results of this study

also showed that the managers and the supervisors are more

committed than the workers.

In another important study by Syed Mohammad Azeem

(2010), on the topic Job Satisfaction and Organizational

Commitment among Employees in the Sultanate of Oman

found that the mean values of job satisfaction and

organizational commitment are at moderate side. A moderate

significant positive relationship was found among job

satisfaction facets, demographic factors, and organizational

commitment. Supervision, pay, overall job satisfaction, age,

and job tenure were the significant predictors of organizational

commitment.

Fikri Pala et. al. (2008) did an empirical study on the

effects of demographic characteristics on organizational

commitment and job satisfaction on turkish health care staff.

The results showed that gender, education, title and institution

are effective on the organizational commitment level. In terms

of job satisfaction, education, title, institution, duration of

occupation and working in the same institution can be stated as

diagnostic factors.

In an study on “Demographic and Psychological Factors

Predicting Organizational Commitment among Industrial

Workers” done by Samuel O. Salami (2008) and Results

showed that emotional intelligence, work-role salience,

achievement motivation, job satisfaction and all demographic

factors except gender significantly predicted organizational

commitment of the workers. Findings suggest the need for

organizational managements and psychologists to consider

the factors investigated when designing programs for

increasing the organizational commitment of the workers.

Let us look at a few more studies related to the same

variables, we can see some more results: Örs’s et al study

(2003), investigated the effects demographic variables on

organizational commitments of doctors and nurses; Cengiz’s

study (2002) investigated the association between

demographic variables and organizational commitment

among health care staff; Güçlü’s study (2006) examined the

effects of demographic characteristics on organizational

commitment in tourism sector; Gümüþ’s et al. Study (2003)

examined the association between demographic variables and

organizational commitment in hotel businesses.

However, if we look at the overall literature, the literature

shows that commitment antecedents are studied in the form of

personal characteristics, attitudes or what the employee

contributes to the workplace. There have been mixed findings

regarding what characteristics influence greater commitment.

DeCotis and Summers, (1987), argued that a commitment

profile does not exist therefore there can be no connection

between one‘s personal characteristics and their commitment

to an organization. However though, Mowday et al (1982),

Steers (1982), all investigated the role of personal

characteristics and found that the characteristics and

experiences that a person brings to an organization can predict

their commitment to the organization.

Organizational commitment has been extensively

researched; however, the relationship between demographic

factors and attitudinal commitment has not been fully explored

(Mathieu & Zajac, 1990). In this paper, the relationship

between demographic factors (age, education, tenure and

Marital Status) and altitudinal commitment has been exposed

in Diesel Locomotive works, Varanasi, India.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Statement of the Problem

There has been a lot of study in the area of Organizational

Commitment still it remains unexplored to some extent and yet

a general understanding has not been developed when it

comes to studies conducted at different times and in different

work environment. One of the greatest challenges

organizations face today is how to manage turnover of work

force that may be caused by migration of a lot of industrial

workers. Therefore, it has become an important area of

research that how to reduce turnover and absenteeism and

improve performance of an organization. Moreover, it has

been observed many a times that employees who are satisfied

with their jobs are still not good performers. This may be

02 SAMIKSHA - Volume IV, No. 1, January-June 2013

DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

This section reproduces the results of investigation

obtained through a careful analysis of the response scores with

the help on the SPSS software. The raw scores of the present

study are the responses of workers on the standardized

measuring devise, namely, Organizational Commitment Scale.

The appropriate statistics which has been used in this

study are Box Plot, t-test, ANOVA and Post-hoc. These

statistics are expected to test all the hypotheses of study

outlined in the previous section and to explain in unambiguous

terms how and to what extent the Organizational Commitment

of Workers gets impacted by the demographic factors under

study.

Impact of Marital Status on Organizational Commitment (OC):

The impact has been first checked through the box plot

(Figure (i)) (at the last) to first visualize if there is any difference

between the medians of the OC scores of the two groups based

on Marital Status of the respondents viz. married and

Unmarried. By visual inspection the difference is clearly

visible. Also, the mean scores of OC of Married and Unmarried

groups have been shown in table (i) (at the last), which also

shows that there are differences in the mean scores of the

variable under study. But, whether it is significant or not has

been tested with the help of a parametric test, namely, t-test.

The value of the t-static comes out to be significant clearly

indicating the differences in the mean to be significant and

hence we reject our first hypothesis and alternatively establish

that Marital Status does impacts the OC level of employees and

also from table (i) (at the last) we can say that married

employees are more committed towards the organization as

compared to unmarried employees.

Impact of Education Level on Organizational Commitment (OC):

In this case also the impact of Education on OC has been

first visualized through second box plot shown in figure (ii) (at

the last). A visual inspection shows very minor differences

between the means of different groups of employees belonging

to different educational levels and when those differences were

analyzed with the help of ANOVA (Table (ii) (at the last) they

were found to be insignificant. The insignificance of the

differences indicates clearly that education level does not

impact the OC level of employees in this particular

organization. This leads us to the conclusion that we cannot

reject our second hypothesis i.e., there is no significant

difference in the level of organizational commitment of

employees having different education levels.

Impact of Tenure on Organizational Commitment (OC):

Similar to what we have been doing, we move ahead and

first make a visual inspection of the box plot shown in figure

(iii) (at the last), which clearly indicate the differences in the

median of OC scores of three groups of employees possessing

different levels of experience. To check the significance of these

differences we go for ANOVA again shown in table (iii) (at the

last), which shows that the differences are significant and

because of their lack of Motivation and commitment for the

organization; this point of view emphasizes the importance of

the study of Organizational Commitment.

Objectives:

The present study aims at exploring the relationship

between Job Satisfaction and Motivation of the employees in an

organizational set-up. The objectives of the study are

enumerated below:

1. To find out whether the organizational commitment level

of employees vary with the various demographic factors

viz. Age, Tenure, Education and Marital Status

Hypotheses:

1. There is no significant difference in the level of

organizational commitment of employees belonging to

different Marital Status groups.


organizational commitment of employees having

different education levels.


organizational commitment of employees possessing

different level of experience (Tenure).


organizational commitment of employees belonging to

different Age groups.

RESEARCH DESIGN

In the present study Organizational Commitment has

been taken as a Dependent Variable and the impact of various

demographic variables like Age, Tenure, Education and

Marital Status (which are the independent variables of the

study) have been checked on the organizational commitment

level of employees with the help of tests like, t-test, AVOVA

and Post-hoc.

Measures:

The study, utilized one standard questionnaires for

Organizational Commitment developed by C. Balaji, also it has

been tested for very high reliability with coefficient of alpha

=.91 and an intrinsic validity score of 0.95 and the

Questionnaire has been used many times successfully in

various industrial and banking setups. The demographic

factors under study have also been asked at the beginning of

the Questionnaire.

Sample:

The investigation was conducted at Diesel Locomotive

Works, Varanasi, U.P., India, which is a government

undertaking possessing both rural and urban characteristics.

The investigation is related to 600 employees who were

selected through disproportionate stratified sampling from a

total of approximately 6000 workers working in different

departments of the unit, viz., administration, quality control,

engineering, electrical, stores, production, marketing, design

etc.

The Effects of Demographic Characteristics on Organizational Commitment of Employees 03

hence we reject our third hypothesis and alternatively state

that employees possessing different levels of experience or

employees who have served the organization for different

tenures differ in their level of commitment towards the

organization.

To find out which group is the most/least committed we

check it with the help of a test named Post Hoc (table (iv)) (at

the last), which calculates the differences among the mean

scores of the three groups and compares them together and

also finds out the significance of these differences. After the

Post Hoc analysis of table (iv) (at the last), it can be easily stated

that employees who have an experience ranging from 10-20

years are more committed as compared to the employees who

have an experience of less than 10 years. Also, employees

possessing experience of more than 20 years are more

committed towards the organization as compared to

employees having experience less than 10 years. While, the

difference in the mean commitment scores of employees

belonging to 10-20 years’ experience group and 20 years above

experience group is insignificant. Hence, indicating that

employees belonging to experience group less than 10 years are

least committed.

Impact of Age on Organizational Commitment (OC):

Again we continue in the fashion of the interpretation, we

move ahead and first make a visual inspection of the box plot

shown in figure (iv) (at the last), which clearly indicate the

differences in the median of OC scores of three groups of

employees belonging to different Age groups. To check the

significance of these differences we go for ANOVA again

shown in table (v) (at the last), which shows that the differences

are significant and hence we reject our fourth and final

hypothesis and alternatively state that employees belonging to

different age groups differ in their level of commitment

towards the organization.

To find out which group is the most/least committed we

again check it with the help of the Post Hoc test (table (vi)) (at

the last), which calculates the differences among the mean

scores of the three groups and compares them together and

also finds out the significance of these differences. After the

Post Hoc analysis of table (vi)(at the last), it can be easily stated

that employees belonging to the age groups 25-45 years and 45

years above are more committed as compared to the employees

who are under the age group of less than 25 years. While, the

difference in the mean commitment scores of employees

belonging to 25-45 years’ age group and 45 above years age

group is insignificant. Hence, indicating that employees

belonging to age group less than 25 years are least committed.

CONCLUSION

Organizational commitment and its relationship to

demographics in this case shows that the level of commitment

of employees does gets affected with most of the demographic

variables under study viz. Marital Status, tenure and Age of the

employees, the only exception being the education level of the

employees. This shows that demographic variables also can

work as important antecedents to the organizational

commitment level of employees. Also, here it has been seen

that employees who are married and having age of 25 years

and above and possessing experience of more than 10 years are

more committed as compared to the employees who are

unmarried, less than 25 years of age and possessing less than 10

years of working experience.

From the present study we can say that the organization

should derive commitment strategies for the employees who

are married, possessing experience of more than 10 years and

having crossed the 25 years of age such that they are able to

retain them and also to further enhance their commitment level

as they are already committed to the organization. While, on

the other hand for employees who are unmarried, having an

age of less than 25 years and possessing an experience of less

than 10 years, strategies to bring their level of commitment up

at least to their counterparts as these are the young dynamics

work force of the organization and can be a cause major success

in future as they are the one who are going to last in the

organization for the longest period of time as compared to the

others who are already committed and loyal.

Further, researches should be directed towards the

exploration of the influences of other demographic factors not

considered in this study on the commitment level of industrial

workers in order to have a better understanding of this

phenomenon in the present industrial setup and also in other

industries around the world.

REFERENCES

• Pala, Fikri, et. al., (2008). The Effects of Demographic

Characteristics on Organizational Commitment and Job

Satisfaction: An Empirical Study on Turkish Health Care Staff.

The Journal of Industrial Relations and Human Resources, 10

(2).54-75.

• Ors’set. al., (2003).Commitment of doctors and nurses in an

hospital. Journal of Ankara University Faculty of Medicine, 56

(4), 217-224.

• Cengiz, Aytul Bu (2002). Determinants of Organizational

Commitment, Organizational Life in the Eskisehir region

between the Doctor and Nurse Occupation Groups: A

Comparative Study. Proceedings of the 10th National

Management Congress, 23-25, May 2002, 805-817.

• Guclu, Hatice, (2006). Organizational Tourism Sector

Situational Factors: Effect of commitment. Republic of Turkey

Anadolu University Publications, No. 1681, Eskisehir, 211.

• Gumus, (2003). "Organizational Commitment: A Research on

Determining the Relationship of Business Excellence in Hotel

Management ", 11th National Management and Organization

Congress, Afyon: AfyonKocatepe University, (22 to 24 May

2003), 987-998.

• Iqbal Adnan, (2010). An Empirical Assessment of Demographic

Factors, Organizational Ranks and Organizational

Commitment. International Journal of Business and

Management, 5(3), 16-27.

• Salami, Samuel O. (2008). Demographic and Psychological

Factors Predicting Organizational Commitment among

Industrial Workers. Anthropologist, 10(1), 31-38.

• Pourghaz, Abdulwahab, et. al., (2011). Do Demographic


Characteristics Make a Difference to Job Satisfaction,

Organizational Commitment and Burnout among Travel

Agency Drivers? (A Case Study in Iran). J. Basic. Applied.

Scientific. Research., 1(8),916-923.

• Mathieu, John E. and Zajac, Dennis M., (1990). A Review and

Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents, Correlates, and

Consequences of Organizational Commitment. Psychological

Bulletin 108 (2),171-194.

• Azeem, Syed Mohammad, (2010). Job Satisfaction and

Organizational Commitment among Employees in the

Sultanate of Oman. Scientific Research Psychology, 1, 295-299.

• DeCotiis, T.A. and Summers, T. P. (1987), A path analysis of a

model of the antecedents and consequences of organizational

commitment. Human Relations, 40 (7), 445-470.

• Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W., and Steers, R.M., (1982).

Employee-organization linkages: the psychology of

commitment, absenteeism and turnover. New York: Academic

Press.

05

• Kwon, I.G. and Banks, D. W. (2004). Factors related to the

organizational and professional Commitment of internal

auditors. Managerial Auditing Journal, 19(5), 606-622.

• Yousef, D. A. (2000). Satisfaction with job security as a predictor

of organizational commitment and job performance in a

multicultural environment. International Journal of

Manpower, 19(3), 184-194.

• Stallworth, H.L. (2003). Mentoring, organizational

commitment and intentions to leave public accounting.

Managerial Auditing Journal, 18(5), 405-418.

• Stallworth, H. L. (2004). Antecedents and consequences of

organizational commitment to accounting organizations.

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The Effects of Demographic Characteristics on Organizational Commitment of Employees

Figure (i): Box Plot for Organizational Commitment on the basis of Marital Status of the Respondents

Figure (ii): Box Plot for Organizational Commitment on the basis of Education of the Respondents


Figure (iii): Box Plot for Organizational Commitment on the basis of Tenure of the Respondents

Figure (iv): Box Plot for Organizational Commitment on the basis of Age of the Respondents

Table (i): t-test between Organizational Commitmentand Marital Status of the Respondents

Marital Status N Mean Organizational

Commitment Scores

t-static Sig.

Married 526 73.3783

-4.194 .000

Unmarried 74 67.9865

07The Effects of Demographic Characteristics on Organizational Commitment of Employees

Table (ii): ANOVA between Organizational Commitment and Education Level of the Respondents

Sum of Squares Degree of

Freedom

Mean

Square

F Sig. (P)

Between Groups 543.343 2 271.671

2.477 .085 Within

Groups 65467.351 597 109.661

Total 66010.693 599

Table (iii): ANOVA between Organizational Commitment and Tenure of the Respondents


Freedom

Mean

Square

F Sig. (P)

Between Groups 2504.047 2 1252.023

11.770 .000 Within

Groups 63506.647 597 106.376

Total 66010.693 599

Table (iv): Post Hoc test for Multiple Comparisons for Organizational Commitment and Tenure

(I) years of

experience (J) years of experience Mean Difference (I-J) Std. Error Sig.

less than 10 years 10-20 years -4.33481* .96608 .000

20 above -3.72537* 1.09059 .002

10-20 years less than 10 years 4.33481* .96608 .000

20 above .60944 1.14885 .856

20 above less than 10 years 3.72537* 1.09059 .002

10-20 years -.60944 1.14885 .856

Table (v): ANOVA between Organizational Commitment and Age of the Respondents


Freedom

Mean

Square

F Sig. (P)

Between Groups 1712.442 2 856.221

7.950 .000 Within

Groups 64298.251 597 107.702

Total 66010.693 599


Table (vi): Post Hoc test for Multiple Comparisons for Organizational Commitment and Age

(I) age of the

respondent

(J) age of the

respondent

Mean Difference

(I-J) Std. Error Sig.

less than 25 25-45 -9.39534* 2.72183 .002

45 above -11.26903* 2.85189 .000

25-45 less than 25 9.39534* 2.72183 .002

45 above -1.87369 1.08688 .197

45 above less than 25 11.26903* 2.85189 .000

25-45 1.87369 1.08688 .197

*Assistant Professor, PSG Institute of Management, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India.

INTRODUCTION

Financial sector reforms have long been regarded as an

integral part of the overall policy reforms in India. The reforms

have been driven by a thrust towards liberalization and several

initiatives such as liberalization in the interest rate and reserve

requirements have been taken on this front. At the same time,

the government has emphasized on stronger regulation aimed

at strengthening prudential norms, transparency and

supervision to mitigate the prospects of systemic risks. Today

the Indian financial structure is inherently strong, functionally

diverse, efficient and globally competitive. The banking sector

is the most dominant sector of the financial system in India.

Significant progress has been made with respect to the banking

sector in the post liberalization period. The financial health of

the commercial banks has improved manifolds with respect to

capital adequacy, profitability, and asset quality and risk

management.

Traditionally investor’s needs regarding current income

and capital appreciation are evaluated and appropriate

securities are selected in the construction of portfolio. However

modern Portfolio theory helps the investors to calculate the

amount of return as well as risk for any investment portfolio

(Punithavathy pandian). Modern Portfolio theory was first

proposed by Harry M. Markowitz from University of Chicago.

William Sharpe, following Markowitz, developed the single

index model, which provides an alternative expression for

portfolio variance, which is easier to calculate than in the case

of the Markowitz analysis. This alternative approach can be

used to solve the portfolio problem as formulated by

Markowitz determining the efficient set of portfolios. It

requires considerably fewer calculations. The single index

model relates returns on each security to the returns on a

common index, that is it considers both systematic and

unsystematic risk for the construction of portfolio. The focus of

this study is to find out an optimal portfolio using single index

model.

Need for the study

The return which a person can get in a stock market can be

very very high. It made Azeem Premji a very wealthy person

The purpose of the research is to investigate the risk-

adjusted performance of stock portfolios through the

application of the single-index model. In this research the daily

closing prices of 24 companies from banking and finance sector

listed in National Stock Exchange (NSE) and S&P CNX nifty

index over the period of 4 years (01-04-2008 to 31-04-2012)

were used and ranked them based on excess return to beta ratio.

Four companies were selected from both sectors. The cut-off

point was calculated and highest value is to be taken as a base

for calculation of money to be invested in each stocks.

Furthermore, the paper offers better options for decision

making process in choosing optimal portfolios.

Keywords: risk, return, beta, market variance, residual

variance, portfolio, sharpe.

Construction of an Optimum Equity Portfolio with Reference to Banking and Finance Sectors in India P Varadharajan*

*[email protected]

when Wipro’s share went high in the late 90s. It can even

reduce the wealth of the promoter which is recently been seen

by Vijay Mallya where Kingfisher’s shares are exceedingly

low. So how does a normal person invest in stock market given

its huge volatility? Here again, it depends upon the type of

return the person wants from his investment. Remember,

largest returns come from taking the biggest risk. But, failing

there can bring huge losses which we as small or medium

investors can not afford to take. Portfolio is constructed to

maintain perfect negative correlation between the

combinations of securities in order to mitigate the entire risks.

Framing portfolio by selecting securities from banking and

finance sector based on the capital market performance of the

Indian banks, PSU Banks and other financial institutions. This

paper is built around cooking up the portfolio by balancing the

positive and negative correlation existing between the

securities and in turn getting returns closer to the anticipated

results.

Objectives

• To study the relative market performance of twenty-four

companies belonging to Banking and Finance sectors,

listed in National Stock Exchange, India.

• To construct an optimal portfolio which gives maximum

return for the particular level of risk.

• To identify stocks and proportion of stocks to be included

in portfolio.

• To guide investors to find out the company that gives the

maximum return with minimum risk.

Limitations

• Portfolio is constructed based only on risk and return.

• Study offers better options for decision making process in

choosing optimal portfolios in only NSE.

• Study is restricted to only 24 stocks from Banking and

Finance sectors, which are constituents of market portfolio

that is, NSE NIFTY.

• Stock prices considered are restricted to only the previous

4 year’s closing prices.

• All the calculations could not be brought into the report.

Review of literature

Kent Danie l , David Hirsh le i fer , Avanidhar

Subrahmanyam (1998) explained a theory of securities market

under- and overreactions based on two well-known

psychological biases: investor overconfidence about the

precision of private information; and biased self-attribution,

which causes asymmetric shifts in investors' confidence as a

function of their investment outcomes. It shows that

overconfidence implies negative long-lag autocorrelations,

excess volatility, and, when managerial actions are correlated

with stock mispricing, public-event-based return

predictability. Biased self-attribution adds positive short-lag

autocorrelations (“momentum”), short-run earnings “drift,”

but negative correlation between future returns and long-term

past stock market and accounting performance. The paper also

offers several untested implications and implications for

corporate financial policy. William F. Sharpe (1963) described

the advantages of using a particular model of the relationships

among securities for practical applications of the Markowitz

portfolio analysis technique. A computer program has been

developed to take full advantage of the model: 2,000 securities

can be analyzed at an extremely low cost-as little as 2% of that

associated with standard quadratic programming codes.

Moreover, preliminary evidence suggests that the relatively

few parameters used by the model can lead to very nearly the

same results obtained with much larger sets of relationships

among securities. The possibility of low-cost analysis, coupled

with a likelihood that a relatively small amount of information

need be sacrificed make the model an attractive candidate for

initial practical applications of the Markowitz technique.

Rakesh Mohan (2005) investigated the story of Indian financial

sector reforms in terms of a number of segments such as

banking, debt markets, forex markets, and others like non-

banking financial companies. This apart, as an offshoot of the

financial sector reform, changes in the monetary policy are

discussed. In this light, the paper looks at various performance

indicators of different segments of the Indian financial sector.

In general, it is found that there has been an improvement in

efficiency, competitiveness and health of all the segments of the

Indian financial sector. The paper raises some issues for the

future of this sector. Tarapore S. S. (2000) explained about the

various Financial crises, weaknesses in financial systems and

their supervision contribute to macro instability and gave

suggestions to solve it. the author suggest, Not only is stronger

supervision necessary but the discipline of the market needs to

be reinforced. Corporate governance needs to be strengthened

and bankruptcy legislation made more robust. With rapid

technological changes, the leaders in innovation would claim

the best business. Banks and financial institutions which resist

change would, like dinosaurs, become extinct. Further the

paper describes that the financial system would need to be

guided by three requirements, viz, transparency, rigorous

norms and appropriate incentives. Ram Mohan T. T. (2003)

evaluated the performance of public sector banks (PSBs)

consequent to disinvestment by comparing the returns to PSB

stocks with returns to the Sensex. The author do so on an

unadjusted as well as risk-adjusted basis. He also compute the

relative returns of private sector banks with respect to the

Sensex and use these to compare public and private sector bank

performance. He find that PSB stocks' performance on the

average was not significantly different from that of the Sensex

or from that of private sector bank stocks. Mohammed

Hossain, Masrur Reaz (2007) reported the results of an

empirical investigation of the extent of voluntary disclosure by

38 listed banking companies in India. It also reports the results

of the association between company specific characteristics

and voluntary disclosure of the sample companies. The study

reveals that Indian banks are disclosing a considerable amount

of voluntary information. The findings also indicate that size

and assets-in-place are significant and other variables such as

age, diversification, board composition, multiple exchange

listing and complexity of business are insignificant in

explaining the level of disclosure. However, this paper has

contributed to the academic literature that financial

institutions provide voluntary corporate information

including social information as discharging their social

responsibility and corporate citizenship. Barathi Kamath G.

(2007) said to estimate and analyze the Value Added

Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC™) for measuring the value-

based performance of the Indian banking sector for a period of

five years from 2000 to 2004. The VAIC™ method is applied in


and Classic. Heuristic methods are supposed not to “get stuck”

in local optima, in which classics often do get stuck. Heuristic

algorithms perform a wide random search; consequently, the

chance of being trapped in local optima is deeply decreased.

Therefore, in this study, Genetic Algorithm, a heuristic

evolutionary method, and a classic solver are applied to

construct and optimize portfolios in a sample market of five

stocks. The research findings indicate that Genetic Algorithm,

in contrast to classic methods, is more adaptable to the

portfolio selection problem and has a better performance in

contrast to its classic optimization counterparts. Richard B .

Spurgin (2001) described a derivative structure that can

induce an upward bias in the measurement of the Sharpe ratio.

The structure accomplishes this by shifting returns from the

highest monthly return each year to the lowest one. This

smoothes observed returns-and lowers observed volatility-

without significantly altering the annual return. The objective

of the article is to demonstrate how adding derivatives can

appear to improve risk-adjusted return without actually doing

so. Murthi, B.P.S. Yoon K. Choi, Preyas Desai (1997) proposed a

new measure of performance that seeks to address the

limitations of the earlier indices such as Jensen's alpha and the

Sharpe index.. The new index is calculated by employing a well

known method in operations research called data

envelopment analysis. The paper shows the benefits of the

proposed approach and assesses the performance of mutual

funds. They compare the results with traditional indices of

performance. An interesting result obtain is that the mutual

funds are all approximately mean-variance efficient. AJ du

Plessis and M Ward (2009) this research endeavours to apply

the theory of Markowitz to the Johannesburg Securities

Exchange (JSE) to establish whether an optimal portfolio can be

identified and used as an effective trading rule. Here Weekly

data over 11 years on the top 40 JSE listed companies was

analysed to construct Markowitz mean-variance optimised

portfolios using ex-ante data. The optimal portfolio was then

selected and re-balanced periodically, and the returns

compared against the FTSE/JSE ALSI40 index. The study

found that the trading strategy significantly outperformed the

market in the period under review. Lubos Pastor (2000)

explained portfolio selection in a Bayesian framework that

incorporates a prior degree of belief in an asset pricing model.

Sample evidence on home bias and value and size effects is

evaluated from an asset-allocation perspective. The paper

explains that the U.S. investors' belief in the domestic CAPM

must be very strong to justify the home bias observed in their

equity holdings. The same strong prior belief results in large

and stable optimal positions in the Fama–French book-to-

market portfolio in combination with the market since the

1940s. Varadharajan P (2011 ) explained how to construct an

optimal equity portfolio with help of the sharpe index model.

In this paper, Banking and Information Technology sectors

have taken into consideration for construction of equity

portfolio. Five companies were selected from each sector and

ranked them based on excess return to beta ratio. The cut-off

point was calculated and highest value is taken as a base for

calculation of money to be invested in each stocks. This

research findings and suggestions would be helpful to

investors.

order to analyze the data of Indian banks for the five-year

period. The intellectual or human capital (HC) and physical

capital (CA) of the Indian banking sector is analysed and their

impact on the banks' value-based performance is discussed in

this paper. The study confirms the existence of vast differences

in the performance of Indian banks in different segments, and

there is also an improvement in the overall performance over

the study period. There is an evident bias in favour of the

performance of foreign banks compared with domestic banks.

Lingjie Ma & Larry Pohlman (2008) investigated in finance

there is growing interest in quantile regression with the

particular focus on value at risk and copula models. In this

paper first present a general interpretation of quantile

regression in the context of financial markets. Then it explore

the full distributional impact of factors on returns of securities

and find that factor effects vary substantially across quantiles

of returns. Utilizing distributional information from quantile

regression models, they propose two general methods for

return forecasting and portfolio construction and show that

under mild conditions these new methods provide more

accurate forecasts and potentially higher value-added

portfolios than the classical conditional mean method. Ulf

Herold (2003) explained about the structured approach for

portfolio construction leads to a more consistent

implementation of market views and to more balanced

portfolios in terms of risk profile. The vast majority of active

portfolio managers use a fundamental investment approach.

They do not generate quantitative forecasts but instead express

their market views in a qualitative manner. The portfolio

construction approach in practice is usually overweighting

assets with a bullish outlook by some pre specified amount,

and underweighting assets for which the view is bearish. The

author recommends that the structured approach incorporates

several diagnostic tools and a Bayesian model. It also allows a

portfolio manager to compute the shrinkage in the information

ratio when implementing a suboptimal portfolio. This

mitigates the need for transactions and hence reduces

transaction costs. Bhagirathi nayak, Nahak C Dr..& Arun KR.

Misra Dr (2011) investigated to forecast financial market

indicators using rule based fuzzy system. The fuzzy system has

been applied on Gold commodity future market, Carbon credit

and CNX Nifty Index. The report is devoted to articulate the

impact of rule based fuzzy system for forecasting the above

mentioned parameters. Fuzzy rule have been designed by

considering the standard deviation of the above parameters as

a rule input variable and is applied on the moving average of 2

days, 7 days and 15 days of the input variable that is the future

commodity gold prices, carbon credit and the CNX Nifty

Index. Around 42 rules have been designed by considering the

bullish, bearish, near bullish, near bearish and active bullish

and active bearish etc. The article effectively forecast future

gold price and the bullish and bearish nature of market. It also

forecast the Index along the cycle of bullish and bearish. In-

sample prediction has supported the rule based fuzzy system

as an effective methodology of forecasting. Arash Talebi,

Mohammad Ali Molaei, Bozorgmehr Ashrafi (2011) reviewed

Modern Portfolio Theory and describes the problems and

solutions, which have been put forward in the Theory. In this

paper, selection of a portfolio is optimized via two different

methods from two major optimization approaches, Heuristic

Construction of an Optimum Equity Portfolio with Reference to Banking and Finance Sectors in India 11

METHODOLOGY

This is a descriptive study on the construction of portfolio

of stocks. The data taken for the study is secondary in nature

because it pertains to historical analysis of reported financial

data. The daily closing price of the shares and Index value and

the 91-day Government of India treasury bills rate has been

used for the study. These data has been collected from various

websites like National Stock Exchange (NSE), Reserve Bank of

India (RBI), etc., and also from the databases of Ebsco and

Proquest. The study is conducted with the financial data for the

past four years from 1st April 2008 to 31st March 2012. The

sampling technique adopted is purposive sampling and the

sample size of the study is limited to 24. They are a combination

of stocks from two different sectors namely Banking and

finance. This study takes all the 12 shares which are part of

CNX Bank Index and all the 12 PSU bank shares which are part

of CNX PSU Bank Index and 12 selected shares which are part

of the CNX Finance Index. The collected data were

consolidated as per study requirements.

Tools used for data analysis

Return

A particular amount of money as a profit or loss that an

investment can produce for given period of time. It is the ratio

of capital appreciation plus income earned on such investment

and the value at the beginning period of such invested financial

asset.

Return = Today's market Price - Yesterday's market Price x 100

Yesterday's market price

Risk-free rate of return (RF)

Risk-free rate of return is the required return on a risk free

asset, typically a 91 days treasury bill rate.

Correlation

Correlation is a statistical technique that can show

whether and how strongly pairs of variables are related. It is a

single number that describes the degree of relationship

between two variables.

Beta Coefficient

A measurement of how much the price of a share has

changed in a particular period of time, compared with the

average change in the price of all shares in the market.

â = Correlation x ó(Y)

ó(x)

Where, ó (Y) = Standard Deviation of Individual Stock

ó(x)= Standard Deviation of Market

Excess Return-Beta Ratio

It is to know which security gives maximum return, based

on the risk free rate of return.

Excess Return-Beta Ratio = Ri - Rf

â

Where, Ri = the expected return on stock

Rf = the return on a riskless asset

âi = the expected change in the rate of return on

stock associated with one unit change in the market return.

Cut-off point:

Where, ei = variance of the market index.

2 m = variance of a stock’s movement that is not

associated with the movement of market index that is stock’s

unsystematic risk.

Optimum portfolio

The combination of securities with perfect negative

correlation can generate an optimum portfolio that can

eliminate the entire risk in such portfolio of securities. A Set of

portfolio which generate maximizes return for a particular

level of risk is termed as optimum Portfolio. The percentage of

funds to be invested in each security can be estimated as

follows:

Where, Xi = the proportion of investment of each stock.

Where, C*= the cut-off point.

Analysis and interpretation:

For constructing an optimal portfolio, a sample of size 24

securities selected form the Banking and finance sector listed

on NSE. NSE NIFTY MIDCAP 50 is taken as the market index.

Daily closing price of each securities from 1st April 2008 to 31st

March 2012 were collected from NSE website. The average risk

free return is considered as 8.20% p.a (91-day Government of

India treasury bills). Using this stock price the folowing

variables are calculated.


Indusind bank yielded the maximum return among the

companies selected following that MM finance ltd and Bank of

Baroda yielded higher return and Kotak Mahindra Bank

yielded lower return following that IDBI ltd and State Bank of

India yielded lower return. Beta is greater than 1 in IndusInd

Bank Ltd, Bank of Baroda, Allahabad bank, etc. which shows it

more risk and at the same time the reward per unit of risks also

13

more. But in case of other companies with regards to beta it is

less than 1 which shows it is less risky when compared to

market risk. Beta of some companies like Mahindra and

Mahindra Finance ltd is less than 1, which has less rick but the

return of such company is more compare to other securities.

Table 1

Construction of an Optimum Equity Portfolio with Reference to Banking and Finance Sectors in India

Table 1: Return, Standard Deviation and Beta of Individual Stock

Scrip’s RETURN Residual Variance â

Allahabad bank 0.125204 2.669441 0.944643

Andhra bank 0.080779 2.53629 0.911591

Axis bank 0.088541 3.199409 1.202862

Bank of Baroda 0.137167 2.572502 0.788047

Bank of India 0.082005 3.024825 1.015624

Canara bank 0.112782 2.727724 0.860371

HDFC ltd -0.00887 3.79106 0.915551

hDFC bank ltd 0.013488 3.448311 0.783969

ICICI Bank ltd 0.07203 3.389788 1.307743

IDBI ltd 0.060988 3.004925 1.224295

IndusInd Bank Ltd 0.194938 3.256389 1.137049

Indian Overseas Bank 0.007451 2.961379 1.050632

Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd 0.055366 3.565863 1.18632

LIC Housing finance ltd 0.126941 4.150391 1.063851

MM finance ltd 0.120238 2.555643 0.421011

Oriental Bank of Commerce 0.077605 2.890168 0.891017

Power Finance Corporation ltd 0.052855 2.827295 0.892568

Punjab National Bank 0.090625 2.471331 0.84582

Reliance capital ltd -0.04272 3.817805 1.514227

State Bank of India 0.06437 2.733683 1.037185

Shriram Transport Finance Co. Ltd. 0.087419 2.421076 0.394767

Syndicate bank 0.073696 2.597908 0.920278

Union bank of India 0.087135 2.648144 0.800781

Yes bank ltd 0.138544 3.463156 1.347174

Table 2: Excess return to beta ratio

Scrip (Ri-Rf/â) New ranking

Allahabad bank 0.045736 IndusInd Bank Ltd

Andhra bank -0.00134 MM finance ltd

Axis bank 0.005438 Bank of Baroda

Bank of Baroda 0.070005 Allahabad bank

Bank of India 4.53E-06 LIC Housing finance ltd

Canara bank 0.035777 Yes bank ltd

HDFC ltd -0.09925 Canara bank

hDFC bank ltd -0.08739 Shriram Transport Finance Co. Ltd.

ICICI Bank ltd -0.00762 Punjab National Bank

IDBI ltd -0.01716 Union bank of India

IndusInd Bank Ltd 0.099325 Axis bank

Indian Overseas Bank -0.07096 Bank of India

Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd -0.02245 Andhra bank

LIC Housing finance ltd 0.042244 Oriental Bank of Commerce

MM finance ltd 0.090824 ICICI Bank ltd

Oriental Bank of Commerce -0.00493 Syndicate bank

Power Finance Corporation ltd -0.03265 State Bank of India

Punjab National Bank 0.010197 IDBI ltd

Reliance capital ltd -0.08237 Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd.


State Bank of India -0.017 Power Finance Corporation ltd

Shriram Transport Finance Co. Ltd. 0.013727 Indian Overseas Bank

Syndicate bank -0.00902 Reliance capital ltd

Union bank of India 0.006412 HDFC bank ltd

Yes bank ltd 0.041972 HDFC ltd

The single index model assumes that co-movement

between stocks is due to movement in the index. For selection

of appropriate securities in portfolio, the average returns of

individual returns or portfolio are adjusted to that of risk free

return (here 8.20 percent is considered as risk free rate based on

91-day Government of India treasury bills). The selection of

any stock is directly related to its excess return to beta ratio.

Based on the excess return to beta ratio the scrip’s are ranked

from 1 to 24, with Indusind bank being in the first rank and

Kotak Mahindra Bank being in the last. Table 2

Table 3: Cut-off point calculation

Scrip (RiRf)/â (RiRf)â/ á²ei

á²m* Ó(Ri-Rf)â/á²ei

â²/á²ei 1+á²mÓâ²/á²ei Ci

IndusInd Bank 0.099 0.0121 0.0454 0.1218 1.4566 0.0311

MM finance ltd 0.091 0.0025 0.0546 0.0271 1.5582 0.035

Bank of Baroda 0.07 0.0066 0.0792 0.0937 1.9097 0.0415

Allahabad bank 0.046 0.0057 0.1006 0.1251 2.3786 0.04231

LIC Housg fin ltd 0.042 0.0028 0.111 0.0656 2.6247 0.04230

Yes bank ltd 0.042 0.0063 0.1348 0.1512 3.1914 0.0422

Canara bank 0.036 0.0036 0.1481 0.0994 3.564 0.0416

Shriram Tran Fin 0.014 0.0004 0.1495 0.0266 3.6636 0.0408

PNB 0.01 0.0012 0.154 0.117 4.1022 0.0375

UBI 0.006 0.0006 0.1562 0.0913 4.4447 0.0351

Axis bank 0.005 0.0008 0.1591 0.1412 4.974 0.032

Bank of India 5E-06 6E-07 0.1591 0.1126 5.3962 0.0295

Andhra bank -0.001 -0.0002 0.1584 0.1291 5.88 0.0269

OBC -0.005 -0.0005 0.1567 0.0949 6.236 0.0251

ICICI Bank ltd -0.008 -0.0011 0.1524 0.1487 6.7934 0.0224

Syndicate bank -0.009 -0.0011 0.1482 0.1254 7.2633 0.0204

SBI -0.017 -0.0024 0.139 0.1438 7.8024 0.0178

IDBI ltd -0.017 -0.0028 0.1283 0.1658 8.4241 0.0152

Kotak Mahindra -0.022 -0.0025 0.119 0.1106 8.8386 0.0135

Power Fin Corp -0.033 -0.0033 0.1068 0.0996 9.2118 0.0116

IOB -0.071 -0.0089 0.0734 0.1257 9.6832 0.0076

Reliance capital -0.082 -0.0129 0.0249 0.1572 10.272 0.0024

HDFC bank ltd -0.087 -0.0045 0.008 0.0516 10.466 0.0008

HDFC ltd -0.099 -0.0058 -0.0137 0.0583 10.684 -0.001

Cut-off point

The selection of the stocks depends on a unique cut - off

rate such that all stocks with higher ratios of excess return to

beta are included and the stocks with lower ratios are left out.

The cut - off point is denoted by C*. The highest Ci value is

taken as the cut – off point C*. The stocks ranked above C* have

high excess return to beta than the cut - off Ci and all the stock

below C* has low excess returns to beta. Table 3

The highest value of Ci is taken as the cut-off point that is

C*. Here Allahabad has the highest the cut-off rate of C*=

0.04231. All the stocks having greater than C* can be included

in the portfolio.

Table 4: Selection of stocks among 24 companies and Proportion of Investment in each Stock

Stocks Cut-off points Proportion of Investment

IndusInd Bank 0.0311 0.47

MM finance ltd 0.035 0.24

Bank of Baroda 0.0415 0.25

Allahabad bank 0.04231 0.03

15Construction of an Optimum Equity Portfolio with Reference to Banking and Finance Sectors in India

FINDINGS

From the empirical analysis, Out of 24 companies taken for

the study, 2 companies are showing negative return and the

other 22 companies are showing positive returns. Out of 24

companies, 15 companies where market beta is above 1, show

that the investments in these stocks are outperforming than the

market. the stocks of higher risk yield higher return; Indusind

bank has higher risk and yields higher return. However,

significance of the beta is not consistent with all security return,

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services has lesser risk and

yields higher return. Leading to the conclusion that every

security depends to some extent on the overall performance of

the market.

Recommendations

The first choice for the investor from the selected

companies in the portfolio is Indusind bank which has the

highest proportion of investment. The proportion of about 47%

of the investment has to be made and it has maximum return

and risk compare to the market and other companies in the

portfolio. The companies like Mahindra & Mahindra Financial

Services ltd and Bank of Baroda have beta value less than one,

which means risk is comparatively low, But the return of such

companies are closely equal the return of other two companies

selected in the portfolio. So diversification of portfolio may

help the investor to eliminate the controllable risk associated

with all these companies stocks. The lower proportion of

investment of about 4% has to be invested in Allahabad Bank.

index model for the construction of portfolio. The top 4 stocks

which have been selected are: IndusInd Bank, Bank of Baroda,

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd and Allahabad

bank. As the price, return and risk involved in investment of

securities in the stock market is determined by various external

factors such as economic, political and psychological factors,

investors should take special care when selecting their

portfolios. We hope that these results are useful to individual

and institutional investors, managers, and policy makers in

making decision and adopting new investment policies in the

construction of portfolio.

SCOPE FOR FURTHER STUDY

• The study analyses securities in banking and finance

sectors only. Further research can be done involving all

sectors which would be a more optimal portfolio rather

than from specific sectors.

• Sharpe Index model has its own limitations so in order to

constract an optimal portfolio sharpe index model alone is

not sufficient. Portfolio construction can be done with

consideration of other models.

REFERENCES

• AJ du Plessis and M Ward (2009) "A note on applying the

Markowitz portfolio selection model as a passive investment

strategy on the JSE" Investment Analysts Journal - No. 69,

pages. 39 - 46.

• Arash Talebi, Mohammad Ali Molaei, Bozorgmehr Ashrafi

(2011) "Performance Investigation of Classic and Heuristic

Methods in Portfolio Optimization" Journal of American

Science,7(11), pages. 339-349.

• Barathi Kamath G, (2007) "The intellectual capital performance

of the Indian banking sector", Journal of Intellectual Capital,

Vol. 8, Issue.1, pages. 96 - 123.

• Bhagirathi nayak, Nahak C. Dr & Arun KR. Misra. Dr (2011)

"forcasting of financial markets - application of fuzzy

association rules" international journal of research in

commerce, it & management, volume no. 1, issue no. 5, page. 1.

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(1998) "Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and

Overreactions" The Journal of Finance Volume 53, Issue 6,

pages 1839-1885.

• Lingjie Ma & Larry Pohlman (2008) "Return forecasts and

optimal portfolio construction: a quantile regression approach"

The European Journal of Finance, Volume 14, Issue 5, pages.

409-425.

• Lubos Pastor (2000) "Portfolio Selection and Asset Pricing

Models" The Journal of Finance, Volume 55, Issue 1, pages

179–223.

• Mohammed Hossain, Masrur Reaz (2007) "The determinants

and characteristics of voluntary disclosure by Indian banking

companies" Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental

Management, Volume 14, Issue. 5, pages. 274-288.

• Murthi B.P.S. Yoon K. Choi, Preyas Desai (1997) "Efficiency of

mutual funds and portfolio performance measurement: A non-

parametric approach" European Journal of Operational

Research, Volume 98, Issue 2, 16 April, Pages. 408-418.

The maximum investment should be made in IndusInd

Bank with a proportion of 47%. Following that Bank of Baroda

with 25%, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services with 24%

and Allahabad bank with 4%. Among four securities selected

for the investment three companies belongs to banking sector

and one company is belongs to Finance Sector. Evidently, the

companies chosen for the investments are growing at a steady

rate in the recent years

CONCLUTION

Initially we were selected 24 stocks from banking and

finance sector and we selected top 4 stocks based on the return

and risk associated with each stock by using Sharpe's single

IndusInd Bank 47%

MM finance Ltd.24%

Bank of Baroda25%

Allahabad bank

4%

Figure: 1.1: Proposition of Investment


• Rakesh Mohan (2005) "Financial Sector Reforms in India:

Policies and Performance Analysis" Money, Banking and

Finance, Vol. 40, Issue.12, pages. 1106-1112+1115-1121.

• Ram Mohan T. T. (2003) "Long-Run Performance of Public and

Private Sector Bank Stocks" Banking and Finance, Vol. 38,

Issue.8, Money, pages. 785-788.

• Richard B. Spurgin (2001) "How to game your sharpe ratio",

The Journal of Alternative Investments, Vol. 4, No. 3, pages.

38-46.

• Tarapore S. S. (2000) "Malaise of Indian Financial System:

Need for Reforms"Economic and Political, Vol. 35, Issue.32,

pages. 2821-2826.

• Ulf Herold (2003) "Portfolio Construction with Qualitative

Forecasts" The Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 30,

Issue.1, pages. 61-72.

• Varadharajan P (2011) "Portfolio construction using the Sharpe

index model with reference to banking and information

technology sectors" Journals of Business Administration and

Management, ISSN: 2251-1261, Vol. 1(12), pages. 392-398.

• William F. Sharpe (1963) "A Simplified Model for Portfolio

Analysis" Journal of Management Science, Vol. 9, Issue. 2,

pages. 277-293.

*Associate Professor, Department of Management, Central University of Rajasthan, Kishangarh, Ajmer, Rajasthan, India.

INTRODUCTION

The health care system in India is as old as Indian

civilization. In fact before the advent of the western system of

medicine each nation had its own indigenous medicine system,

which offered medical care to their citizens. These systems

expanded independent of one another. Each system developed

its own underlying principle of treatment. The existence of

Ayurveda in India most likely dates back to the period of the

Indus Valley Civilization. Jivaka, Charka, Susrata, Vaghbhata,

Dhanvantri were some of the medical specialists of ancient

time in India. It was also India that offers the world the first

hospital service around 320 B.C., when the great ruler Ashoka

built the first hospital. It was specially planned to treat diseases

(Parsad, 1992).

In the last five years hospitals have been equipped with

world class infrastructure, latest sophisticated technology and

world class surgeons to undertake high end procedures, Indian

need not go abroad for treatment. Multimodality

comprehensive treatment of cancer, heart, bone-marrow

transplant, organ transplant and treatment of almost all kind of

other diseases are available with the advance diagnostic

facility. Increase in the strength of trained nursing staff,

keeping pace with the changing need of the patients, more

infrastructure and finance, continuous up-gradation of

technology, and national or more particularly international

accreditation is required for further improvement in the

quality of healthcare services. Hospitals assess their services

from patients’ perspective collect feedback information from

patients and their relatives for further enhancement in quality.

Many specialty hospitals are known for their quality of

treatment and for high end procedures like cardiac, cancer,

organ transplant, orthopedic and neurosurgery. Patients’

inflow is increasing more and more, however, if the existing

capacity is increased they can treat more number of patients.

Since patients’ inflow is increasing extra space, infrastructure,

accommodation, and more equipment are needed and hence

more finance is required.

Private and charitable hospitals advertise their services

and are spending an average of 5 percent of their budget on

The Indian Healthcare sector scenario has undergone

profound changes during last decade. In the last five years

hospitals have been equipped with world class infrastructure,

latest sophisticated technology and world class surgeons to

undertake high end procedures, Indian need not go abroad for

treatment. Multimodality comprehensive treatment of cancer,

heart, bone-marrow transplant, organ transplant and

treatment of almost all kind of other diseases are available with

the advance diagnostic facility. Increase in the strength of

trained nursing staff, keeping pace with the changing need of

the patients, more infrastructure and finance, continuous up-

gradation of technology, and national or more particularly

international accreditation is required for further

improvement in the quality of healthcare services. Hospitals

assess their services from patients’ perspective collect feedback

information from patients and their relatives for further

enhancement in quality. Many specialty hospitals are known

for their quality of treatment and for high end procedures like

cardiac, cancer, organ transplant, orthopedic and

neurosurgery. Patient’s inflow is increasing more and more,

however, if the existing capacity is increased they can treat

more number of patients. The present study highlights the

perception of administrators of Specialty Hospitals in North

India regarding the current state of healthcare services and

need of marketing for growing competition in specialty

healthcare sector.

Keywords: Specialty Hospital, Hospital administrators,

Word of mouth, Hospitality

Hospital Administrators’ Perception towards Healthcare Services of Specialty Hospitals in North India Dr. Maithili R.P. Singh*

*[email protected]

promotion/advertisement of services, while government

hospitals are not spending on advertisement because they are

not provided any fund for advertisement by government.

Accreditation is symbol of quality, international patients prefer

accredited hospital, in India some hospitals are accredited

from Joint Commission International; many hospitals are

seeking accreditations form National accreditation Board for

Hospital (NABH), hospitals already accredited from NABH

are applying for JCI. Accreditation is necessary for to create

brand image of the hospital at national and international

healthcare market. Hospitals are investing best input in the

technology and manpower and are trying to creating star

facility.

With the entry of big business houses in healthcare sector,

large corporate hospitals are being setting up giving a new

light to the existing competition. Number of hospitals applying

for national accreditation with NABH is increasing; those

already accredited with NABH are applying for international

accreditation from Joint commission International. With the

emerging of national & international accredited hospital

competition in health sector is going up. More particularly

competition is increasing among hospitals of private sector.

Fortis healthcare recently bought 90 percent stake in Escorts

hospital for Rs. 585 crore and is acquiring another 250 bed

hospital in the Bangalore city. Wockhardt hospital under its

expansion and diversification plan is setting up a 200 bed

hospital in Devanhalli, Bangalore. Manipal healthcare group is

considering a 350 bed hospital in Bangalore. St John’s hospital

is setting up a large super-specialty corporate hospital in the

same campus where it runs a 1000 bed missionary hospital.

Fortis is acquiring another newly built Imperial hospital in

Bangalore city.

Besides adding more facilities at their domestic units

Apollo, Max, Wockhardt and Fortis healthcare groups are

planning for overseas expansion also. Apollo hospital group

has planned to set up and manage hospital projects in Fiji and

Mauritius. Max healthcare another leading hospital of India is

trying an entry in to the US, UK, and far-east markets besides

the expansion of its operations in countries like Bangladesh

and Afghanistan. Wockhardt is eyeing markets of Europe,

more particularly UK, the company is already building its

brand presence through tie-ups with leading healthcare

insurance providers in the US, UK, and Singapore.

Competition on costs could also make healthcare affordable for

more people in India. India has cost advantage. It is only one-

fifth of the costs in the West. The price of certain high-end

procedures is already coming down. A heart bypass surgery

for instance could cost Rs. 3.5-4 lakh five years ago, and cost

today not more than Rs. 2 lakh. For the first time travel industry

partners tour operators, hotel and airlines and premium

corporate hospitals are busy forging tie-ups to attain more

market share in India and from overseas as well (Rao, 2005).

At present telemedicine is gaining ground, doctors are

consulting globally to provide their patient best care,

healthcare providers are joining hands, and quality treatment

is now available in Africa and Asian continent also which was

previously poor as compared to west. Tie ups between major

players in the world is increasing, healthcare industry is taking

the shape of medical tourism. Besides US, UK and Middle-East,

Singapore and Thailand are emerging as low cost treatment

destination in other parts of the world, creating tough

competition in healthcare market. Now hospitals want to

acquire other countries share in healthcare sector (Sinha, 2008).

The present study is based on the assumption that the

administrators of specialty hospitals are pivotal to hospital

management, quality assurance and all marketing efforts. The

perception of hospital administrators are utmost important for

overall development of specialty hospitals. They are key to

success for any hospital by performing the desired activities for

the all round improvement and development of specialty

hospitals.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Narasimham (1981) emphasizes that a pre-requisite for

organizing a comprehensive and continued service from the

home or community to the hospital and vice versa, there

should be a good recording system. Such facilities exist only in

a few institutions at present. Such efforts have to be made to

obtain the staff, physical facilities and co ordination, in

favourable situation where there is scope, there is need for

sincere experimentation of the comprehensive services and

follows up.

Yesudian (1988) concludes that according to the planning

commission of India, the 20 percent of the population living in

urban areas have the facilities of 70 percent of the total hospital

beds and 80 percent of the doctors in the country. However,

though all varieties of health services are available in our cities,

not all sections of the community are benefited by these

facilities. There is a wide gap in the utilization of health services

between the various sections.

Joseph (2000) reveals that 15 years ago, cataract surgery

involved staying in the hospital for 7 days for each eye. Today,

it is a total of 3 hours for both eyes. Besides, with intra-ocular

lens implants, one emerges with new eyes and brilliant vision.

Scientific achievements and rapid technological advances have

also escalated healthcare expenditure throughout the world.

Although healthcare still remains a cottage industry, during

the last 20 years, it has witnessed a tremendous growth in the

private sector of institutional healthcare, a mushrooming of

hospitals, medical colleges, nursing homes, and diagnostic

centers.

McKinsey (2004) pinpoints the healthcare markets in

India are on the verge of a rapid growth phase. Corporate

hospitals have realized the need to transform themselves into

efficient profit-making organizations to survive the increasing

competition. The perceived threat of global competition has

also compelled the healthcare industry to re-orient itself to face

the challenge. Increasing competition both global and local,

with the entry of private players will be one aspect which will

drive this change.

Choudhury (2004) speaks about Indian healthcare

federation the apex body of healthcare services providers in the

country is planning to introduce an accreditation system for


Rao (2005) describes that a substantial number of

foreigners are coming to India to avail the quality medical

treatment at a cost much lower than that of other countries of

the world, particularly in the field of cardiology, cardiac

surgery, joint replacement, ophthalmology, pathology and

Indian systems of medicine etc. The government of India has

constituted a task force to promote India as a health destination

for persons across the globe so as to gainfully utilize the

healthcare expertise and infrastructure available in the

country.

Jha (2006) writes that apart from hosting the best and state

of art medical facilities, Medicity will be positioned as a one

stop destination for medical tourism in the country. Gurgaon

may have more than 3,000 beds in the premium organized

private medical sector. Medicity will have separate units for

Ayurvedic and Unani medicine as well. The integrated

hospital chain is also likely to get into tie-ups with medical

universities in the US and Germany.

OBJECTIVES AND METHODOLOGY

The objective of the study is to know the perception of

administrators of Specialty Hospitals in North India regarding

the current state of healthcare services and need of marketing

for growing competition in specialty healthcare sector.

The study covers 25 hospitals (government, private and

charitable) in all of north India from the states of Delhi,

Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, J&K, Punjab, Uttrakhand, U.P.

and union territory Chandigarh. The sample size for primary

data includes one administrator from each hospital. The

secondary data is collected from published reports, magazines,

newspapers, journals, websites of the hospital, medical

colleges, institutes etc. across the country.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The Result obtained through analysis, have been

presented in the following Tables (Table No 1 to Table No 17 in

this section.)

1. Provision of feedback regarding services: Hospital try to know public opinion about their services, they ask the patients regarding any sort of problem and during their departure feedback form are given to fill up, few hospital organize talk shows for to collect information regarding their facility, many hospitals try to collect information from patients’ suggestions and complaints.

In spite of these promotional efforts specialty hospital

usually have provision to know the public opinion about

hospital and services and they try to identify the need of

the patients. The marketers of specialty hospital now-a-

days are carrying out marketing research activity to

identify the need of the patient as it is shown in table 1

and 2.

healthcare institutions soon. IHCF is working closely with the

US-based accreditation organization, joint commission

international to set the parameters of the system. The

accreditation will set standards for infection control, continuity

and quality of care, adhering to standard procedures of drug

delivery, hospital safety infrastructure, design of patient

facilities like beds and toilets and other set of similar

parameters.

Seth & Mathew (2005) write that Indian healthcare is all

set to go global. The overseas expansion plans of hospital

majors, including Apollo, Max, Wockhardt and Fortis, are

being planned even as these groups are adding more facilities

at their domestic units to woo patients in large numbers. The

healthcare majors in India are planning something like their

counterparts in IT are doing: a mix of ‘offshoring’ and

‘onshoring’. They are also making ambitious plans to deliver

‘quality’ and ‘affordable’ healthcare delivery services to

overseas patients at their door steps. Our long term plan is to

emerge as a leading global player in providing quality

healthcare at affordable costs, and as part of this, we have plans

to enter a number of overseas markets.

Mathiyazhagan (2005) says India’s health sector is

currently at a crossroads and presents tremendous

opportunities. In terms of market size, India’s private health

sector is enormous, accounting for almost 4.2 percent of the

country’s GDP. In 2001, India had only seven beds per 1,000

people, with public hospitals contributing 4 beds per 1,000

people. Recent healthcare utilization surveys in India show

that private healthcare providers contribute to 60 percent of the

countries curative health services needs. Even lower and

middle income groups in the areas bypass supply constrained

government healthcare services to seek medical care from the

private sector.

Sharma (2005) points out that Indian healthcare sector has

never been known to be a good marketer. It is always said that a

satisfied customer is the biggest advertiser. This is true with the

healthcare sector also. Satisfied customers are the brand

ambassadors of any healthcare organization. Branding and

marketing in the healthcare sector has always taken the back

seat. In the era of localization, privatization and globalization

the world has become one market place. Seeing the potential of

the Indian Healthcare market foreign healthcare companies are

also entering the Indian market.

Pande & Dey (2005) feel that the Indian hospitals have

realized that the big bucks would come from the West. Hence

there’s a rush among the hospitals to make themselves

attractive to medical tourists from Europe and the US. Some

hospitals are packing extra perceived value proposition by

augmenting treatment regiments to include Yoga and other

forms of Traditional Indian healing which have always

fascinated the people in the West. Much of this is being driven

to attract foreign patients from the developed economies

which are a trickle at the moment. Most big private hospital

chains believe, they can rake in greenbacks if they do it right.

Hospital Administrators’ Perception towards Healthcare Services of Specialty Hospitals in North India 19

Table 1 exhibits that all the specialty hospital wants to

know the public opinion about their services.

Table 2: Marketing research to identify the need of the patient

Table 2 depicts that 72 percent hospitals conduct

marketing research to identify the needs of the patients, while

28 percent hospitals do not carry out marketing research.

2. Word of mouth: Conscious marketer knows that mouth to

mouth publicity is the most important tool of promotion in

services marketing. A satisfied and happy customer is the

best ambassador of healthcare marketing as it is evident

from table 3.

Table 3: Word of mouth advertise more than any other type of media

Table 3 depicts that 60 percent administrator of specialty

hospital were strongly agree, 16 percent were agree and 24

percent were neither agree nor disagree that words of mouth

advertises more than any other type of media.

It is clear from the above table that majority of hospitals are

either strongly agree or agree believe that words of mouth

advertise more than any other type of media, a few were

neither agree nor disagree.

3. Provision of concession on medicines for promotion of

services: As promotional efforts some hospitals are

offering concession on the medicine dispensed by them as

shown in table 4.

Table 4: Provision of concession on themedicines dispensed by hospital

Table 4 exhibits that 68 percent hospitals do not provide

concession on the medicine dispensed by the hospital, while 32

percent hospitals have provision of concession on the medicine

dispensed by the hospital.

The table clearly shows that majority of hospitals do not

provide concession on the medicines dispensed by them. A

small number of hospitals provide concession on medicines for

to woo patients towards their services. They provide up to 10

percent discount on medicine dispensed by them.

4. Efforts to attract patients from abroad: Hospitals have

intensified their marketing efforts eying patients from

international healthcare market by providing world class

treatment. Hospitals are tying up with healthcare

institution overseas to widen the scope of marketing,

interest to cater more patients from abroad, and special

apartments for foreign patients etc. as shown in the table 5

and 6.

Table 5: Hospitals tie up with healthcare institution overseas

Table 5 shows that only 4 percent hospitals have tie up

with other hospital/healthcare institution overseas, 44 percent

do not have any tie up overseas, 52 percent hospital are under

consideration tie up healthcare institution overseas.

It is clear from the table that a small number of hospital

already have tie up with healthcare institution overseas while a

majority of hospital’s tie up with healthcare institution

overseas is under consideration.


Statements Frequency Percentage

Yes 25 100.0

No 0 0

Total 25 100

Source: Primary data.


Yes 18 72.0

No 7 28.0

Total 25 100


Strongly agree 15 60.0

Agree 4 16.0

Neither agree nor disagree

6 24.0

Disagreed 0 0

Strongly Disagreed 0 0

Total 25 100

Table 1: Provision to know the public opinionabout your hospital and services




Yes 8 32

No 17 68

Total 25 100



Yes 1 4

No 11 44

Under 13 52

consideration

Total 25 100


Table 6 shows that 92 percent hospitals do not have special

apartment for foreign patients, while only 8 percent hospitals

have special apartment for foreign patients.

It is clear from the above table that majority of specialty

hospitals do not have special apartment for foreign patients

while a few hospitals have special apartment for foreign

patients. However, to promote patients from overseas they

have special arrangement like deluxe suite, deluxe room, super

deluxe room etc.

5. Special arrangements for VIP, celebrities and affluent

class of society: To promote patients from affluent class of

society, VIP, and celebrities, there are special

arrangements like deluxe suite, deluxe room, super

deluxe room etc as shown in table 7.

Table 7 shows exhibits that all the specialty hospitals have

arrangement for VIP’s, celebrities and affluent class of society.

6. Tying up with hospitality services providers: In order to

facilitate patients coming from distant places in India and

abroad, hospitals are tying up with hospitality industry

like hotels and Airlines etc. as is shown in the table 8.

Table 8 depicts that 68 percent hospitals are tying up with

allied services provider like hospitality Inc. like hotel industry,

32 percent hospital were not tying up with allied service

providers.

21

7. Suggestion and complaints popularize the services: For

effective promotion and satisfaction of their patients,

hospitals entertain suggestion and complaints regarding

their services and try speedy removal of complaints as

shown in table 9.

Table 9 clearly shows that all the hospitals entertain

complaints and suggestions regarding services of hospital.

8. Availability of sufficient medical staff: Employment of

sufficient number of medical and other staff ensures the

smooth discharging of services. Table 10 and 11 shows

whether the medical staff is adequate and total number of

doctors and nursing staff on permanent and temporary

basis.

Table 10 clearly exhibits that all the specialty hospitals

have adequate medical staff.

Nursing staff on permanent and temporary basis

Hospital Administrators’ Perception towards Healthcare Services of Specialty Hospitals in North India

Table 6: Special apartment for foreign patients


Yes 2 8

No 23 92

Total 25 100


Table 7: Types of arrangement for VIPs, celebrities and affluent class of society


Yes 2 8

No 23 92

Total 25 100


Table 8: Tying up with services provider like hotel industry, Airlines etc


Yes 17 68

No 8 32

Total 25 100


Table 9: Whether suggestions and complaints regarding services of hospital are entertained


Yes 25 100

No 0 0

Total 25 100


Table 10: Whether Medical staff is adequate in the hospital


Yes 25 100

No 0 0

Total 25 100


Table 11: Number of doctors and nursing staff employed on permanent & temporary basis

Hospitals

On permanent basis

On temporary basis

Doctors Nursing

staff Doctors

Nursing staff

RMCH 160 400 - -

PGIMS 125 450 - -

IGMCH 110 280 - -

PGI 200 400 - -

AIIMS 500 1450 - -

JMC 200 500 - -

GDH 48 128 - -

Artemis 40 200 20 -


Table 11 shows AIIMS, has maximum number of

permanent doctors and nursing staff followed by Apollo, JMC,

PGI and PGIMS respectively.

9. Employment of visiting medical staff: Hospitals mostly

private and charitable also employ visiting medical staff

as shown in table 12.

Table 12 exhibits that 60 percent hospitals were employing

visiting medical staff, while 40 percent hospitals do not employ

visiting medical staff.

10. Reasons for employment of visiting medical staff:

Hospitals have some reasons behind employing the

visiting medical staff as shown in table 13.

Table 13 shows that 73.3 percent hospitals were employing

visiting medical staff because it is economical to retain them as

visiting medical staff, 20 percent hospital employ visiting

medical staff because most of them are specialist and are in

short supply, 6.7 percent hospital employ visiting medical staff

because they are from other countries.

It is clear from the table that majority of hospital employ

visiting medical staff because It is economical to retain them as

visiting medical staff and secondly most of them are specialist

and are in short supply.

11. Maintaining disease record: For better treatment

hospitals maintain and keep the record of the disease of

the patients. Some hospital keep the record of the disease

of the patient for short period of time and some hospital

keep the record of the disease for longer period of time as

shown by table 14 and 15.

Table 14 shows that 96 percent hospitals always keep the

record of the disease of their patients, 4 percent hospitals

seldom keep the record of the disease of their patients.

QRG 20 68 15 -

Max 20 90 10 -

Apollo 325 1329 43 -

Yashoda 42 250 15 -

Gracian 10 52 5 12

Kailash 42 90 37 -

Amandeep 15 40 5 -

Fortis 65 98 - -

Tagore 13 35 5 -

RGCIRC 47 230 20 -

Jaipur Golden

30 90 50 -

Mah.

Agarsen 60 300 48 -

Sir GangaRam

72 185 20 -

Batra 93 250 100 -

DMC 91 400 - -

CMC 80 390 - -

SGRRMC 35 125 27 30


Table 12: Employment of visitingmedical staff in the hospital


Yes 15 60

No 10 40

Total 25 100


Table 13: Reasons for employment of visiting medical staff in hospitals



It is economical to retain

them as visiting medical staff.

11 73.3

Hospital /Institution

cannot financially afford to employ them on permanent position.

0 0

Most of them are specialist and are in short supply

3 20.0

They are already employed in leading hospital/Institution and are not willing to join your hospital.

0 0

They are from other countries

1 6.7

Total 15 100.0

Table 14: Record keeping of the disease of the patient


Always 24 96.0

Seldom 1 4.0

Never 0 0

Total 25 100.0


Factors Categories Mean Scores

Std. Deviation

Test statistic

(t / F

value)

Sig.

Gender Male 3.55 1.317

t = -0.724 0.494 Female 4.00 1.225

Age

(in years)

20-40 5.00 .000

F = 5.766 0.010 40-60 3.71 .920

60 & above 4.80 .447

Types of

Hospital

Private 4.14 .949 F = 24.089

0.000 Government 2.00 .000

Charitable 4.75 .500

23Hospital Administrators’ Perception towards Healthcare Services of Specialty Hospitals in North India

Table 15 shows that 48 percent hospitals keep the record of

the disease of the patient up to one year. Another 48 percent

hospitals keep the record up to 5 years, and only 4 percent of

them keep the record up to 10 years.

12. Provision of separate fund for advertising and

marketing: In growing competition there is a need of

provision of separate fund for advertising and marketing

as shown in table 16.

are highly favourable that there is a provision of separate fund

for advertising and marketing where as administrator of

middle aged group (40-60) are not so supportive to the

statement. So ages have an impact on the statement.

The mean score of private and charitable hospital depicts

that they want to have provision of fund for advertising and

marketing while the government hospitals administrators are

quite averse to the statement, they are not in favour of

provision of separate fund for advertising and marketing. The

F-statistic for measuring impact of types of hospitals is 24.089

which is significant at 0.05 level of significance. Hence the null

hypothesis is rejected. It implies that there is significant

difference between the views of administrator of different

types of hospital. So it constitute that types of hospital have an

impact on the statement. The mean score of three types of

hospital again confirm the outcome of hypothesis.

13. Charges of services in hospitals: There is a variation in the

prices of different types of hospital, prices at government

specialty hospital is far less in comparison to charitable

and private hospitals. Higher fee can be charged for better

services by the hospitals as shown in table 17.

The table 16 highlights the result based on test statistic and

mean scores for the statement regarding ‘there is a provision of

separate fund for advertising and marketing’. The t-test value

for measuring gender effect is -.724 which is statistically not

significant at 0.05 level of confidence. So the null hypothesis is

accepted. The mean score of female shows that female is highly

supportive in views that there is a provision of separate fund

for advertising and marketing. Although male is also

supportive to the statement. Hence genders do not have impact

on the statement.

The F-ratio on age effect is 5.766 which is significant at 0.05

level of significance. Hence the null hypothesis is rejected. This

reveals that there is significant difference in the views of

administrator of different age group. The mean score of young

administrator (20-40) and old aged administrator shows they

Table 15: Duration to keep the record of the disease of the patients


Up to one year 12 48.0

1 to 5 years 12 48.0

5 to 10 years 1 4.0

Total 25 100.0


Table 16: Summary of test statistics for the statement ‘There is a provision of separate fund

for advertising and marketing’

Source: Primary dataSignificance at 5% level.

Table 17: Summary of test statistics for the statement ‘Higher fee can be charged for better

services by the hospitals

Factors Categories Mean Scores

Std. Deviation

Test statistic

(t / F value)

Sig.

Gender Male 3.65 1.461 t = -1.452 0.177

Female 4.40 .894

Age

(in years)

20-40 4.67 .577

F= 2.321 0.122 40-60 3.41 1.502

60 & above 4.60 .548

Types of Hospital

Private 4.60 .516

F= 6.455 0.006 Government 2.57 1.397

Charitable 3.88 1.458

Source: Primary data.Significance at 5% level.

The table 17 depicts the result based on test statistic and

mean scores for the statement regarding ‘Higher fee can be

charged for better services by hospital’. The t-test for

measuring gender effect is -1.452 which is statistically not

significant at 0.05 level of confidence. So the null hypothesis is

accepted. This implies that there is no significant difference

between male and female administrator on the statement.

The F-ratio for measuring age effect is 2.321 which is

statistically not significant at 0.05 level of significance. Hence

the null hypothesis is accepted. This reveals that there is no

significant difference in the views of different age groups of

administrator. The minor differences in the mean score also

confirm the hypothesis.


The mean score depicts private hospitals are more

favorable to the statement in comparison to charitable

hospitals that higher fees can be charged for better services.

However, the government hospitals are not supportive in

views. The F-statistic for measuring impact of types of hospital

is 6.455 which is statistically significant at 0.05 level of

significance. Hence the null hypothesis is rejected. It implies

that there is a significant difference in the views of

administrator of different types of hospital regarding the

statement. So types of hospital constitute an impact on the

statement.

CONCLUSION

It may be concluded from the study that all the specialty

hospital wants to know the public opinion about their services,

entertain complaints and suggestions regarding services of

hospital, always keep the record of the disease of their patients

and majority of them conduct marketing research to identify

the needs of the patients. Word of mouth is believed to be most

effective for promotion of healthcare services.

Majority of hospitals do not provide concession on the

medicines dispensed by them, a small number of hospitals

provide concession on medicines up to 10 percent. A small

number of hospital already have tie up with healthcare

institution overseas while a majority of hospital’s tie up with

healthcare institution overseas is under consideration.

Hospitals are tying up with allied services provider like

hospitality Inc. like hotel industry and allied service providers.

Majority of specialty hospitals do not have special

apartment for foreign patients while a few hospitals have

special apartment for foreign patients, however, they have

arrangement for VIP’s, celebrities and affluent class of society.

All the specialty hospitals have adequate medical staff,

however, majority of hospital employ visiting medical staff

because it is economical to retain them as visiting medical staff

and secondly most of them are specialist and are in short

supply.

Private and charitable hospitals want to have provision of

fund for advertising & marketing and believe that higher fees

can be charged for better services; however, the government

hospitals are not supportive in views.

REFERENCES

• Choudhury, J. R. (2004, February 17). IHCF to set up

accreditation system for healthcare units. Health News, Express

Pharma Pulse, 13.

• Jha, M. S. (2006, May 1). Gurgaon to become hospital hub. The

Economic Times, 4.

• Joseph, N. (2000, April). Healthcare- Indian and Global Trends,

the Challenge Ahead. Management and labour studies, 25(2),

122.

• McKinsey, C.I.I. (2004, April 18). It’s all about healthcare. The

Economic Times, 5.

• Mathiyazhagan, M.K. (2005, September 16). India’s next big

thing: healthcare. The Hindu Business Line, 8.

• Narasimham, V.L. (1981). Community health services through

hospitals. In Sahni, A. (1981). Role of hospitals in Health Care,

Publishers Indian Societies of Health Administrators, p. 63.

• Pande, B. & Dey, S. (2005, September 23). Five-star hospitality

for medical tourists. The Economic Times, 26.

• Parsad, P. B. (1992, September). Marketing of Health Services

in Maternity Care- A managerial approach, Doctoral Thesis,

Venkateshwara University, Tirupati, 1-5, 12, 13, 41, 42.

• Rao, V. M. (2005, October). Rural health facilities.

Kurukshetra, 53(12), 72.

• Seth, D. & Mathew, J. (2005, December 7). Healthcare chains

going global to keep in shape. The Economic Times, 7.

• Sharma, G. (2005). Service industry management. Chandigarh:

IIFT Research-consultancy & Publication division.

• Sinha, K. (2008, April 4). Medical tourism booming in India.

The Times of India, p.19.

• Yesudian, C.A.K. (1988). Health services Utilization in Urban

India. Delhi: Mittal publications, 1.

*Asstt. Professor (Sr.) and HOD, Department of Information Technology, Amity Business School, Amity University, UP, India.

**Student, Pursuing MBA, Amity Business School, Amity University, UP, India.

INTRODUCTION

Modern Information Technology has changed our lives

entirely, of which one important part is shopping. Emergence

of Internet, Mobile Phone Technology, Mobile Phone

Broadband and creation and largely reliable high speed

Network Support and continuous development in the

Information Technology infrastructure has largely fuelled the

growth of e-commerce transactions. Although such practices

have existed since long in the technologically advanced

developed countries, this concept has started developing roots

in developing countries like India and other countries.

Individuals and Governments in South East Asia & Pacific

region have also started experimenting with this concept, due

to its unique advantages.

Another major factor; other than the social & work

environment of Banking Infrastructure and Networking

Support, behind the acceptance of this model is the changing

cultural scene. Today people are spending more time in

travelling to office, working in night shifts; organizations are

working seven days a week. This has forced the people to look

for other alternatives of shopping because of paucity of time.

Another reason is the availability of worldwide

communication and publicity media like TV and Internet. Now

the people are able to find out about any new products

launched all across the world. Naturally the next step is

purchase of the desired product. e-commerce model comes

handy here. People can purchase the product from anywhere

in the world from home without going to that particular part of

the world where the product is available.

This model enables companies to deal directly with the

consumer and removing the middlemen, thus helping in

cutting costs. e-commerce model is the precise model the big

retailers wanted. It was immediately accepted by the industry.

Governments are promoting the e-commerce model due

to many reasons. Major reasons being:-

1. Cash Transactions are reduced which is good for the

economy. Malpractices are discouraged automatically.

2. Due to purchasing being done from home, environmental

Electronic commerce (e-Commerce) relates to the

purchasing and selling or products or services, with the help of

electronic interfaces meant for reaching the masses such as

Internet and other computer networks. Consistently revised

security protocols such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and anti-

spyware services ensure safe browsing and transactions over

the World Wide Web. The emergence of e-Commerce has

transformed business corporations around the world into

much more sophisticated and technology driven units. Modern

electronic commerce is supported by a wide range of

technologies including e-mail, mobile phones etc. e-

Commercehas existed for a long time as a model of commerce. It

is only recently that it has achieved such wide recognition due

to multiple factors like globalization ushered in by Information

Technology all across the world. E-commerce may not be

taking off as yet on the regional level. The sudden surge in

availability and acceptance of credit cards, IT assisted Banking

(Internet Banking, Telephone Banking etc.) made way for yet

newer innovations in the field of e-Commerce. By the end of

2000, most of the European and American business companies

started offering their services via the World Wide Web.

Although e-commerce is the model of the future, there are still

some problems being faced by the users of the model (sellers and

buyers both). This paper aims to point out distinct problems

relating to e-Commerce and its applications. For this purpose,

exploratory research was conducted by collecting data using

Structured Questionnaire. Separate Questionnaires were

presented to customers and owners of e-Commerce based

Websites. The size of the sample is 111 (customers) and 20

(owners). The sampling technique used is Non-probabilistic

Convenience sampling, with Delhi NCR as the sampling

frame.The results highlight a major perception gap between the

mindsets of customers and owners of e-commerce websites.

Also, it is observed that some of the encouraging factors for

using e-commerce websites are Gender specific. Based on the

findings, it is highly recommended that customers should

demand quality and be careful at the time of delivery of items or

products purchased online.

Keywords: E-Commerce, World Wide Web, SSL, Online

shopping, Transaction, Network, EDI, Downloading,

Problems

E-Commerce based Websites:Complications and Perception Gap Gaurav Chandhiok*

Baldev Kr. Asnanie**

*[email protected]

**[email protected]

pollution; road traffic density and fuel consumption is

considerably reduced.

3. Due to less time being spent on travelling, the GDP (Gross

domestic product) automatically increases.

The e-commerce model is being accepted by

individuals(buyers) due to the following reasons:-

1. Availability of vide variety at one place (Customer doesn’t

have to visit different markets for a variety of a product

e.g. shoes.). Also the customer gets an unlimited market

place and can shop anywhere in the world.

2. Time and money cost of travelling to outlet is nullified.

3. Work time / Open hours constraints are nullified. If the

free time of customers and open hours of the brick and

mortar store don’t match, the customer can’t do the

purchasing. There is no such problem in c-commerce.

4. Customer gets the product cheaper due to elimination of

middlemen.

The businesses are promoting ecommerce model because

of the following reasons:-

1. Lower cost of doing business than having brick and

mortar stores.

2. The business gets an unlimited market place. E-commerce

site attracts customers from all corners of the world unlike

the local customers in case of brick and mortar store.

3. As the middlemen are eliminated in this model, the

businesses are able to provide the product to customers at

much lesser prices.

The customers can take purchase decision right at home

with ease, while looking at variety of products at reasonable

prices that can be easily compared with other similar products

in the market, enabling them to arrive at a suitable decision. E-

Commerce offers the customer a wide range of products and

services, with an interactive feature for comparing the price

quoted by different suppliers or vendors to choose the deal best

suited to their needs and wants.

Most people believe that e-Commerce is just constrained

to online shopping, whereas it is just one of the many features

offered by e-Commerce. Other features include online trading

of stock and bonds, buying and downloading software,

electronic funds transfer, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI),

Inventory Management systems and so on. Moreover, e-

Commerce includes business-to-business interaction packages

that make purchasing in bulk easier and economical for big

corporations.

Despite the technological superiority and ease of access, e-

Commerce has been facing tough challenges and loopholes.

The problems related to e-Commerce observed through

analysis of secondary data during research are listed below:

• Undisclosed or Unsubstantiated charges.

• Failure to Honor warranty or guarantee by vendor.

• Misrepresentation of product information.

• Merchandise or service delivered not in conformity with

the purchase order.

• Non-availability of proper contact information of the

vendor.

• Unauthorized use of identity or Account information by

the vendor.

• Billing for unordered Merchandise or service.

• Failure to honor refund policy on the part of the vendor.

• Non-delivery of Merchandise or service.

• Defective/poor Quality of products purchased online.

The focus of this paper is to find out the problems faced by

the customers and the vendors using the e-commerce model.

This paper is divided into various informative sections.

The following section discusses various theoretical as well as

figurative contributions in the field of e-commerce from

various authors and researchers. The section after that is titled

research methodology, and describes the various research

design considerations of our study including demographic

profile of the customers being interviewed through

Questionnaires. Moreover, the next sections lists down various

data analysis tools employed with their respective

interpretations. The next section tries to bring the attention of

the reader to the conclusions drawn and recommendations

based on our research. Last but not the least, all the references

and citations being quoted in our study are listed down as

Bibliography. An Appendix section with the research

Questionnaires is provided in the end for reference.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW Web

browser and transformed an academic telecommunication

network into a worldwide everyman everyday

communication system called internet/www.Commercial

enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited by National

Science Foundation (NSF) until 1995(Kelly, 2005).

In 1979, Michael Aldrich invented online shopping(Tkacz

& Kapczynski, 2009). In 1984, Gateshead SIS/Tesco is first

Business-to-customer (B2C) online shopping and Mrs.

Snowball, 72, is the first online home shopper (Aldrich, 2009).

In April 1984, CompuServe launched the Electronic Mall in the

USA and Canada. It was the first comprehensive electronic

commerce service (Online Today, 1984). Thursday 27 April

1995, the purchase of a book by Paul Stanfield, Product

Manager for CompuServe UK, from W H Smith’s shop within

CompuServe’s UK Shopping Centre is the UK’s first national

online shopping service secure transaction. The shopping

service at launch featured WH Smith, Tesco, Virgin/Our Price,

Great Universal Stores/GUS, Interflora, Dixons Retail, Past

Times, PC World (retailer) and Innovations (IMRG Special

Report).In the year 2012, US e-Commerce and Online Retail

sales are projected to reach $226 billion, an increase of 12

percent over 2011 (Mulpuru, Sehgal, Evans, Hoar, & Roberge,

2012).

In the United States, some electronic commerce activities

are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These

activities include the use of commercial e-mails, online

advertising and consumer privacy. The CAN-SPAM Act of

2003 establishes national standards for direct marketing over e-

mail. The FTC Act regulates all forms of advertising, including

online advertising, and states that advertising must be truthful

and non-deceptive(Department of commerce, 1914).


9. Sampling size: 111 for customers and 20 for owners.

10. Sampling Technique: Non probabilistic Convenience

sampling.

11. Scales used: Likert Scale.

12. Pilot Survey: 10% of the population.

13. Data Analysis: Cross-tabulation.

14. Testing Techniques: Independent t-test and Correlation.

D E M O G R A P H I C P R O F I L E O F T H E RESPONDENTS (CUSTOMERS)

DATA ANALYSIS WITH INTERPRETATIONS

1) Reliability Check(Checking accuracy of data for all variable scales in Questionnaire designed for Customers)

This study adopted the value of Cronbach’s coefficient

alpha for identifying the reliability of the measurement and

scale items. Reliability can reflect the internal consistency of the

indicators measuring a given factor. The item reliability for

each scale was examined using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha to

confirm internal consistency of the measures. Nunnally (1978)

suggested that a scale can be considered to have high reliability

if Cronbach’s alpha is greater than 0.70 and should be removed

if it was lower than 0.35. High reliability value ensures that the

responses are suitable and authentic. Also, since the response

values of different respondents isn’t widely distributed (less

variance and standard deviation), the data analysis results are

also assumed to be more accurate and reliable.

Scale: ALL VARIABLES

Business models across the world also continue to change

drastically with the advent of e-Commerce and this change is

not just restricted to USA. Other countries are also contributing

to the growth of e-Commerce. For example, the United

Kingdom has the biggest e-Commerce market in the world

when measured by the amount spent per capita, even higher

than the USA. The internet economy in UK is likely to grow by

10% between 2010 and 2015. This has led to changing dynamics

for the advertising industry(Robinson, 2010).

Amongst emerging economies, China's e-Commerce

presence continues to expand. With 384 million internet users,

China's online shopping sales rose to $36.6 billion in 2009 and

one of the reasons behind the huge growth has been the

improved trust level for shoppers. The Chinese retailers have

been able to help consumers feel more comfortable shopping

online (Olsen, 2010). E-Commerce is also expanding across the

Middle East. Having recorded the world’s fastest growth in

internet usage between 2000 and 2009, the region is now home

to more than 60 million internet users. Retail, travel and

gaming are the region’s top e-Commerce segments, in spite of

difficulties such as the lack of region-wide legal frameworks

and logistical problems in cross-border transportation

(Thomas White International, 2012). E-Commerce has become

an important tool for businesses worldwide not only to sell to

customers but also to engage them(Eisingerich & Kretschmer,

2008).

Google, in 2007, earned 48% of its revenues from

international operations (Google, 2007), operating and

providing localized Information-related content in more 134

more developing countries than Yahoo. Using its authority

under Section 5 of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) Act,

which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, the FTC has

brought a number of cases to enforce the promises in corporate

privacy statements, including promises about the security of

consumers’ personal information(Department of commerce,

1914).


Research Objectives

1. To find out problems related to e-Commerce websites

from customers and owner point of view.

2. To determine the impact of these problems on success of e-

Commerce websites.

3. To find out possible solutions to existing drawbacks of the

e-commerce based selling models.

Research Design

1. Research Type: Exploratory.

2. Type of Data: Primary and Secondary.

3. Data Collection Tool: Structured Questionnaire.

4. Data collection Method: Survey Method (Personal

Interviews and through e-mails).

5. Analysis tools: SPSS 19.0 and MS Excel.

6. Type of Survey: Sample Survey.

7. Sampling frame: Vendors and customers using the e-

commerce model.

8. Sampling Area: Delhi NCR.

E-Commerce based Websites: Complications and Perception Gap 27

Graph 1: Combined Graph of Customer respondents demographics

Table set 1: Reliability Analysis

Case Processing Summary

N %

Cases Valid 111 100.0

Excludeda 0 .0

Total 111 100.0

a. Listwise deletion based on all variables in the procedure.

Convenience

Availability of large

variety at one place

24X7 access

Saving of time

Better Information Availability

Ease of comparision

among products

N Valid 20 20 20 20 20 20

Missing 0 0 0 0 0 0

Std. Deviation

.000 .489 .444 .308 .000 .503

Cronbach's Alpha N of Items

.697 51

The result of our research study showed high reliability of

the questionnaire. All the questions used in this survey have

been validated in previous studies. Results showed that every

construct of this research model had strong reliability with all

Cronbach’s alpha approximately equal to 0.70 (as shown in

Table set 1 above).

2) Analysis 1 (Perception Gap between Customers and Owners pertaining to encouraging factors for using e-commerce)


Reliability Statistics

Graph 2: Encouraging factors for using e-commerce (Owners)

Graph 3: Encouraging Factors for using e-commerce (Customers)

Table Set 2: Frequency Distribution of results of encouraging factors for using e-Commerce by customers (Owners opinions)

FREQUENCIES FOR OWNERS (Statistics)

Convenience

Availability of large verity at

one place 24x7

access saving of

time


Ease of Comparison

among products

N Valid 111 111 111 111 111 111

Missing 0 0 0 0 0 0

Frequency Percent Valid Percent

Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 8 40.0 40.0 40.0

No 12 60.0 60.0 100.0

Total 20 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid No 20 100.0 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 18 90.0 90.0 90.0

No 2 10.0 10.0 100.0

Total 20 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 5 25.0 25.0 25.0

No 15 75.0 75.0 100.0

Total 20 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 13 65.0 65.0 65.0

No 7 35.0 35.0 100.0

Total 20 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 20 100.0 100.0 100.0

29E-Commerce based Websites: Complications and Perception Gap

Convenience

Availability of large variety at one place

24X7 access

Saving of time


Ease of comparison among products

Table Set 3: Frequency Distribution of results of encouraging factors for using e-Commerce by customers (Customer’s Opinions)

FREQUENCIES FOR CUSTOMERS (Statistics)


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 90 81.1 81.1 81.1

No 21 18.9 18.9 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0

Convenience


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 57 51.4 51.4 51.4

No 54 48.6 48.6 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 42 37.8 37.8 37.8

No 69 62.2 62.2 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 81 73.0 73.0 73.0

No 30 27.0 27.0 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 75 67.6 67.6 67.6

No 36 32.4 32.4 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0


Cumulative Percent

Valid Yes 57 51.4 51.4 51.4

No 54 48.6 48.6 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0


Interpretation

The statistics displayed above indicates significant

difference between the perceptions of customers and owners

with respect to encouraging factors for using e-commerce by

customers. This could mean that the e-Commerce Website

owners and service providers are not able to communicate

properly with their customers. If the owners understand such

encouraging factors better, they will be able to understand the

needs and wants of the customers well in advance, so that

effective and desirable products & services are produced.

3) Analysis 2 (Frequency of usage of credit/ Debit cards by customers for online transactions)

Availability of large variety at one place

24x7 access

saving of time


Ease of Comparison among products

Graph 4: Debit/ credit card usage frequency by customers

N Valid 111

Missing 0

Statistics

Card Usage

Number of hits

Updation Time

Total Daily Weekly Fort night

<50 Category Communication Provider 0 1 1

Lifestyle 2 2 4

Grocery 0 1 1

Electronic goods 1 0 1

Total 3 4 7

50-100 Category Travel Convenience 1 1 2 4

Lifestyle 3 0 0 3

Grocery 2 0 0 2

Electronic goods 1 1 0 2

Total 7 2 2 11

>200 Category Online Banking 2 2

Total 2 2

Total Category Online Banking 2 0 0 2

Travel Convenience 1 1 2 4

Communication Provider 0 1 0 1

Lifestyle 5 2 0 7

Grocery 2 1 0 3

Electronic goods 2 1 0 3

Total 12 6 2 20

Cases

Valid Missing Total

N Percent N Percent N Percent

Category * Updation Time * Number of hits

20 100.0% 0 .0% 20 100.0%



Cumulative Percent

Valid Never 9 8.1 8.1 8.1

Daily 3 2.7 2.7 10.8

Weekly 39 35.1 35.1 45.9

Biweekly 15 13.5 13.5 59.5

Monthly 45 40.5 40.5 100.0

Total 111 100.0 100.0


Interpretation

The statistics displayed above indicates that almost 41 % of

the respondents prefer using their credit/ debit cards on a

monthly basis for carrying out transactions online, followed by

approximately 35 % for Weekly. The banks issuing credit/

debit cards to their customers can take a special note of this

result to promote their plastic cards, with special reference to e-

Commerce Websites in their Advertisements. The results also

suggest that online purchase models are still at a nascent and

developing stage. Thus, customers are required to be

encouraged to use online modes of shopping more over

traditional ways requiring their physical presence.

4) Analysis 3 (Cross Tabulation of Type of e-commerce Websites, Number of hits and updating time of websites from owner’s perspective)

Table Set 4: Frequency Distribution of Card Usage responses by customerCard Usage

Graph 5: Bar diagram showing Updating time in rows, Number of hits as category axis and category of websites in clusters

Table Set 5: Cross tabulation showing category of websites and Updating time with Number of hits in the layer variable

Category * Updating Time * Number of hits Cross tabulation Count

Education

Income level

Total <1L 1-5L 5-10L >10L

GRADUATE No physical Examination Yes 0 15 3 6 24

No 3 0 3 3 9

Total 3 15 6 9 33

POST GRADUATE No physical Examination Yes 6 21 15 6 48

No 6 9 15 0 30

Total 12 30 30 6 78

Total No physical Examination Yes 6 36 18 12 72

No 9 9 18 3 39

Total 15 45 36 15 111

Cases

Valid Missing Total

N Percent N Percent N Percent

No physical Examination * Income level * Education

111 100.0% 0 .0% 111 100.0%


Interpretation

The above Table Set 5 result indicates that e-commerce

website owners are more likely to receive high site visit hits if

they update websites on daily basis. For Example, almost 64 %

respondents reported to have observed high site visits due to

daily updating of websites.

5) Analysis 4 (Cross-tabulation between Income level, Education and Discouraging factors for not using e-Commerce Websites by Customers)

people about the reliability and authenticity of the purchased

products. Also, they need to be convinced about the

advantages that e-Commerce offers.

6) Analysis 6 (Study to determine co-relation between two variables of experience while shopping online by customers)

Graph 6: Multilevel graph showing Income level, Educational Qualification and Discouraging factors

for not using e-Commerce Websites


Table Set 6: Cross tabulation showing Income Level, Discouraging factors with Educational Qualification as Layer variable

No physical Examination * Income level * Education Cross tabulation Count

Interpretation

Results in Table Set 6 suggests that 15 respondents (almost

46%) who are Graduates and 21 respondents (almost 27%),

having income ranging from 1 to 5 lakhs per annum, are

discouraged by the fact that e-Commerce based websites do

not provide the facility of physical examination of the product

before purchase. Special efforts should be made to assure such

Bad

delivery service

Bad after sale service

Bad delivery service

Pearson Correlation

1 .444**

Sig. (2-tailed) .000

N 111 111

Bad after sale service

Pearson Correlation

.444** 1

Sig. (2-tailed) .000

N 111 111

Table Set 7: Correlation between Bad sale service and Bad after sale serviceCorrelations

**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).


Interpretation

The above analysis is performed to determine whether

bad after sales service is co-related with bad delivery service.

The result suggests that there is a moderate co-relation

between the two attributes. This implies that if a customer is a

victim of bad delivery service, then he is most likely to

experience bad after sales service & support too. It is highly

recommended that customers should be very demanding and

careful at the time of delivery of items or products purchased

online.

7) Analysis 7 (Testing of Hypothesis)

Ho| µo: There is no significant difference between the

mean values of Male and Female response fields with respect to

the choice of response for importance level of various

attributes, as mentioned in the questionnaire.

H1 | µ1: There is a significant difference between the mean

values of Male and Female response fields with respect to the

choice of response for importance level of various attributes, as

mentioned in the questionnaire.

Confidence Interval: 0 - 95%

Level of Significance (Tabulated): 5%

Eligibility for accepting µ1: p-value or significance

(Calculated) < 0.05

Table Set 9: Z-Test Statistics determining the authenticity of H1 (claim) for significant difference between means of both Genders with respect to the choice of importance level for various attributes

Group Statistics

Gender N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean

Website design MALE 66 1.91 .854 .105

FEMALE 45 2.33 1.087 .162

Website Updation MALE 66 1.77 .675 .083

FEMALE 45 1.87 .894 .133

Speed of up/downloading MALE 66 1.73 .814 .100

FEMALE 45 1.33 .603 .090

Access to information MALE 66 1.55 .587 .072

FEMALE 45 1.60 .889 .133

Security MALE 66 1.50 .846 .104

FEMALE 45 1.40 .889 .133

Price Transperancy MALE 66 1.64 .777 .096

FEMALE 45 1.67 .798 .119

Tracking of order status MALE 66 2.00 .804 .099

FEMALE 45 1.73 .780 .116

Delivery Service MALE 66 1.95 .831 .102

FEMALE 45 1.60 .720 .107


Interpretation

Data in Table Set 8 and Figure 1 indicates that there is a

significant difference in the mean values of some of the priority

choices made for various attributes, with respect to the gender

of the respondents. The attributes qualifying the Alternate

hypothesis criteria are: Website Design, Speed of Uploading/

downloading and Delivery service. The e-Commerce Website

owners and service providers should focus on providing

special Gender specific features for the above mentioned

attributes, to increase brand awareness and satisfaction of

customers, which would eventually result in increased sales

and site visits.

CONCLUSION

1. The result of our research study showed high reliability of

the responses collected. All the questions used in this

survey have been validated in previous studies. Results

showed that every construct of the research model had

strong reliability with all Cronbach’s alpha approximately

equal to 0.70 (as shown in Table set 1).

2. A huge perception gap was observed in the perceptions of

customers and owners. For Example: As per most owners

(8 respondents), customers are encouraged by Time

saving and Convenience features of e-Commerce

Websites. Whereas, as per customers (only 2 respondents)

agree gave similar responses.

3. Almost 41% of the respondents prefer using their credit/

debit cards on a monthly basis for carrying out

transactions online, followed by approximately 35%

weekly.

4. Table Set 5 result indicates that e-commerce website

owners are more likely to receive high site visit hits if they

update websites on daily basis. Almost 64% respondents

reported to have observed high site visits due to daily

updating of websites.

5. Results in Table Set 6 suggest that 15 respondents (almost

46%) who are Graduates and 21 respondents (almost 27%),

having income ranging from 1 to 5 lakhs per annum, are

discouraged by the fact that e-Commerce based websites

do not provide the facility of physical examination of the

product before purchase.

6. The co-relation analysis is performed to determine

whether bad after sales service is co-related with bad

delivery service. The result suggests that there is a

moderate co-relation, precisely .444, between the two

attributes. This implies that if a customer is a victim of bad

delivery service, then he is most likely to experience bad

after sales service & support too.

7. The Testing of Hypothesis result indicates that attributes

like Website design (p-value=.024), Speed of

downloading/uploading (p-value=.007) and Delivery

service (p-value=.022) are greatly influenced by Gender of

the customers.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. The owners of Websites should try to reduce the

perception gap about factors that encourage customers to

use e-Commerce based websites by utilizing and

enhancing existing communication channels. This in turn

will enable them to understand the needs and wants of the

customers well in advance, so that effective and desirable

products & services could be produced.

2. The results suggest that online purchase models are still at

a nascent and developing stage. Thus, customers are

required to be encouraged to use online modes of

shopping more over traditional ways that require their

physical presence.

3. The data analysis results indicate that e-commerce website

owners are more likely to receive high site visit hits if they

update websites on daily basis. Thus, website owners

should make consistent updating of their e-Commerce

models a general practice to ensure customer satisfaction

and brand patronage.

4. Special efforts should be made to assure people about the

reliability and authenticity of the products purchased

online. Also, they need to be convinced about the distinct

advantages that e-Commerce offers.

5. It is highly recommended that customers should demand

quality and be careful at the time of delivery of items or

products purchased online.

6. The e-Commerce Website owners and service providers

should focus on providing special Gender specific

features for the above mentioned attributes, to increase

brand awareness and satisfaction of customers, which

would eventually result in increased sales and site visits.

LIMITATION

1. As the budget for research was limited, the survey was

performed only in Delhi NCR region. Thus, the results

may not represent the actual scenario outside NCR.

2. Due to time constraint, only 111 responses from e-

commerce customers and 20 responses from owners of

websites could be collected which may not be the exact

replication of entire scenario.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Aldrich, M. (2009, March). "Finding Mrs Snowball". Retrieved

April 2012, from The Michael Aldrich Archive Website:

http://www.aldricharchive.com.

• Department of Commerce (1914) "Advertising and Marketing

on the Internet: Rules of the Road". Federal Trade Commission.

• Eisingerich, A. B., & Kretschmer, T. (2008, March). "In E-

Commerce, More is More". Harvard Business Review 86, 20-

21.

• Google. (2007) Google announces third quarter 2007 results.

I n v e s t o r r e l a t i o n s , p u b l i s h e d 1 8 O c t o b e r .

[WWWdocument].URL http://investor.google.com/releases/

2007Q3_google_earnings.html (accessed 13 May 2012).

• IMRG Special Report. (n.d.). "£100 bn spent online since

1995". Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).

• Kelly, K. (2005, August). Archive: Issue 13.08: "We Are the

Web". Retrieved April 2012, from WIRED Website:

http://www.wired.com

• Mulpuru, S., Sehgal, V., Evans, P. F., Hoar, A., & Roberge, D.

(2012). "US Online Retail Forecast, 2011 To 2016". Forrester

Research Inc.


• Olsen, R. (2010, January 18). "China's migration to

eCommerce". Forbes.com.

• Online Today. (1984, April). "The Electronic Mall".

CIS/CompuServe nostalgia.

• Robinson, J. (2010, October 28). "news". Guardian.co.uk.

• Tkacz, E., & Kapczynski, A. (2009). "Internet - Technical

Development and Applications". Springer.

• Thomas White International (2012, January 6)."Now a Digital

Mall Boom in the Middle East". Retreived in April, 2012 from

Website: http://www.thomaswhite.com.

(n.d.) Dept. of Commerce. "Enforcing Privacy Promises:

Section 5 of the FTC Act". Federal Trade Commission

*Assistant Professor, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida (U. P.) India.

INTRODUCTION

Of-late, performance appraisal systems (PMS) have

become laughing stock and subsequently termed as main

reasons for the significant dissatisfaction of employees. Some

examples of comments that often being heard about

performance appraisals are shared below:

• "Performance appraisals are a sheer wastage of time – who

cares for them anyway."

• "There is no relation between the job that I do and the

ratings that I get."

• "Pay hikes are inversely related to the rating of your

performance – your work may not speak, but your

relationships with appraisers surely do."

• "Good ratings are not for men – while women can get top

ratings without much effort."

• “Women often go unnoticed for their shoddy

performance, as the bosses have soft corners for female

fraternity”.

• "Whom can I speak to, that my boss is high on discretion."

Although performance appraisals are often complained

about, yet they provide vital stats to managers making

decisions on the following:

• Pay for performance

• Influencing performance of employees

• Hiring, allocating and firing employees

• Identifying “hi-po” (high potential) employees for their

career advancement

Managers are responsible for employees` performance

appraisal which is one of their prime duties while managing

human resources. Despite this, managers and employees both

have been found to be noticeably dissatisfied with the

performance appraisal systems as they have been badly affected

by many of their deficiencies. Taking cues from experience and

views of practicing managers and personal experience at work,

court rulings, this article provides a framework as an

important benchmark in the form of 6 T’s to make any

performance appraisal system effective and focused to its value

and relevance.

This article serves as an important insight for managing

and making performance appraisal effective in particular and

leveraging its overall management in general for the present

and future managers dealing with performance management.

Keywords: “Performance”, “Appraisal”, “PMS”

6 T’s of An Effective Performance Management System (PMS) Abdul Qadir*

*[email protected]

• HR planning for future organizational requirements.

In addition, an effective performance appraisal system can

leverage organizations’ competitiveness. For instance, through

an effective performance appraisal system, managers can get

the precise assessments of employees` yield and quality of

work. Such assessments can be used to motivate employees for

their further higher degrees of performance with the help of a

good feedback mechanism. Also, the nation’s growing trend at

the work place suggests that women, ethnic groups, minorities

and the physically otherwise-abled are becoming significant

parts of organizations` work force. This rising diversity in

employees’ ratio calls for even better and discrimination-free

performance appraisal systems, which concentrate on the jobs

and their clear and direct relation with the performance

benchmarks. Further, it’s very important for employers to

carefully workout the evaluation and reward system for good

performance of employees particularly when they are part of

groups and teams.

W H A T M A K E S A P E R F O R M A N C E APPRAISAL SYSTEM (PMS) EFFECTIVE?

Well, to answer this question, is probably a tough task,

however, many works in the past ranging from articles to

research papers and expert opinions have answered this query

from varied angles. Establishing a good performance

management system cannot occur in a day or two or by chance.

An exhaustive planning, a comprehensive design, its

functionality and integration with other subsystems of HR and

lastly its implementation; all these need to be addressed before

HR team and other parties to that system start using it.

Therefore, a PMS can be an effective one and the tool that has

the potential to do that, is 6 T’s of an effective Performance

Management System.

6 T ’ s O F A N E F F E C T I V E P E R F O R M A N C E MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (PMS)

The abbreviation 6 T stands for;

T - Time

T - Tools

T - Talents

T - Training

T - Temperament

T - Transparency

1. Time

First and the foremost in the priority of 6 T’s, is time.

Almost every organization, be it small, medium or large sized,

having a PMS, sets some or the other standard for meeting the

deadline for completing appraisals. Of late, its has been

observed that despite several notices, memos and deadline

mails, departments do not adhere to it or either are left scot-free

by the management in the wake of their business obligations.

Another irony is, the PMS has no set time for uniform appraisal

of all the departments, falling prey to flexibility. So, honor time

and deadlines, without fail.

The idea is, once the deadline is set, HR alongwith

Management will have to ensure that no matter, how busy or

burdened an individual/department might be, one has to

respond to the deadline of completing the appraisal of it’s

employees. Alongwith this, the stakeholders also need to

decide how frequent this appraisal would be as the part of

appraisal policy. Whatever is the cycle (Quarterly, By yearly,

Yearly), deadlines will not be compromised with.

2. Tools

Another key issue is, the instruments that are used in PMS,

set the success or failure premises. They are roughly more than

five to six different methods and tools that are used in PMS but

all not may be relevant to all or say one size does not fit all.

Organizations are made up of different tall and flat structures

and different set of employees with varied skills and expertise.

One has to use right kind of technique and method to suit the

requirement of the appraisal. Using irrelevant method or tool

in a PMS will not only defeat the purpose of PMS rather, it will

affect the performance and motivation among employees

adversely. Employees may not either improve or sustain

his/her performance rather; he/she intentionally becomes

indifferent about it.

6 T’s of An Effective Performance Management System (PMS) 37

5. Temperament

One of the key personality traits of any individual is his

temperament. Emotional Intelligence provided necessary

impetus to decode one’s own temperament and side by side

helps unveiling other’s mood and feelings. Appraisers should

always keep in mind that they are not appraising an individual

but appraising and individual’s work performance against a

pre-established benchmark. Any biasness arising out of an

appraiser’s own mood swing will adversely affect the rating of

the appraisee. On the contrary to this, the appraiser should also

keep in mind that appraisees are human being and they are

prone to err. Appraiser may give a negative rating to an

appraisee because on any fine occasion the employee may not

have done well on his/her job because he/she was down with

a bad patch. Although this perspective is a little challenging,

but surely if pursued cleverly, can do wonder in getting the

best from the subordinates.

3. Talents

Next in the queue is the talent. Talents may be seen here in

two folds; one is the appraiser and the other is appraisee. Who

is appraising whom is an important proposition wherein,

authorized and the competent managers or supervisors should

ensure that they are fully honest and upto the job of appraising

their subordinates. Often it is observed that the seniors are

either not competent or they don’t pay much attention to this

job of appraisal, which lead to many errors in appraisal.

Appraisal and feedback both should be honored and the

recipients should feel like they are taken care of by the

mechanism of PMS. Once it is ensured that appraisers are right

appraisees would automatically fall in the right corner,

eliminating all the felonies in PMS.

4. Training

No matter how good a system is, its success solely depends

on its users. Managers lacking in interpersonal skills and poor

communication can always undermine the potential of an

excellent PMS and worst could be the sole purpose of having a

system will be defeated. All stakeholders, be it managers,

supervisors, other functional users and obvious HR team, all

these people need training on how to commune and carry out a

lenient and reliable appraisals in a professional manner.

If the appraisers are well equipped with all the relevant

tools used in a modern PMS, the overall process of appraisal

would become smooth and focused. Organizations should

ensure that the proper training is organized for the appraisal

team so that the objective of any PMS is served for which it was

conceived.


6. Transparency

Last but not the least T in the sequence, infact one of the

most significant factors, is transparency in PMS. In an

organizational setup, we often overhear or come across

through different sources as “comments” from employees

down the line, that our PMS is not transparent. Often there is no

feedback mechanism used in an appraisal system trough

which appraisees could be explained where they have gone

wrong. Appraisees are flatly told that they are not up to the

mark and your performance is a cause of concern without

explicitly sharing the deviation from benchmarks. This

approach often has some truth of discrepancies in the system

which hampers the image of the appraisers in particular and

organization in general. Keeping the performance open to the

appraisee and showing him/her ways to align with the

expected performance will pave the path for a two way benefit;

the goodwill of the system and employees faith in it will

increase whereas, employees will tend to uplift and match

themselves with the company’s objective of ideal performance.

CONCLUSION

It is critical to get performance management right, because

HR issues are dragging down business performance and

impacting on businesses ability to grow. Effective performance

management has been proven to increase staff moral and

productivity.

If wee look at these above 6 T’s from an organization’s

point of view, we will surely be in the favour of implementing

this in our PMS. They are simple yet very effective for making a

PMS significant and successful. It is the responsibility of

managers and stakeholders to integrate these 6 T’s in the

system as soon as possible and work around these factors to

achieve the purpose of establishing a PMS in the organization.

REFERENCES

Books:• Cynthia D. Fisher, Lyle F. Schoenfeldt & James B. Shaw (2009),

Human Resource Management – 6th Edition, Biztantra, Delhi,

Pp 429-433.

• Snell, Bohlander, Vohra (2010) “Human Resource

Management: South Asian Perspective”, 7th Edition, Cengage

Learning, New Delhi, Pp 307-311, 349.

• Mirza S. Saiyadain (2010), Human Resource Management - 4th

Edition, Tata MacGraw Hill, New Delhi, Pp 257-258.

• Wayne F. Cascio and Herman Aguinis (2010), Applied

Psychology in Human Resources Management - 6th Edition,

Prentice Hall, Delhi, Pp 83-85.

Other Resources:• http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/workforce-

management/479508-1.html accessed on 27 Dec. 2012 IST

11.50 am.

• http:/ /www.sibson.com/publications-and-resources/

articles/WAW-effective-perf-mgt-drives-high-performing-

orgs.pdf accessed on 17 Dec. 2012 IST 09.30 am

• Personal Interview; Shabbir Ahmad, Manager HR - Hamdard

Wakf Labs, New Delhi.

• Personal Interview; Shweta Sharma, HR Head, BMA Wealth

Creator, New Delhi.

• Personal Interview; Jagdish Mutharia, Sr. Manager - IT, TERI,

New Delhi.

6 T’s of An Effective Performance Management System (PMS) 39

*Research scholar, Faculty of Management Studies, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, UP, India.

**Associate Professor, Faculty of Management Studies, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, UP, India.

INTRODUCTION

Stress is the complex phenomenon that alters both mental

and physical nature of the body - forces from the inside or

outside world affecting the individual. At every stage of life a

person experience different kind of stress of different level.

Suppose when we were Students then we faced stress such as

to clear our academic exam & to secure some position & even if

we are in job we experience a stress of different nature which

arises out of our job responsibility, job attribute, position &

differential role requirements in different situations. Stress

occurs because of various reasons &basically when any

challenge exceeds the coping abilities of the individual.

Hans Selye first introduced the concept of stress in to the

life science in 1936. He Defined stress as "The force, pressure, or

strain exerted upon a material object or Person who resist these

forces and attempt to maintain its original state."

Stress:

In the physical sciences stress is thought of as an external

pressure applied to an object...and if too much pressure is

applied the object breaks.

Stress is the mental, physical and emotional reactions one

experiences as a result of demands of life.

Stress is derived from Latin word “ stringi” which means

to be drawn tight.

In medical terms stress is described as, "a physical or

psychological stimulus that can produce mental tension or

physiological reactions that may lead to illness."

According to Richard S Lazarus, stress is a feeling

experienced when a person thinks that "the demands exceed

the personal and social resources the individual is able to

mobilize."

Stress arise when perceived demands exceed the

perceived ability to cope with these demands. Unrelenting

pressure at work, concerns over money and the economy,

Stress is anything which is undesirable for each & every

individual. Stress is related to both external and internal

factors. The impact of stress in the workplace on the employee's

physical health, mental well-being and effectiveness in the

workplace has been increasingly recognised in recent year.

Anyone who has worked in a helping profession such as

teaching will appreciate how stressful such professions can be.

Everyday interactions with students can trigger the

experience of stress in teachers. The reality is that the teacher is

normal but the work situation is often unpredictable and

sometimes even abnormal from a professional point of view.

This study is focussed on teachers engaged in higher education

i.e. engaged in teaching at university level or associated with

institutes which run engineering& management courses in

poorvanchal region basically around Varanasi district.

Keywords: Stress, Teacher’s stress, Occupational stress

Stress in Teachers Engaged inHigher Educational Institutes: A study Durga Wati Kushwaha*

Dr. R. K. Lodhwal**

*[email protected]

**[email protected]

overwhelming responsibilities at work and home...stress feels

like a fact of life.

The father of stress research, Hans Seyle, argued that stress

is not all bad. He said "it all depends on how you take it."

Thus any stress definition has to take into account that

stress is in the eye of the beholder.

Stress is one of the most common phenomena prevalent in

present society & generally unavoidable in modern life style.

With the advancement in the field Information technology

stress has crept everywhere, it has not been confined to the jobs

which involve high degree of technicalities & corporate. This

stress has also been observed amongst the professional & non-

professional in Education field. So this has Given birth to

concept of occupational stress for the teacher in higher

education.

Occupational stress:

Occupational stress as the term highlights is nothing but

stress which occurs because of work & other things which are

closely associated with it. It can also be termed as JOB Stress.

Job stress can be defined as the harmful physical and emotional

responses that occur when the requirements of the job do not

match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker. Job

stress can lead to poor health and even injury. The concept of

job stress is often confused with challenge, but these concepts

are not the same. Challenge energizes us psychologically and

physically, and it motivates us to learn new skills and master

our jobs. When a challenge is met, we feel relaxed and satisfied.

Thus, challenge is an important ingredient for healthy and

productive work. The importance of challenge in our work

lives is probably what people are referring to when they say "a

little bit of stress is good for you.

Causes of Occupational Stress:

• Meeting out the demands of the job.

• Relationship with colleagues.

• Controlling the staff working under supervision.

• Training the staff and taking work from them.

• Excessive work pressure.

• Meeting out the dead lines.

• Giving Results.

• Conducting & producing new researches (if you are in

research area).

• Working overtime and on holidays.

• New work hours.

• Delay in promotion or junior preferred for promotion first.

• Argument or heated conversations with co-workers or

boss.

• Change of job.

• Work against will.

• Harassment.

The above mentioned causes of work place stress are

outcome of various studies conducted in different sectors.

Teacher’s Stress:

While there are many different occupations in education

sector, teaching is identified as a particularly stressful job

(smith et al 2000). Stress among teacher is a contributor to

illness as well as a cause for leaving the profession (Cited in

Verdugo & vere). Teachers are not the only workers in

education sector, but are the most visible. One of the studies

ranked teachers highest among occupational groups in terms

of chronic stress. Various studies conducted over teaching staff

reveals that major sources of stress are pupil’s misbehavior,

teacher’s workload ,time & resource constraint /difficulties ,

interpersonal relationships & recognition etc.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Beehr & Newman (1978) defines occupational stress as “A

condition arising from the interaction of people & their jobs &

characterized by changes within people that forces them to

deviate from the normal functioning.”

Ganster & Loghan (2005) said that stress is an unwanted

reaction, people have severe pressures or other types of

demands placed upon them. A huge & multi fields literature

points a lot of key factors such as work environment

management support, workload etc in determining the

stressful the work can be & its effect on employee physical &

mental health.

Ivancevich & Matteson has defined stress as follows,

“stress is an adoptive response mediated by individual

characteristics &/or psychological process, that is a

consequences of any external action, situation, or event that

places special physical &/or psychological demand upon a

person.”

Brook (1973) reported that qualitative changes in the job

create adjustmental problems among employees. The

interpersonal relationship within the department & between

the departments creates qualitative difficulties within the

organization to a great extent.

Brief & Aldag (1976); said that there is evidence that role

incumbents with high levels of role ambiguity also responds to

their situation with anxiety, depression, physical symptoms, a

sense of futility or lower esteem, lower levels of job

involvement & organizational commitment, & perceptions of

lower performance on the part of organization, of supervisors,

& of themselves.

Anderson (2002) work to family conflicts is also a

predecessor which creates stress in employees of an

organization.

Kahn et al (1964) & Selye (1956) viewed stress as an

environmental stimulus to an individual & defined stress as an

individual’s reaction to an environmental force that effect an

individual performance.

D’Arcy (2007) emphasizes that everyone experiences

stress a little differently, it can be a good thing, but overload of

Stress in Teachers Engaged in Higher Educational Institutes: A study 41

Bhagawan (1997) studied on job stress among 53 male and

47 female teachers from 20 schools in Orissa. It was found from

the results that male teachers experienced more Stress

compared to female teachers.

Virk et al. (2001) conducted a study on occupational stress

and work motivation in relation to age, job level and type-

behaviour. He reported that age and job level can have strong

influence on job stress.

De Nobile & McCormick, (2007); Jepson & Forrest, (2006); Kyriacou, (2001); Muchinsky, 2000; Spector, (2000)

Occupational stress has been linked to decreased job

satisfaction and job commitment, absenteeism (some of it

probably due to illness), turnover and reduced performance .

Sultana (1995) in her study investigated the level of

organizational role stress among male and female teachers of

professional and non-professional courses.

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE

The purpose of study was to examine the level of stress

among the teachers engaged in higher education institutes

located in areas near by Varanasi district & in Varanasi .In

order to understand about this following research objectives

were formulated.

1. To describe the demographic characteristics of selected

teachers of Institutes.

2. To determine the level of stress among teachers.

3. To establish relationships between level of stress and

demographic characteristics of teachers


Instrument and Measurement

This is an exploratory study based on primary data; the

data have been collected through survey. The survey

instrument used was standard questionnaire developed by

Udai Pareek (Occupational Role Stress, ORS) to assess the

stress level of teachers. This questionnaire was constructed on

the scale ranging from Zero (0) rarely feel this way to Four (4)

frequently feel this way. Personal demographic information

was also collected in this survey.

Population and Sampling

This questionnaire was distributed amongst the teachers

who came to attend one of the programm organised in the

department. Thus sampling or the selection of respondents

was based on the convenience of the researcher. The

questionnaire was distributed randomly to the teachers thus

simple random technique was used. Total in all 80

questionnaires were distributed of which 72 were fit for study.

Analysis & Interpretations

it is a different story. He explains that stress overload is caused

by the overreaction or failure of the stress response to turn off

and reset itself properly

Kyriacou and Sutcliffe (1978a), presented a model of

teacher stress which conceptualized teacher stress as “a

response syndrome mediated by an appraisal of threat to the

teacher's self-esteem or well-being and by coping mechanisms

activated to reduce the perceived threat”.

Many studies have researched occupational stress among

university faculty (and staff) in several parts of the world,

including Australia, India, the United Kingdom and the

United States. These researches indicates that university

faculty members around the globe experience various kinds of

occupational stress (e.g., role ambiguity, role overload,

unreasonable group pressure, powerlessness, and peer

relationship issues), and that these stressors have significant

negative impacts on diverse aspects of their lives-most notably,

their physical and psychological well-being.

According to Faridah Karim dan Zubaidah Aman (1998),

teaching is attributed as an occupation that always disclosed to

high stress level. Gold dan Roth (1993) indicated that change is

one of the sources of stress among teachers.

Ahsan, Abdullah, Fie and Alam (2009) identified stress

inducing factors in academic staff to include: work overload,

home work interface, role ambiguity and performance

pressure. In support of stress on academic staff, Abouserie

(1996) found workload and conducting research as factors of

stress. Listing the most related stressors on academic staff,

Ahmandy, Changiz, Masiello and Bromnels (2007), included

workload, conflict, demands from colleagues and supervisors,

incompatible demands from different personal and

organization roles, inadequate resources for appropriate

performance, insufficient competency to the demands of their

role, inadequate autonomy to make decision on different tasks

and feeling of underutilization.

Selye, (1956), stress can affect either positively or

negatively to employee performance.

Positive qualities are those in which the individual may

feel more excited and agitated and Perceive the situation

positively as a form of challenge

Tharakan (1992) studied on occupational stress and job

satisfaction among working women. He observed that

professional women experienced greater work related stress

than non- professional women. The expectation of technocrats

was much higher than the non technocrats.

Ushashree et al. (1995) on their study considered 80 male

and 80 female high School teachers in the age group of 25-40

year (adult) and 41-60 years (middle) age to know The effect of

gender on teacher’s experience of job stress and job satisfaction.

Analysis of Data indicated significant effect of gender on job

stress.


The graphic presentation of the age distribution of the

sample is presented in Figure 1. The majority of the

respondents (n = 20 or 27.8 %) fall in the age category 25- 30 &

36-40 years. This is followed by 16 (22.2 %) of the respondents

in the age category 41-45 years. The age category 31-35 years

constitutes 11.1% (n = 8) of the sample. Least number of

teachers fall in the age group of 45-50 & 51-55 years ( n= 4 or

5.6% ) From the ensuing results it can therefore be concluded

that the majority of the teachers who are participating in the

study are belonging to age groups i.e. 25-30 & 36-40 years.

The graphic representation of gender wise distribution of

teachers is depicted in figure 2. It is clear from the chart that

major section of the respondents were male contributing up to

67% (n = 48) for the purpose of study Remaining 33% of

respondents were Female teachers working in different

institute at different level.

Descriptive of the demographic profile of teachers selected for study:

Demographic variables

Group N Percentage (%)

Age <= 30 20 27.8

31 - 35 8 11.1

36 - 40 20 27.8

41 - 45 16 22.2

46 - 50 4 5.6

51 - 55 4 5.6

Gender Male 48 66.7

Female 24 33.3

Education

Post Graduate 8 11.1

Phd 44 61.1

PG + Net 16 22.2

phd+net 4 5.6

Marital status unmarried 16 22.2

married 56 77.8

Organisational Ranking

Assistant Professor

48 66.7

Associate Professor

24 33.3

Total Experience

<= 5 20 27.8

6 - 10 20 27.8

11 - 15 8 11.1

16 - 20 8 11.1

21 - 25 12 16.7

26 - 30 4 5.6

Total experience in Present Job

<= 5.0 48 66.7

5.1 - 10.0 16 22.2

10.1 - 15.0 4 5.6

20.1 - 25.0 4 5.6

Figure 1: Age distribution of Teachers

05

10152025

<= 30 31 - 35 36 - 40 41 - 45 46 - 50 51 - 55

Nu

mb

er o

f re

spo

nd

ents

Age group of respondents

Age distribution of teachers in sample

67%

33%

Gender wise distribution of teachers

Male

Female

Figure 2: Gender wise distribution of teachers

11%

61%

22%

6%

Educational qualification of teachers

Post Graduate

Phd

PG+Net

phd+net

22%

78%

Marital status of teachers

unmarried

married

Figure 3: Education wise distribution

The graph depicted above clearly indicates the

distribution of teachers on the basis of their educational

qualification. It is quite clear from figure 3 the respondents of

the study were highly qualified having the Doctoral degree.

About 61% (n=44) of the total respondents were having Ph.D

degree followed by those who were having their post graduate

qualification along with NET ( National eligibility Test which

issues certificate of eligibility as lecturers). They contributed

about 22% (n= 16) of the sample. The remaining portion was

occupied by those respondents who were either post graduate

(n= 8, 11%) or were Doctorate with NET (n = 4, 6%)

Figure 4: Distribution based on marital status

The above graph shows the marital status of respondent’s

.It is quite apparent from the graph that the majority of the

respondents under study were married. About 78% i.e. 56 out

of the 72 respondents were married & only 22% of them were


<= 30 31 - 35 36 - 40 41 - 45 46 - 50 51 - 55 Total

Mean 79 51 67.2 56.75 95 59 67.44

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Mea

n v

alu

e o

f st

ress

variation of stress with age

Independent Variable N Total stress

Significance Level

Age 72 -.024 .843

Sex 72 .172 .148

Marital status 72 .044 .176

Total experience 72 -.310** .008

Experience in organisation

72 -.568* .000

Education Organisational ranking

72 72

.163 -.385**

.172

.001

**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

67%

33%

Organisational ranking of teachers

Assistant Professor

Associate Professor

The graph present above depicts the person’s experience

in current organisation/present job. Most of the respondents

are new to the organisation i.e. having an experience of less

than 5 years & number of such respondents is about 67%

(n= 48) followed by experience of 6-10 years which about 22%

(n=16). However the persons with experience of 10-15 years &

20-25 contribute towards the remaining portion i.e. 11% (5% &

6% respectively). One of the major outcome as apparent here is

that there are no persons which belong to the experience group

of 15-20 years.

Overall level of stress level among teachers:

The mean of overall stress level among teachers is 67.44

which reveal that the stress among the respondents is more

than the least median score of standard questionnaire but it fall

in the medium score. This leads to a conclusion that teachers

are moderately stressed which is in accordance with the review

of literature that teaching job is comparatively less stressful.

unmarried. This shows that majority of the respondents have

to fulfil many of the roles at times.

Figure 5: Distribution Based on organisational position

From figure 5 it is very clear that respondents under study

were belonging to mainly two groups i.e. assistant professor &

associate professor although in education system of higher

education there is a three tier system i.e. chain of command

flows from professor to associate professor to assistant

professor. The majority of the respondents were belonging to

the cadre of assistant professor contributing to about 67%

(n=48) of respondents while 33% (n=24) were belonging to

associate professor level.

28%

28%11%

11%

17%

5%

Total experience wise Distribution of teachers

<=5

6.0 - 10.0

11.0 -15.0

16.0-20.0

21.0- 25.0

26.0-30.0

67%

22%

5% 6%

Experience in current organisation

<= 5.0

5.1 - 10.0

10.1 - 15.0

20.1 - 25.0

Figure 6: Total experience in career

The figure above clearly shows that most of the

respondents under study were belonging two major

experience groups i.e. in category of less than 5 years & in

group of 6 to 10 years of experience contributing about 28%

each followed by the experience of 21-25 years contributing

about 17%. However persons in experience group of 11-15

years & 16-20 years contribute about 11% each towards the

respondents. Only few of the respondents (n= 4, 5%) were

representing the experience group of 26-30 years.

Figure 7: Experience in current organisation /Present job

Table 1: One-Sample Statistics

N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean

Total

stress 72 67.44 20.883 2.461

Correlation Between various Demographic variables with the level of stress:

Table 2: Correlation Between various Demographic variables with the level of stress

Age & total level of stress:

Figure 8: Variation of Stress with age


<= 5.0 6.0-10.0 10.0-15.0 16.0 - 20.0 21.0 - 25.0 26.0 - 30.0

Mean 79 68.8 47 72 59.33 59

0

20

40

60

80

100

stre

ss l

evel

variation of stress with Total experience

Post Graduate Phd PG + Net phd+net

Mean stress level 70 61.73 84.25 58

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

stre

ss l

evel

variation of stress with education

Male Female

Mean 64.92 72.5

60

62

64

66

68

70

72

74

Str

ess

lev

el

Variation of stress with gender

The correlation statistics reveal that there is a negative

correlation between the two factors viz. age & stress & also the

relationship between the two is insignificant. Moreover the

further analysis of this when done to find out the variation of

stress with age it was found that the persons in the age group of

46-50 are highly stressed (mean stress level = 95) followed by

the persons in age group of less than 30 ( mean stress level = 79).

The persons who are in the age group 36- 40 are having a stress

level as near about 67.20

Stress & Gender:

satisfied if one is in the teaching profession. Moreover the

correlation studies reveal that there is a positive & insignificant

relation between the two factors viz. stress & education level.

Stress & organisational position:

Figure 11: Variation of Stress with organisational Position

It is apparently visible from the above graph that the

persons / respondents who are at assistant professor level are

more stressed as compared to those at associate level. This

variation in the stress level is also justified from the values of

correlation coefficient where it appears to be highly significant

relationship with negative orientation this implies that the

stress level of the person decreases with raise in hierarchical

position in turn supplemented by the increase in experience in

coping up with difficult situations.

Stress & Total experience:

Graphs below shows a variation in stress level with total

experience (here total experience refers to the number of years

for which one has been serving any organisation). The image

which is reflected seems to be like initially the stress level

appears to decrease with increase in experience of the person

.But after certain point the stress level appears to increase this

could be due to change in nature of the job responsibility &

duties. Moreover the correlation statics prove that there is a

significant but negative relationship between the two factors

which implies that with increase in experience the stress level

will decrease.

Figure 9: Variation of Stress with Gender

The above graph depicts that the stress level experienced

by the female is more than that of the males. The mean stress

level among females is approx.72.5 (= 73) & that among males it

is approx.64.92 (= 65). However the correlation statistics

indicate that the overall level of stress is positively but

insignificantly associated with the gender of the respondents.

There are various reasons which can explain this variation in

stress among both genders the most important one which can

explain it-is the dual role of women where they have to fulfil

the responsibility towards organisation as well as their family

with different active role.

Stress & Education

Figure 10: Variation of stress with Education

In survey basically there were four kinds of respondents in

terms of their educational qualification of which the highly

stressed category was that of the persons / teachers who were

Post graduate as well as NET qualified & the level of stress was

84.25 ( approx. 84) .On the contrary the people who were PhD

as well as NET qualified were least stressed. The most probable

reason for such a variation in stress level can be explained in

terms of the minimum eligibility criterion which is to be

Figure 12: Variation of Stress with Total experience

Assistant Professor Associate Professor

Mean 73.08 56.17

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Str

ess

lev

el

Variation of stress with organisational position


• Brook, A. (1973). Mental Stress at Work. The Practitioner, Vol

210, pp. 500-506.

• Brief, A.P. and Aldag, R.J. (1976). ‘Correlates of role indices’,

Journal of Applied Psychology, 61, 486-472.

• De Nobile, J.J. and McCormick, J. (2007). Job Satisfaction and

Occupational Stress in Catholic Primary Schools: Implications

for School Leadership. Leading & Managing, 13 (1), 31-48.

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May10, 2010.

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di Kalangan Guru Terhadap Sistem Pendidikan. Prosiding

Seminar Isu-isu Pendidikan Negara. November 26–27.

Malaysia: University Kebangsaan Malaysia, 317-333.

• Gold, Y. dan Roth, R. A. (1993). Teachers Managing Stress and

Preventing Burnout - The Professional Health Solution.

London: The Falmer Press.

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Managerial Perspective, Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and

Company.

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Factors in Teacher Stress: The Role of Achievement Striving and

Occupational Commitment. British Journal of Educational

Psychology, 76, 183-197.

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Rosenthal, R. A. (1964). Organizational stress: Studies in role

conflict and ambiguity. New York: Wiley.

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Research. Educational Review, 53 (1), 27-35.

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Educational Studies, vol 4, pp 1-6.

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control intervention to alleviate job-related stress. Journal of

Management 2005;31(1):90-107.

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Ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth.

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R., The scale of occupational stress. A further analysis of the

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2000.

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New York.

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Psychology: Research and Practice (2nd ed.). New York: John

Wiley & Sons.

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stress of professional & non professional teachers of higher

educational institutions, Unpublished M.A. Dissertation,

Department of psychology, Lucknow University, Lucknow.

• Tharakan, P., 1992, Occupational stress and job satisfaction

among working women. J. Indian Aca. App. Psy., 18(1&2): 37-

40.

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gender role and age effects on teacher’s job stress and job

satisfaction. Psy. Stu., 40(2): 72-76.

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Workplace violence in service sectors with implications for the

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http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/sector/papers/educ

ation/w p 208.pdf.

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behaviour. J. Indian Aca. App. Psy., 27(1&2): 51-55.

Stress & organisational Experience:

Figure 13: Variation of stress with experience in organisation

The graph above represents the variation of stress level

with experience in organisation (here experience in

organisation refers to the number of years for which the person

has been in current organisation). There is a decrease in the

level of stress with increase in experience & it is also seen by the

correlation study that there is a significant but negative

relationship between the two.

FINDINGS & CONCLUSION

1. The data analysis reveals that the stress experienced by the

teachers is moderate as stress experienced among the

respondents is more than the least median score of

standard questionnaire but it fall in the medium score.

2. The correlation studies among the stress experienced by

the respondents & the demographic variables clearly

reflects insignificant relation between the factors such as

age, sex, marital status, education.

3. However the stress experienced has a significant but

negative correlation with the variables such as

organisational ranking, total experience & experience in

organisation.

REFERENCES

• Anderson, S. E., Coffey, B. S., & Byerly, R. T. (2002). Formal

organisational initiatives and informal workplace practices:

Links to work-family conflict and job-related outcomes. Journal

of Management, 28(6), 787-810.

• Ahsan, N., Abdullah, Z. Fie, D.Y.G., & Alam, S.S. (2009). A

study of job stress on job satisfaction among university staff in

Malaysia: Empirical Study. European Journal of Social Science,

8 (1), 121-131.

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satisfaction in university academic staff. Educational

psychology, 16 (1), 49-56.

• Ahmdy, S., Changiz, T., Masiello, I., & Brommels M. (2007).

Organizational role stress among medical school faculty in Iran:

Dealing with role conflict. (www.biomedcentral.com/1472-

6920/7/14). Retrieved May 3, 2010.

• Bhagawan, S., 1997, Job stress and burn out in teachers of

secondary school in Orissa. J. Ednal. Res. Extn., 33(4): 218-234

• Beehr TA, Newman JE (1978). Job Stress, employ Health and

Organisational Effectiveness- A fact analysis model and

literature reviews. Personal Psychol., 31: 665-669.

<= 5.0 5.1 - 10.0 10.1 - 15.0 20.1 - 25.0

Mean 72.58 66.5 57 20

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

stre

ss le

vel

Variation of stress with experience in organisation


*Professor & Principal, Al-Qurmoshi Insittute of Business Management, Hyderabad, India.

INTRODUCTION

Employee engagement is a complex concept, with many

issues influencing engagement levels consequently, there are

many pathways to foster engagement, with, and with no one

‘Kit’ that fits all organizations. While each company may

define employee engagement differently, ultimately, the key to

effective engagement will be rooted in the flexibility of

approach most appropriate for each individual firm. For

example, the company may consider a best practice and then

determine the likely outcome of this practice in its workplace.

This Research Quarterly is written to provide HR professionals

and other business leaders with the knowledge and

understanding of the many concepts and aspects of employee

engagement as well as offers recommendations to foster

engagement.


Most often employee engagement has been defined as

emotional and intellectual commitment to the organization

(Baumruk 2004, Richman 2006 and Shaw 2005) or the amount

of discretionary effort exhibited by employees in their job.

Beardwell and Claydon (2007). It was found that, after the

workers were given the training and freedom to make repairs

to their own equipment rather than having to call a supervisor

every time they experienced a problem, they reported fewer

occupational injuries. This would suggest that workers who

feel they have control over their destiny at work, a key aspect of

employee engagement, are more likely to stay focused and less

likely to make preventable mistakes.

The related construct to engagement in organizational

behavior is the notion of flow advanced by Csikszentmihalyi

(1975, 1990). Csikzentmihalyi (1975) defines flow as the

‘holistic sensation’ that, people feel when they act with total

involvement. Flow is the state in which there is little distinction

between the self and environment. When individuals are in

Flow State little conscious control is necessary for their actions.

Today global competition slow growth economies are

focusing towards customer focused organizations as the

Organization structures comprising the formal structure and

the coordinating mechanisms are continually seeking

equilibrium Employee engagement has an emerged as critical

drivers of business success in today’s competitive marketplace.

The extent to which employees commit to something or

someone in their organization, how hard they work and how

long they stay as a result of that commitment.” This paper

investigated employee engagement and has incorporated

statistical tools such as frequency analysis, chi-square test and

the results of the same have been expressed and it was found

that Career Related, Compensation Related, Organizational

Climate and Morale are the four major factors have been

influencing on employee engagement.

Keywords: employee, organization, engagement,

involvement, tenure, designation experience

Employee Engagement- Building PositiveEmployment Relations atM/s. Heritage Foods, Hyderabad Prof. Dr. Y. Vinodhini*

*[email protected]

Frank (2004) Although it is acknowledged and accepted

that employee engagement is a multi-faceted construct, as

previously suggested by Kahn (1990).

Fox (1974) argued that despite an elaborate external

controlling structure being in place, no role can be totally

diffuse or totally specific; even in jobs which are tightly

controlled, some outstanding element of discretion always

remains. In cases where employees have been given some

control over how they do their jobs, positive benefits have

appeared to emerge. For example, previous research in the UK

has looked at job redesign and the impact this has had on

engagement. In 1990 research was carried out by the University

of Sheffield on factory workers and the number of injuries they

reported given the differing levels of control over their work

Goddard (1999) describes engagement with the

organization and the task to be associated with time use.

Difference in skills, abilities and disposition variables are also

expected to impact the levels of employee engagement. Gender

difference have been found to impact employee engagement

.personal values, culture and climate of organizations also

influence employee engagement. climate includes aspects such

as systems and satisfaction with organization while culture

includes accepts such as community. There also exists a strong

correlation between complex feeling and emotions. The focus

should be on personality, cognition and environment forces

that determine an individual behavior in organizations.

The Gallup organization (2008) deduced conclusively

from their annual employee engagement survey that engaged

employees are the only employees an organization needs

because of their far higher levels of commitment and

performance.

Halbesleben (2003) examined a number of issues as to the

measurement and process of burnout and engagement.

Halbesleben investigated the role of perceptions of politics as

an antecedent of burnout, as well as assessing the role of

motivation as a mediator in the relationship between burnout

and job performance.

Engagement at work was conceptualized by Kahn, (1990)

as the ‘harnessing of organizational members’ selves to their

work roles. In engagement, people employ and express

themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during

role performances.

Khan (1990) first mentioned the concept of employee

engagement. It was observed that engagement is a

multidimensional construct, in that employees could be

emotionally, cognitively or physically engaged.

Khan (1990) pp692-724 characterized engagement as

consisting of physical cognitive and emotional components

(when linking the engagement of students to the classroom

environment and the success of implementing engagement

strategies into facilitation learning success this having a clear

synergy with organizations).


According to Lawler and Worley (2006) for a high-

involvement work practice to be effective and for it to have a

positive impact on employee engagement, employees must be

given power They argue this will lead to employees having the

ability to make decisions that are important to their

performance and to the quality of their working lives, thus

engaging them in their work. Furthermore, Lawler and Worley

(2006) contend that power can mean a relatively low level of

influence, as in providing input into decisions made by others

or it can mean having final authority and accountability for

decisions and their outcomes. Involvement is maximized when

the highest possible level of power is pushed down to the

employees that have to carry out the decision, resulting in

gaining the maximum level of engagement possible from

employee.

McCashland (1999) defined EE as ‘commitment or

engagement - an emotional outcome to the employee resulting

from the critical components of the workplace.

Miles (2001) described it as intensively involving all

employees in high-engagement cascades that create

understanding, dialogue, feedback and accountability,

empower people to creatively align their subunits, teams and

individual jobs with the major transformation of the whole

enterprise (Miles, 2001).

Purcell 2006 and Truss et al 2006.

Moreover, engaged employees have been found to

outperform their disengaged counterparts. However, recent

research in the UK and other countries shows that there are

more disengaged employees than there are engaged

employees in today’s organizations. Employee engagement

can and has been found to make a difference. However there is

great disagreement surrounding how to define engagement,

how it should be operationalised and whether or not it is

actually a valid construct at all. Furthermore, it is evident that

sound, academic research lags somewhat behind practice

given that the literature is under developed, and the concept of

engagement is still in its infancy.

Robinson (2004). In the recent years, there has been a great

deal of interest in employee engagement and it has become a

widely used and popular term many have claimed that

employee engagement predicted employees outcomes,

organizational success, and financial performance (e.g. total

share holders return).

Saks (2006) argues that one way for individuals to repay

their organization is through their level of engagement. In

other words, employees will choose to engage themselves to

varying degrees and in response to the resources they receive

from their organization. Bringing oneself more fully into one’s

work roles and devoting greater amounts of cognitive,

emotional, and physical resources is a very profound way for

individuals to respond to an organization’s actions, as

suggested earlier by the work of Kahn (1990). Thus, employees

are more likely to exchange their engagement for resources and

benefits provided by their Organization.

Kahn (1990), and captures the common theme running through

all these definitions.

DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

Truss et al (2006) define employee engagement simply as

‘passion for work’, a psychological state which is seen to

encompass the three dimensions of engagement discussed by

Employee Engagement- Building Positive Employment Relations at M/s. Heritage Foods, Hyderabad 49

Table 1: EXPERIENCE * Involvement of employee in decision making Cross tabulation

Experience

Cross tabulation between experience & Involvement of employee in decision making

Most Frequently Frequently Sometimes Rarely Never Total

Before 6 months

0 12 4 5 0 21

6 months – 4 years

4 34 18 4 3 63

4 – 8 years 0 11 1 0 0 12

8- 12 years 0 0 0 0 0 0

12 years and above

0 4 0 0 0 4

Total 4 61 23 9 3 100

a. 0 cell (.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The

minimum cell frequencies is 25.0

b. 0 cell (.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The

minimum cell frequencies is 20.0

INTERPRETATION

The above table shows the Calculation value of the

Experience and involvement in decision making and chi-

square results has Calculation value 0.14 value is Acceptance

hence both are independent. Form the table value is 3.84.

CHI-SQUARE RESULTS

H : Experience and involvement in decision making are o

independent of each other.

H : Experience and involvement are not Independent of A

each other.

Test Statistics

Experierience Involvement in decision

making

Chi-Square 82.800a 117.800b

df 3 4

Asymp. Sig. .000 .000

Table 2: CROSS TABULATION between Income and satisfied with position

Satisfied with position Highly

satisfied Satisfied

Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied

Dis satisfied Highly

dissatisfied Total

Income

4000-10000 5 58 18 1 1 83

10000-20000 0 9 1 1 0 11

20000-30000 0 3 0 0 0 3

30000 and above

0 3 0 0 0 3

Total 5 73 19 2 1 100

CROSS TABULATION between AGE and satisfied with salary

Satisfied with salary Extremely

Satisfied Satisfied Neutral Dissatisfied Total

AGE

20-25 1 24 7 6 38

25-30 1 36 10 5 52

30-40 0 6 2 0 8

40-45 0 2 0 0 2

Total 2 68 19 11 100

Interpretation:

From the above given table we analyzed the income

satisfied with the position of the employees working in M/s

Heritage Foods, Hyderabad where, the majority of the


employees are satisfied with their income provided with their

position in the company, i.e., out of 100%, 58% of the employees

are satisfied.

5

58

18

1 10

91 1 00

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Income

4000-10000

10000-20000

20000-30000

30000 and above

Table 3: CROSS TABULATION between AGE and satisfied with salary

0

24

36

6

20

7

10

200

6 5

0 00

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

AGE 20-25 25-30 30-40 40-45

SATISFIED WITH SALARY

EXTEREMELY SATISFIED

SATISFIED

NETURAL

DISSATISFIED

Figure: AGE * Satisfied with salary Cross tabulation

Foods (India) Limited where, the age group of the employees

between 25-30 says that, the career development programs are

provided.

Interpretation:

The above table identifies about the satisfaction level of

income of the employees working in M/s Heritage Foods,


Hyderabad where, the majority of employees between the age

of 25-30 are satisfied and the second highest of the employees

between the age group of 20-25 are satisfied with their salary.

Interpretation:

The above mentioned table is analyzed about the career

development of the employees who are working in Heritage

Table 4: Cross tabulation between AGE & Career development

AGE Cross tabulation between AGE & Career development

YES NO Total

20-25 28 10 38

25-30 44 8 52

30-40 7 1 8

40-50 2 0 2

Total 81 19 100

Education Career development

Yes No Total

10th 17 2 19

10+2 27 3 30

Graduation 22 8 30

Dip in FD 5 2 7

MBA 10 4 14

Total 81 19 100

0 0

28

44

7

20

108

1 0

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

AGE 20-25 25-30 30-40 40-50

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

YES

NO

Figure: AGE* Career development Cross tabulation

Table 5: EDUCATION * Career development Cross tabulation

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy. .635

Bartlett's Test of Sphericity

Approx. Chi-Square 297.006

Df 55.000

Sig. .000

0 0

17

27

22

5

10

02 3

8

24

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

YES

NO

Interpretation:

The above mentioned table describes about the employees

preference to the education that are being recruited into the

organization. Employees have to be graduates, 60% of the

employees are graduates.


measure of sampling adequacy is greater that 0.6. Therefore, it

is appropriate to proceed with the factor analysis.

Figure: EDUCATION * Career development Cross tabulation

FACTOR ANALYSIS

Factor Analysis is been used to reduce the data and to

know the major influencing factors The 11 Factors which

influence EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT are Career

development, Achievements are Recognized, Satisfied with

Salary, Working Conditions, Morale, Free flow of

Communication, Career Advancement, Opportunities to learn

and Grow, Interpersonal Relationship, Satisfaction with the

Company, Involvement of Employee in Decision Making.

Table 6: KMO and Barlett’s Test

The above table revealed that the Barlett’s Test of

Spehericity is significant and that the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin

Source: The figures are compiled from primary data

Component

Initial Eigen values Extraction Sums of Squared Loadings Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings

Total

% of Variance

Cumulative %

Total

% of Variance

Cumulative %

Total

% of Variance

Cumulative %

1 2.657

24.157

24.157

2.657

24.157

24.157

2.563

23.300

23.300

2 1.637

14.885

39.043

1.637

14.885

39.043

1.540

13.996

37.296

3 1.504

13.671

52.714

1.504

13.671

52.714

1.523

13.846

51.142

4 1.088 9.894 62.608 1.088 9.894 62.608 1.261 11.467 62.608

5 .994 9.034 71.642

6 .939 8.535 80.177

7 .669

6.086

86.263

Table 7: Factor Analysis-Eigen Values Total Variance Explained

accounts for 62.608 percent of the variance of relationship

between the variables.

Large communalities indicate that a large range of

variance has been accounted for by the factor solution.

Varimax related factor analytical results are shown in below

table.


4 Components Extracted

After the standards indicated that the data are suitable for

factor analysis, Principal component analysis was employed

for extracting the data, which allowed determination of the

factors underlying the relationship between 11 variables. The

Total Variable Explained suggested that it extracts four factors

8 .610

5.550

91.813

9 .449

4.084

95.897

10 .350

3.185

99.082

11 .101 .918 100.000

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

Table 7: Name of the Factors

Factor I

Career Related

Factor II

Compensation Related

Factor III:

Organizational Climate

Factor IV

Morale

Career development Satisfied with Salary Working Conditions Morale

Career Advancement Satisfaction with the

Company Free flow of

Communication Achievements are

Recognized

Opportunities to learn and Grow

Interpersonal Relationship

Involvement of Employee in Decision

Making

Figure : Factor Analysis-Scree-Plot

Source: The figures are compiled from primary data

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

Factor – I ---- Career Related

Factor –II---- Compensation Related

Factor- III---- Organizational Climate

Factor IV---- Morale

SUGGESTIONS

• The company shall take steps to recognize the employee’s

achievements and they may reward immediately to

improve morale to boost the productivity levels.

Otherwise, the employees will be disgusted and their

morale levels will be decreased causing dip in

productivity levels of the company.

• Based on the existing personnel policies, incentive

schemes and facilities, the employees are more committed

to the organization for achieving the organization goals by

improving the productivity levels.

• The Company shall take further steps to enrich the career

development schemes.

• The company shall take certain measures to further

involve the employees in decision making.

• The company can further improve the morale rate of the

employees by using the concepts of various HR

interventions.

• The organization has to provide equitable and fair

remuneration to the employees so that they can retain

valuable employees.

REFERENCES

• Baumruk, R. (2004) ‘the missing link: the role of employee

engagement in business success’, Workspan, Vol 47, pp48-52.

• Beardwell, J. and Claydon, T. (2007) Human Resource

Management, A Contemporary Approach. 5th ed. Harlow,

Prentice Hall.

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975) Beyond boredom and anxiety. San

Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal

Experience. New York Harper.

• Frank, F.D., Finnegan, R.P. and Taylor, C.R. (2004) ‘The race

for talent: retaining and engaging workers in the 21st century’,

Human Resource Planning, Vol 27, No 3, pp12-25.


• Fox, A. (1974) Beyond Contract: Work, power and trust

relations. London, Faber and Faber.

• Goodard, R.G. (1999) ‘In-time, out-time: A qualitative

exploration of time use by managers in an organization’

Dissertation Abstracts International. University Microfilms

International, USA.

• The Gallup Organization (2008) [online] Available at:

www.gallup.com.

• Halbesleben, J. R. B. (2003). Burnout and engagement:

Correlates and measurement. Dissertation Abstracts

International: Section B: the Sciences & Engineering, US: Vol

64(1-B), 451Univ Microfilms International, 64(1-B), 451.

• Kahn, W.A. (1990) ‘Psychological conditions of personal

engagement and disengagement at work’, Academy of

Management Journal, Vol 33, pp692-724.

• Khan, W.A. (1990). Psychological Conditions of Personal

Engagement and Disengagement at Work. Academy of

Management Journal, 33(4).

• Lawler, E and Worley, C.G. (2006) ‘Winning support for

organizational change: Designing employee reward systems

that keep on working’, Ivey Business Journal, March/April,

ppBeardwell.

• McCashland, C. R. (1999). Core Components of the service

climate: Linkages to customer satisfaction and profitability.

Dissertation Abstracts International US: Univ Microfilms

International. 60 (12-A), 89.

• Miles, R. H. (2001). Beyond the age of Dilbert: Accelerating

corporate transformations by rapidly engaging all employees.

Organizational Dynamics 29(4), 313-32.

• Purcell, J. (2006) Change Agenda, Reflections on Employee

Engagement. London, CIPD.

• Robinson (2004). Most often it has been defined as emotional and

intellectual and intellectual commitment to the organization.

• Robinson, D., Perryman, S. and Hayday, S. (2004) The Drivers

of Employee Engagement. Brighton, Institute for Employment

Studies.

• Saks, A.M. (2006) ‘Antecedents and consequences of employee

engagement’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol 21, No 6,

pp600-619.

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Burnett, J. (2006) Working Life: Employee Attitudes and

Engagement 2006. London, CIPD.

*Associate Professor, IIT, Allahabad, India.

**Students of MBA (IT), IIT, Allahabad, India.

***Students of MBA (IT), IIIT Allahabad, India.

INTRODUCTION

Today, as we all know that internet is the need of the hour.

It is ubiquitous and forms the basis of most of the businesses

around the globe. There are some developing countries which

are still struggling and cannot afford this technology. Off late,

improvement in the living statuses and the growing literacy

created awareness among the masses due to which world has

witnessed a paradigm shift and internet has gained more

popularity. Now the educated section of the society relies on

internet for various things. In the last decade terms like e-

commerce and social networking earned more value.

According to a survey, maximum internet usage in India is

in the name of youth population. Majority of the users are

students and the rest is the earning crowd. Online shopping

has gained importance and so does the social networking.

Today in the era where people hardly find time to stay

connected to their beloved ones, social networking websites

came to their rescue. Now people can easily keep in touch with

their friends, family e.t.c. Facebook emerged out to be the

biggest social networking website running on the planet in

terms of number of users. Today, Facebook is the most

promising destination for the other websites to advertise their

products and services because of its large customer base.

Facebook gaming is one of the important components that

adds revenue to the corporation. Approximately 30% of the

revenue is extracted from the social games that Facebook

offers. Recently there have been problems with the IPO of

Facebook and they incurred losses. In order to overcome the

situation and to retain their customers some serious

modifications is the call of the situation. There is still untapped

market in India and abroad which can be capitalized by sincere

efforts.

There is a lot of scope for research in this area which will

help the social networking giant to a greater extent. People get

bored of playing the same games again and again on Facebook.

A revamp in the games section of Facebook could possibly help

them to increase their market penetration which will

apparently be fruitful in increasing the revenue, thereby

improving the business model and revenue model.

This research revealed the inclination of Indian

population towards existing Facebook games i.e. time spent,

frequency of playing games e.t.c. and proposes methods to

increase the market penetration and revenue by adding Indian

currency, and prepaid cards as a more secured mode for paying

Facebook games and games of Indian taste.

The literature review stresses on the need to revitalize the

gaming arena of Facebook and for that we have gathered the

data in two stages from existing Facebook game users.

In first stage, we have tried to determine the gender,

education, occupation, internet usage, time spent on Facebook

games, and device used for accessing Facebook account by

Indian users.

After that we have put in efforts to analyze whether

existing Indian Facebook game users want any new game of

Indian flavor and Indian currency to be added on the website.

Here we have also tried to find out the need of more secured

payment method such as prepaid cards and the extent to which

the majority agrees to pay.

For this purpose we designed a questionnaire and

collected the responses of 202 existing Indian Facebook game

users. We analyzed the data collected and performed various

types of testing techniques which helped us to prove our

hypotheses and marked the way for the success of our research.

In brief, by customizing games according to Indian

perspective, adding Rupees as an option for payment and

prepaid cards as a more secured mode for paying Facebook

games will arouse more interest and lead to an increase in the

time spent and number of Indian people playing games on

facebook which in turn increases the market penetration and

this will ultimately lead to the increase in revenue thereby

improving the business model and revenue model of Facebook.

Keywords: Customization, Business Model, Revenue

Model, Market Penetration.

Facebook Gaming - An Indian PerspectiveSub-Theme: Social Networking

Dr. Vijay Kumar Chaurasiya*Gyanendra Pratap Singh**

Mayank Tandon***

*[email protected]

**[email protected]

***[email protected]

LITERATURE REVIEW

According to Socialbakers website January 2013 statistics,

total number of Facebook users in India is 61,499,220 which put

India on 3rd position in the overall ranking of all country wise

Facebook statistics. Facebook penetration in Indian population

is 5.24% and 66.96% is the total online penetration in India.

India registered an increase of 8,102,160 Facebook users in the

past 6 months. If we do a comparison of the nearest countries,

India witnesses 0.13% higher penetration than Cambodia and

0.15% lower Facebook penetration than Russia. The age group

in the range of 18-24 years with a total of 29,449,780 users is the

largest followed by the age group 25-34. 75% are male users

and 25% female users in India. India Facebook demographics

also reveal that the average CPM is $0.05 and average CPC is

$0.23.

According to Quintly website January 2013 statistics,

except for China, Facebook is the largest social networker in

Asia currently. In the top 10 rapidly growing countries on

Facebook, India bags the 2nd place. As per the country stats of

Facebook January 2013, India marked an increase of 1.78

million new users on Facebook displaying a significant growth

of 2.93%.

XIN msn news website on 01/31/2013 quoted that

Facebook reported a profit of $64 million in the 4th quarter

portraying a steep decline compared to $302 million in the

same period of 2011. There was an increase in revenue by 40%

to $1.585 billion and expenses rose by 82% to $1.06 billion.

Facebook emphasized that number of mobile users raised 57%

compared a year ago to 680 million, and crossed the personal

computer users for the first time, at 618 million on an average

for December 2012. Mobile devices contributed to

approximately 23% of Facebook’s ad revenue. About 1.06

billion Facebook monthly users marked an increase of 25%

from the previous year.

SFgate website on January 30, 2013 doubted the social

networks vulnerability reporting a theft of the login details of

16,000 Facebook users by a botnet called Poker Agent. Mostly

Israel was hit by this threat, but seems inactive now. The

programmed bot use to log into Facebook users accounts, and

collect statistics of Zynga Poker and the number of saved

payment methods in the Facebook account. In this way a

command would be received by the infected computers to

enter in to a user’s Facebook account thereby attracting the

user’s friends to a phishing website in order to steal their login

credentials, as well. Thus in this manner users credit card

numbers got exposed which calls for a more secured payment

method such as prepaid cards e.t.c.

On Feb 1, 2013 Reuters website advocated that Facebook is

planning to launch 10 high quality games created by third

party developers targeting hardcore gamers. Facebook is

coming up with more action battle games which will be more

time consuming as compared to the casual games such as

‘Farmville’. Social networking giant grabs 30% revenue share

from game developers and more than a quarter of 1.06 billion

monthly active users play games.


According to Bloomberg Businessweek website, with a

growth of 22% every six months, India will be the biggest

country on Facebook having the maximum number of users on

the planet by 2015. The growth would be explosive attributing

to the large amount of untapped market.

Method & Findings

The proposed Hypotheses are:

H1: Indian currency will attract more users to pay for

Facebook games.

H2: Games of Indian flavor will increase the time spent on

Facebook.

H3: Prepaid cards as more secured mode of payment will

attract more users to pay for Facebook games.

For this research we constructed a questionnaire. Our

target was 250 people but only 202 responses got registered.

We developed the questionnaire and floated that on Facebook

and also conducted surveys personally in our college IIIT

Allahabad.

We have tried to find out the education, occupation,

gender, usage of internet in hours, time spent on Facebook

games and device used to access Facebook in first part of our

questionnaire. After that we seek the willingness of users to

add any new game of Indian flavor to Facebook, prepaid cards

as a more secured payment method and Indian currency for

paying Facebook games in the second part. Based on these

questions we proposed three hypotheses and in order to prove

them we have used bivariate techniques (correlation and

regression) and measure of association (chi-square test) after

doing reliability test. SPSS 20 is used for the purpose of

analysis.

Reliability Test

First of all we checked the internal consistency of test items

by applying reliability test.For a good research the value of

Cronbach’s Alpha should be greater than 0.7 and in our case

the value is 0.819 which proves that there is a good

intercorrelation among test items and the degree of reliability is

appropriate.

H1: Time spent on Facebook will be affected if Indian

currency is added for paying Facebook games.

Test for our first hypothesis- Indian currency will attract

more users to pay for Facebook games

H0: Time spent on Facebook will not be affected if Indian

currency is added for paying Facebook games.

Facebook Gaming - An Indian Perspective Sub-Theme: Social Networking 57

two variables between 4 and 5 i.e. somewhere between agree

and strongly agree.

Descriptive statistics show that the mean is between 4 and

5 for both the variables. This signifies that majority rated these

regression as primary condition (high correlation) is fulfilled.There is 61.7% correlation between the two variables

which is linear, strong, positive and high. Now we can apply


The coefficient of determination is 0.381; therefore, about

38.1% of the variation in the time spent on Facebook is

explained by the addition of Indian currency for paying

Facebook games.

At 95% level of confidence, significance should be less

than 0.05.Since p-value = 0.000 < 0.05, we shall reject the null

hypothesis. We are 95% confident that the slope of the true

regression line is somewhere between 0.476 and 0.682 which

means that with 95% confidence we can say that if Indian

currency is added for paying Facebook games the time spent

on Facebook will increase somewhere between 47.6% to 68.2%.

At @=0.05 significance level, there pertains enough evidence to

conclude that regression line slope is not 0 and hence time

spent on Facebook will be affected if Indian currency is added

for paying Facebook games. The regression equation is

Y= 1.892 + 0.579X

which shows that X has a significant and positive impact

on Y i.e. if X will change by 1% then there will be a change of

57.9% in Y. Hence, we can say that Indian currency will attract

more users to pay for Facebook games.

Test for our second hypothesis- Games of Indian flavor will increase the time spent on Facebook

H0: Time spent on Facebook will not be affected if any new

game of Indian flavor is added to Facebook.

H1: Time spent on Facebook will be affected if any new

game of Indian flavor is added to Facebook.





and strongly agree.

There is 64.0% correlation between the two variables


regression as primary condition (high correlation) is fulfilled.




56.5% in Y. Hence, we can say that games of Indian flavor will

increase the time spent on Facebook.

Test for our third hypothesis- Prepaid cards as more secured mode of payment will attract more users to pay for Facebook games

H0: Time spent on Facebook will not be affected if prepaid

cards are added as a more secured payment method for paying

Facebook games.

H1: Time spent on Facebook will be affected if prepaid

cards are added as a more secured payment method for paying

Facebook games.

explained by the addition of any new game of Indian flavor to

Facebook.





means that with 95% confidence we can say that if any new

game of Indian flavor is added to Facebook the time spent on

Facebook will increase somewhere between 47.1% to 66.0%. At

@=0.05 significance level, there pertains enough evidence to

conclude that regression line slope is not 0 and hence time

spent on Facebook will be affected if any new game of Indian

flavor is added to Facebook. The regression equation is

Y= 1.983 + 0.565X






and strongly agree.


There is 64.9% correlation between the two variables


regression as primary condition (high correlation) is fulfilled.



explained by the addition of prepaid cards as more secured

mode of payment for paying Facebook games.






means that with 95% confidence we can say that if prepaid

cards are added as a more secured payment mode for paying

Facebook games the time spent on Facebook will increase

somewhere between 46.8% to 65.1%. At @=0.05 significance

level, there pertains enough evidence to conclude that

regression line slope is not 0 and hence time spent on Facebook

will be affected if prepaid cards are added as a more secured

payment mode for paying Facebook games. The regression

equation is

Y= 2.054 + 0.559X



55.9% in Y. Hence, we can say that prepaid cards as more

secured mode of payment will attract more users to pay for

Facebook games.

Cross Tabulations1)

63

This crosstabulation grid provides us the count and the

expected count in each category as well as the percent with

willingness to add any new game of Indian flavor to Facebook

and the percent within gender.

Facebook Gaming - An Indian Perspective Sub-Theme: Social Networking

There is no significant effect. The chi-square probability is

0.222 (greater than 0.05) which signifies that we are accepting

the null hypothesis that the column variable is unrelated (that

is, only randomly related) to the row variable. That means

there is no association between the two variables and there is

no difference between the gender and their willingness to add

any new game of Indian taste to Facebook.


A chi-square test of independence was applied to analyze

the data with willingness to add any new game of Indian flavor

to Facebook as one variable and the gender of the respondent

as the second variable. There was no significant effect between

the two variables i.e. no difference is spotted between the two

genders and their willingness to add any new game of Indian

flavor to Facebook. The figure shows the data in graphical

form.

2)

65



willingness to visit Facebook more frequently if any new game

of Indian flavor is added and the percent within gender.







no difference between the gender and their willingness to visit

Facebook more frequently if any new game of Indian taste is

added.



the data with willingness to visit Facebook more frequently if

any new game of Indian flavor is added as one variable and the

gender of the respondent as the second variable. There was no

significant effect between the two variables i.e. no difference is

spotted between the two genders and their willingness to visit

Facebook more frequently if any new game of Indian flavor is

added. The figure shows the data in graphical form.

3)

67



time spent on Facebook games daily and the percent within

gender.






no difference between the gender and their time spent on

Facebook games daily.



the data with time spent on Facebook games daily as one

variable and the gender of the respondent as the second

variable. There was no significant effect between the two

variables i.e. no difference is spotted between the two genders

and their time spent on Facebook games daily. The figure

shows the data in graphical form.

After considering the above three cross tabulation analysis

for variable independence, we have found that there is no

significant relationship between the variables taken. Thus, we

can say that male and female both are equally willing to spend

more time on Facebook if any new game of Indian flavor is

added to Facebook. This calls for efforts to add games falling in

the taste of both the sexes.

CONCLUSION

This study reveals that time spent by Indian users on

Facebook will increase if any new game of Indian flavor is

added to Facebook. There are lots of game lovers in India who

are willing to pay but they don’t turn up because of the

transaction insecurities. Hence, a more secured payment mode

such as prepaid cards should be added to Facebook for paying

Facebook games. Indian market is driven by emotions and

sentiments to a larger extent and the people here are cost

conscious. So, if Indian currency (Rupees) is added on

Facebook as another option for payment of Facebook games

and the payment amount is reduced to a satisfactory level (less

than Rs. 20), there would be an increase in the number of Indian

users ready to part with their money for playing Facebook

games. Emotions play an important role in India to capture

customer attractiveness towards a particular product or

service. We have also seen that men and women, both are

equally willing to see a new game of Indian flavor on Facebook.

Hence, this calls for efforts to add games falling in the taste of

both the sexes.


There is ample amount of untapped market in India,

having a lot of potential and scope, which can be capitalized by

sincere efforts. In brief, by customizing games according to

Indian perspective, adding Rupees as an option for payment

and prepaid cards as a more secured mode for paying

Facebook games will arouse more interest and lead to an

increase in the time spent on Facebook. By a word of mouth,

there would be an increase in the number of Indian people

playing games on facebook which in turn increases the market

penetration and this will ultimately lead to the increase in

revenue thereby improving the business model and revenue

model of Facebook.

REFERENCES

• About Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Facebook.

• About Facebook games

https://company.zynga.com/ games/facebook-games

• Zynga shares fall as Facebook terms change, Wall Street Journal,

https://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732375110

4578149653809194778.html.

• Adaptable Facebook gaming chat software briefly launched by

Chatwing.com.

https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/business/press-

releases/article/Adaptable-Facebook-Gaming-Chat-Software-

Briefly-4094964.php#ixzz2NT3VB4e6.

• Coming soon to Facebook - more action and battle games

https://in.reuters.com/article/2013/02/01/facebook-games-

idINDEE9100GM20130201.

• Reasons for games being the killer app for social networks

https://mashable.com/2010/08/10/social-gaming-business/

• Games on the go

https://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/

Games-on-the-go/Article1-602207.aspx.

• The gamble in gaming

https://www.financialexpress.com/news/The-gamble-in-

gaming/614046.

• Zynga plays alone for now

https://www.reuters.com/article/2009/12/02/us-media-

summit-zynga-idUSTRE5B1592200 91202.

• Gaming and the future of Facebook

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4076/the_facebook_

doctrinegaming_and_.php.

• Even Facebook must change


578272233666653120.html

• Facebook in privacy breach


575558484075236968.html

• Facebook 'unfriends' Zynga

https://digitaljournal.com/article/338085

• List of countries on Facebook

https://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/

• India Facebook statistics

https://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/india

• States Facebook statistics

https://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/united-states

• An end to close relationship of Facebook and Zynga

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20554441

• There are 425 million mobile users monthly active on Facebook

out of which 46 million are Indian users

https://www.techknots.com/mobiles/facebook-has-425-million-

mobile-users-46-million-indian-users/

• The Future of Facebook is in India

https://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-31/the-

future-of-facebook-is-in-india

69

• Facebook: A brilliant business model

https://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2012/05/19/facebook-a-

brilliant-business-model/

• Facebook boosts mobile, gets lukewarm response

https://news.xin.msn.com/en/world/facebook-boosts-mobile-

gets-lukewarm-response-2

• Security researchers raise alarm about credit cards on Facebook

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Sec

u r i t y - R e s e a r c h e r s - R a i s e - A l a r m - A b o u t - C r e d i t -

4235426.php#ixzz2NU3UXEwu

• 4 ways social media sites make money

https://lauraleewalker.com/2012/03/28/4-ways-social-media-

sites-make-money/

• Sorry Zynga, Farmville needs Facebook

https://www.pcworld.com/article/196010/Farmville.html

• Business model Facebook and Linkedin

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darcytravlos/2012/04/10/linkedi

n-and-facebook-applied-social-networking-could-push-

linkedin-to-120-by-summer/

• Social gaming industry in India

https://www.indiasocial.in/social-games-now-every-indian-

will-play/

• Facebook country statistics January 2013- Brazil and India are

adding millions

https://www.quintly.com/blog/2013/01/facebook-country-

stats-january-2013-brazil-and-india-are-adding-millions/


*Professor, Dept. of Management Studies, Sathyabama University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

**Professor, Department of Management Studies, St.Joseph’s College of Engineering, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

INTRODUCTION

Work and family are the two central domains forming the

back bone of an individual’s life (Howard, 1992). They are

work domain (employment) and non-work domain (family).

These two inevitable institutions namely work and family have

historically coexisted, simultaneously as discrete spheres in

one’s life. But this separation between work and life began to

fade with changes in societal demographics.

The traditional nuclear family where the husband works

out side and the wife cares for the home and children is the

system which no longer apply to majority of families in the

recent few decades. There has been an accelerated influx of

women into paid employment roles that have taken place in

the recent past.

Now more women are entering the labour workforce

which was once considered to be meant for men only. A

majority of women want everything that men have

traditionally wanted - success, power, status, money, as well as

committed relationship, love, children and happiness.

In most studies, researchers have found that carrying out

these dual roles often leads to work family conflict for both men

and women. The profound demographic trends have elevated

the need to understand and manage the interface between

work and family (Fraser., 2001).

ABOUT THE INDUSTRY

The Indian Information technology and Business

Processing Outsourcing (IT-BPO) Industry has emerged as the

largest private sector employer in the country, with direct

employment of 2.23 million professionals and indirect

employment of over eight million people in different industry

sectors. While the percentage of women in the IT-BPO

workforce at the entry level is commensurate with graduate

profiles anecdote evidence suggests that this is not the case at

middle and senior management positions. Skill sets and

designations in the organizational hierarchy women

contribute significantly to the success of companies and the IT-

BPO industry as a whole.

An important issue our society is facing in the recent past

is the changing work and family roles of Indian women.

Women, today, function within multiple roles simultaneously

operating in both work and family domains as a mother,

spouse, housekeeper, and as well as maintain a full time

employment outside the home. The relationship between these

dual roles has thus become a topic of interest among

organizational researchers. The article deals with the select

antecedents and its influence on the role conflict is analyzed in

the study. Sample size of 598 was taken for the study and result

has been obtained using statistical analysis.

Women in Technology -Empirical Analysis of Role Conflict Dr. B. Aiswarya*

Dr. G. Ramasundaram**

*[email protected]

**[email protected]

The IT-ITES industry’s contribution to the national GDP is

estimated to increase from 6.0 per cent in 2008-09 to 6.1 per cent

in 2009-10. The total number of IT and ITES -BPO professionals

employed in India have grown from 0.52 million in 2001- 02 to

2010 million in 2008-09.

In addition, about one fifth of the female employees in the

IT-BPO industry are at the managerial level or above indicating

the numerous opportunities provided to them by the industry.

The increase can be attributed to the gender agnostic

requirements of the industry and the flexible work

environment provided by the IT-BPO companies.


Work Life Conflict

Greenhaus and Beutall (1985) defined work and family

conflict as a form of interrole conflict in which the role

pressures from the work and family domains are mutually

incompatible in some respect. Work and family are two central

domains in most adult’s lives.

Researchers in this area have distinguished between two

types of work family conflict, work interfering with family and

family interfering with work. The second work family conflict

strain-based, conflict arises when strain in one role affects one’s

performance in another role. The last type is behaviour based

conflict which refers to incompatibility between the behavioral

patterns that are desirable in the two domains.

Some of the more prevalent antecedents and outcomes of

work life conflict identified in the literature include role

commitment, role salience and satisfaction parenting

(Rousseau, 1984), marriage and spousal support (Barnette and

Marshall, 1991) and supervisory and company support

(Bowen, 1988).

CAUSES

Organizational Commitment

Organizational commitment refers to the extent to which

employees like and feel a part of the organization for which

they work for. It is the relative strength of an individual’s

identification with and involvement in a particular

organization (Mowday et al., 1982).

Work life balance is positively associated with

organizational commitment. This finding is consistent with

work family conflict. Research that found, employees who

experience excess work to family conflict and family to work

conflict will be less committed to their work organization

(Allen et al., 2000).

Grover and Crooke (1985) studied multiple family

responsive policies together and found that employees with

access to more of these benefits showed greater commitment

and lower intentions to leave. Their study also supported the

idea that flexible working hours offered by organizations

influence organizational commitment of employees.

Organizational Climate

Organizational climate is defined as the recurring patterns

of behaviour, attitudes and feelings that characterize life in the

organization more related to atmosphere tone and ethos. An

organizational climate is a relatively new concept and refers to

the extent to which work environment is supportive with

regards to employees work and family needs (Allen, 2001).

These individual perceptions are often aggregated or

collected for analysis and understanding at the team or group

level, or the divisional, functional, or overall organizational

level. Since positive work family climate is a specific form of

organizational supportiveness and work family conflict

constitutes a stress factor at work, we can conclude that

supportive work family climate would alleviate the negative

impact of work family conflict on the job related attitudes of the

employees, thus improving the productivity of the

organization (Thompson et al., 1999).

Work Exhaustion

Work exhaustion is about the work itself and reflects a

salient frustration about job outcomes (Moore, 2000).

Employee will likely decrease their organizational

commitment as their work exhaustion increases because they

will lose faith that the company can take care of them by

providing an acceptable work life.

Research has linked perceived work interference family to

increased burn out. Moreover, it is stated that perceived

conflict from family responsibilities interfering with work will

also be associated with emotional exhaustion (Bacharach,

Bamberger and Conley, 1991).

Employment in Information Technology Industry in India

Year/ Item 2001- 02 2002-03 2003- 04 2004- 05 2005- 06 2006- 07 2007- 08 2008- 09

IT Services and Exports 0.17 0.21 0.30 0.39 0.51 0.69 0.86 0.92

BPO Exports 0.11 0.18 0.22 0.32 0.42 0.55 0.70 0.79

Domestic Market 0.25 0.29 0.32 0.35 0.38 0.38 0.45 0.50

Total Employment 0.52 0.67 0.83 0.06 0.29 0.62 0.01 2.21

Source: NASSCOM Report 2009.

Women in Technology - Empirical Analysis of Role Conflict 71

restructuring, on the contrary Karambayya and Reilly (1992)

determined that family involvement correlated positively with

work restructuring for both the husbands and wives in their

dual earner sample. Moreover family involvement is the

impact of those family roles which have on an individual’s

image, self -concept and commitment to the roles.


Research Design: The design applied in the study is

descriptive research design. It is appropriate to use this method

in this which research describes the relationship among

different variables.

Questionnaire: A set of suitable questions were framed to

satisfy the objective of the study with the help of the previous

studies and literature review for the selected variables.

Questionnaire consists of both qualitative and quantitative

items.

Sampling: In this study, population refers to women

employees in IT and ITES firms located in Chennai city.

Therefore, convenience sample technique is adopted for

selecting the sample units. Among the collected

questionnaires, only 598 filled questionnaires are taken into

account for the research.

Work Thought Interference

Work thought interference is the inability to stop dwelling

on work matters or simply an inability to stop thinking about

work. An unforeseen and illogical consequence of a single

sided segmentation has been the amalgamation or blurring of

the borders between home and work for the worker, enhancing

the intrusion of the work role into the non-work domain (Louis

and Sutton 1991).

Thus, the work thought interference leads to an

identifiable behavioural manifestations and social

repercussions. It may otherwise be described as the failure of

one’s role transition, in border crossing behaviour. In case of

career women, post child bearing is an especially painful

manifestation of work’s all consuming nature (Sarason, et al.,

1996).

Perceived Work and Family Demand

Perceived demand is a global perception of the level and

intensity of responsibility within the family and the work

domains. It is posited that perceived demand will be

identifiable to researchers and perceived by the individuals.

It Voydanoff (1988) decreased both work and family

demand concepts that included variables such as number of

hours worked, schedule role conflict, role ambiguity, role

overload, stress from work, marital status, spouses working

hours, number of children and age of children. Finally, many of

these measures are indicators for demand such as hours

worked rather perceived demand levels.

Job Autonomy

Job autonomy is defined as “The degree to which the job

provides substantial freedom, independence and discretion to

the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the

procedure to be used in carrying it out (Ilgen and Hollenbeck,

1992).

Another perspective of job autonomy as stated by Ettner

and Grzywacz (2001) found that workers who reported higher

levels of dissatisfaction with working conditions and lack of

autonomy had more negative health effects. Thus job

autonomy as impact not only on the organizations and family

but also on the health of the employee.

Job Involvement

The work involvement represents the degree to which the

individual’s job is central to his / her self-concept and identity.

Lodahl and Kejner (1965) conceptualized job involvement as

an internalization of work values such that an individual

derives self-esteem from involvement in the job.

The fact that women still assure greater responsibility for

family may help explain their lesser degree of work

involvement (Spence, 1985). Paradoxically, married women

individuals generally report greater levels of work

involvement probably due to their family responsibilities.

Family Involvement

Although, Brett and Yogev (1988) concluded that family

involvement was not significantly correlated with

Causes

Organisation commitment 0.851

Job autonomy 0.762

Job involvement 0.809

Family involvement 0.898

Organisational climate 0.847

Perceived workload 0.817

Perceived family demand 0.793

Work thought interference 0.748

Work exhaustion 0.814

Work family conflict 0.923

Reliabilty values of the variables

As for the causes organizational commitment (Mowday,

Steers and Porter., 1979), Job Autonomy (Beehr., 1976), Job

involvement (Lodhal and Kejner., 1965), Family involvement

(Lodhal and Kejner., 1965), Organizational climate (Patterson

et al., 2005), Perceived workload (Moore., 2000), Perceived

family demand (Sudman.,1982), Work thought interference

(Friedmann and Greenhaus., 2000), Work exhaustion (Moore.,

2000).

Segmentation of the causes of role conflict

In order to group the statements based on causes for

work life conflict, explorative factor analysis is used KMO

Bartletts test have been used for measuring sampling

adequacy.


The results in the table show that the sample size of this

study is adequate to conduct factor analysis. Moreover, the

correlation between the variables under each factor is

significantly strong and that is justified with the chi-square

value in the table.

Around thirty-seven statements, barring three, are

grouped under nine factors. For extraction purpose principle

component analysis is applied. Varimax rotation method is

needed for rotating the matrix. Factors, which score eigen

value of more than one, are only taken for analysis purpose and

statements with loading factor less than 0.5 are suppressed.

Influence of Causes on Role Conflict

Based on previous literature it has been found that role

conflict is caused by many factors. However, the predominant

factors are organizational commitment, organizational

climate, and work exhaustion, perceived workload, perceived

family demand, family involvement and job autonomy. For

understanding the significance of influence and the level of

influence of these factors, stepwise regression is employed. As

dimension of role conflict is divided as time, strain and

behaviour, for each dimension, the regression line is estimated.

Influence of causes on work family conflict time

Predictors : Constant, Work Exhaustion.

Predictors : Constant, Work Exhaustion,

Work Thought Interference.

Predictors : Constant, Work Exhaustion,

Work Thought Interference,

Perceived Workload.

Dependent

Variable : Work family conflict time.

The output of stepwise regression explains with the help

of three regression equations that have been evolved by

incorporating only the significant independent variable one by

one. It is evident from R square and adjusted R square values in

the table that the level variance explained by the independent

variables is increasing significantly due to successive addition

of causes. Totally 41 percent of variance of time dimension of

work family conflict is explained by work exhaustion, work

thought interference and perceived workload. Among them,

the highest variance is accounted by work exhaustion (33.3

percent) followed by work thought interference (5.4 percent)

and perceived workload (.2.6 percent).

Coefficients and Collinearity Statistics

KMO and Bartlett's Test

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of

Sampling Adequacy 0.841

Bartlett's Test of Sphericity, Approx.

Chi-Square 1.009E4

Degree of freedom 666

Significance .000

Model Summary

Model

R R Square Adjusted R

Square

Std. Error Change Statistics

R Square

change

F change df1 df2 Sig. F

1 .577a .333 .332 .65642 .333 297.679 1 596 .000

2 .622b .387 .385 .62988 .054 52.275 1 595 .000

3 .643c .413 .410 .61695 .026 26.199 1 594 .000

Model Unstandardized Co-

efficients

Standardized Co-

efficients

t Sig Collinearity Statistics

B Std. Error Beta Tolerance VIF

1 Constant 1.601 .108 14.830 .000

Wrk Extn .561 .033 .577 17.253 .000 1.000 1.000

2

Constant 1.166 .120 9.732 .000

Wrk Extn .500 .032 .514 15.457 .000 .931 1.074

Wrk Thgt Int .249 .034 .240 7.230 .000 .931 1.074

Women in Technology - Empirical Analysis of Role Conflict 73

The unstandardised co-efficients reveals that the highest

level of influence is contributed by work exhaustion. Every

one’s unit change in work exhaustion leads to in 0.46 unit

change in work family conflict. However, the contribution of

work thought interference and perceived workload to change

of work family conflict are 0.242 and 0.199 respectively.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The impact of antecedents on the dimension of work family conflict -Time

Work life conflict time

Though there are several causes for the occurrence of

work family conflict, three predominant factors that influence

work family conflict - time dimension are work exhaustion,

work thought interference and perceived workload in the

order of merit. It is work exhaustion that influences the time

dimension of work family conflict the highest followed by

work thought interference and perceived workload the least.

The influence of organizational commitment, organizational

climate, perceived family demand, family involvement, job

autonomy and job involvement is less and not considered as a

cause for the occurrence of work life conflict time.

REFERENCES

• Allen. S. (2001),” What Is Work For? The Right to Work and the

Right to BE Idle,” in The Changing Shape of Work, ed. Richard

K. Brown (New York : St. Martin’s Press.

• Barnett, R. C., and Marshall, N. L. (1991). The relationship

between women’s work and family roles and subjective well-

being and psychological distress. In M.Frankenhaeuser, U.

Lundbert, and M. Chesney (Eds.), Women, Work and Health:

Stress and Opportunities (pp.111-136). New York: Plenum.

• Beehr, T. (1976). Perceived Situational Moderators of the

Relationship between Subjective Role Ambiguity and Role

Strain. Journal of Applied Psychology 61, 35-40.

• Brett, J. M. and Yogev, S. (1988). Restructuring work for family:

How dual-earner couples with children manage. In Elizabeth B

Goldsmith (ed), Work and Family: Theory, Research and

Applications. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 159-174.

• Ettner, S. L., and Grywacz, J. G. (2001). Worker’s perceptions of

how jobs affect health: A social ecological perspective. Journal of

Occupational Health Psychology, 6, 101-113.

• Friedman, S. D. and Greenhaus, J. H., (2000). Work and Family:

Allies or Enemies? What happens when Business Professionals

confront life choices (New York: Oxford University Press.

• Greenhaus, J. H., and Beutall, N. J. (1985). Sources of conflict

between work and family roles. Academy of Management

Review, 10, 76-88.

• Grover, S. L., & Crooker, K. J. (1995). Who appreciates family

responsive human resource policies: The impact of family -

friendly policies. Personnel Psychology,40,271-288.

• Ilgen, D. R., and Hollenbeck, J. R. (1992). The structure of work:

Job design and roles. In M. D. Dunnette and L. M. Hough

(Eds.), Handbook of Industrial and Organisational Psychology

2, 65-207.

• Karambayya, R., and Reilly, A. H. (1992). Dual earner couples:

Attitudes and actions in restructuring work for family. Journal

of Organizational Behaviour, 13, 585-601.

• Karambayya, R., and Reilly, A. H. (1992). Dual earner couples:

Attitudes and actions in restructuring work for family. Journal

of Organizational Behaviour, 13, 585-601.

• Lodhal, T. M., and Kejner, M. (1965). Definition and

measurement of job involvement. Journal of Applied

Psychology, 49, 24-33.

• Mowday, R. T., Steers, R. M., and Porter, L. W. (1979). The

measurement of organizational commitment. Journal of

Vocational Behaviour, 14, 224-247.

• Mowday, R., Porter, L. & Steers R. (1982). Employee

organizational linkages: The psychology of commitment,

absenteeism, and turnover. New York: Academic Press. Allen,

T.D., Herst, D.E.L., Bruck, C.S., & Sutton, M. (2000).

Consequences associated with work-to-family conflict: A review

and agenda for future research. Journal of Occupational Health

Psychology, 5,278-308.

• Patterson, M. G., West, M. A., Shackelton, V. J., Dawson, J. F.,

Lawthom, R., Maitlis, S., Robinson, D. L., and Wallace, A. M.

(2005). Validating the organizational climate measure: Links to

managerial practices, productivity and innovation. Journal of

Organizational Behaviour, 26, 379-408.

• Spence, T. J. (1985). Achievement American Style: The Rewards

and Costs of Individualism, American Psychologist. 40, 12.

• Sudman, S. (1982). Asking Questions. San Francisco:Jossey

Bass Publishers.

3

Constant .553 .168 3.297 .001

Wrk Extn .460 .033 .473 14.109 .000 .879 1.138

Wrk Thgt Int .242 .034 .234 7.170 .000 .930 1.075

Prcd Wrk load .199 .039 .167 5.118 .000 .933 1.072


Book Review

Reviewed by:Nidhi Choudhari

IAS, Shri Krishna Kunj, Nagaur Road,Near Gayatri Mandir, Didwana, District-Nagaur,

Rajasthan, India.Email: [email protected]

Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India

Author: Manjima BhattacharjyaPublisher: HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS INDIA LTDYear of Publication: 2009Price: Rs. 175

India’s single greatest achievement since the proclamation

of Constitution and its amendments of 1992 relating to local

self-governance, has been the empowerment of over 1.2 million

women through Panchayati Raj. It is an achievement without

precedent in the world and has often been termed as a “silent

revolution”, “the greatest social experiment of our time” and

“one of the best innovations in grassroots democracy in the

world” etc. In the Panchayati Raj structure, woman Sarpanch

stands at the cutting edge wherein their lives are caught

between democracy and the boundaries of traditions, caste and

class. She carries the burden of millennia of patriarchy and also

is a harbinger of change. The opportunity to enter the

forbidden world of power politics has helped her push spaces.

In this book, the reader traces her journey through the swirling

waters of politics, administration and society.

In 1993, when women started this journey in Panchayats,

many persons had thought that this would not change

anything, men will continue to decide and rule as usual, using

their wives or mothers or daughter-in-laws as a cover. Initially

almost all the women who entered the political arena because

of this policy, were in some way forced by their families. Most

of them did not receive any training for the roles they were

asked to take on. In spite of all the cynicism and active

obstruction by old political power-brakers, the experiment has

started to bring about a change. The profiles in this book

“Sarpanch Sahib” vividly bring out the effective role which

women in hundreds of thousands of India’s villages are

playing to bring power to the people and change the fabric of

rural India.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The book “Sarpanch Sahib - Changing the face of India”,

edited by Manjima Bhattacharjya, tells incredible stories about

seven gutsy women in seven far flung villages of India:

Deepanjali, the adivasi graduate sarpanch treading new waters

in Kalahandi; Chinapappa, the non-literate panchayat

president in Tamil Nadu making education accessible to

children; Sunita, struggling against a corrupt system in

Madhya Pradesh; Maya, comingg to terms with sudden

electoral defeat in the hills of Uttarakhand; Maloti, finding

innovative ways of governing her constituencies in tea estate in

Assam; Veena Devi, young widow and seasoned politician,

navigating the criminalized politics in Bihar; and Kenchamma,

the first Dalit woman president of Tarikere panchayat in

Karnataka.

What is more interesting is that each of these stories is

written by a different female journalist who had to get out of

her metropolitan existence to meet her subject in a far off

village. Edited by Manjima Bhattacharjya, this book shows a

completely different and honest face of the Indian woman.

“The history of women in south Asian politics is beset with

contradictions,” writes Manjima Bhattacharjya, editor of the

book, pointing out that while the region has had strong female

prime ministers and presidents, the participation of women in

grassroots politics has still been meagre. The book, sponsored

by The Hunger Project, is a collection of encounters with brave

women who are trying to make a difference. Writers and

journalists like Manju Kapur and Sonia Faleiro traveled to

remote villages to speak with these ladies about their career as

panchayat members. The stories depict a true and objective

picture of the struggle of women Sarpanch in rural India. It

gives sometimes depressing but often inspiring insight into

how social change slowly, painfully comes about in even the

most backward areas and societies.

STORYLINE

Since 1993, over three million Indian women have become

politically active and one million are elected to political office

every five years. Despite large representation, the role of

women in politics is still looked upon with doubts. This book

travels through all the trials and triumphs associated with a

woman leader and put them across honestly, without even a

hint of dramatic feminism. The stories of the book are told by

women like Manju Kapur, Indira Maya Ganesh, etc. and are

immensely readable. They talk of villages from different parts

of India. To understand what these women went through and

continue to pass through, what it means for them to live lives of

poverty and yet strive for better governance against all odds,

makes for a humbling experience. The stories of following

women leaders have been told in the book:

A Suitable Candidate: Deepanjali-Deepanjali Majhi is

raw and fresh into her term as Sarpanch of the Rupra Road

village in Kalahandi (Odisa). She is 28 years old and has

studied first two years of BA which she could not complete

because of marriage. She is an Adivasi and contested from an

open seat and won against 8 men for the post of Sarpanch. She

is bringing about societal change in her village.

Small Wonders: Chinapappa- The illiterate Chinapappa

is the Sarpanch of Pachikanapalli, Tamil Nadu. She helped

twenty one kids of the nomad Irular tribe with enrollment in a

nearby school. She takes us through the struggles of being an

illiterate Dalit woman. Each adjective adding a new constraint

to her efficiency.

Sarpanch Sahib: Sunita- Sunita, an Adivasi woman, was a

landless labourer before becoming a Sarpanch of a Brahmin

dominated Tighra village in Madhya Pradesh. It took her about

a year and nine months just to open her own account and access

the funds granted to her for developmental work. She had to

fight with men of power, men of higher castes and initially men

(and women) of her own family. All of this just to start working

as a Sarpanch after being elected by people. Journalist Manju

Kapur narrates Sunita's journey from a ghunghat-clad skinny

daughter-in-law to a fuller Sarpanch who looks into her

opponent's eyes. She even jokes that “all the fighting made her

put on weight!”

The End of a Term: Maya-Maya Bhakhuni is the former

Sarpanch of Boonga village in Himachal Pradesh. The author

of her story Ms. Abhilasha Ojha visits her on the heels of her

loss in the elections. Maya’s tenure is sparked with progress

and she has demonstrated that she is an efficient and dedicated

Sarpanch, yet she loses election by 50 votes, a crucial election

that would have helped her consolidate the work achieved in

her first term. Maya feels that she has lost because the other

candidates gave bribes, distributed alcohol to buy votes etc. It

highlights the fundamental problem of elections that are

woman-unfriendly: unsafe, undemocratic, criminalized and

characterized by strategies ‘typical of those institutions that

men control’ such as free liquor, money and other incentives

(mostly for men).

The Ballet Dancer: Maloti-In Chamong tea estate in

Assam, Maloti Gowalla, a panchayat leader has been finding

innovative ways of governing her constituency. She has learnt

how to strike a balance over seven years of her experience in

different levels of local politics. Everyday development work is

kept on its toes, as Maloti rides her bicycle through the estate,

making sure that the workmen don’t fall asleep during

working hours. Maloti was instrumental in building a dam in

her area that not only saved the lives of people, but their paddy

fields too. Maloti feels that women have a different way of

governing: they work through persuasion and dialogue, rather

than coercion and violence. Even before entering politics she

persuaded 12 other women to help her pave a main road going

through the tea estate.

The Mukhiya of Loharpura: Veena- She is the mukhiya of

Loharpura in Nawada district of Bihar- the state though being

notorious for corruption and criminality, boasts of highest

percentage (54%) of women in local governance. Veena Devi,

13 years old was married to a man in his 40s with two grown

sons. She became a mother at 15 and a widow at 17. Her

transformation from a child bride to a widow to a seasoned

politician with aspirations for the Parliament is well narrated

by the author Kalpana Sharma.


The Night Before the Elections: Kenchamma-

Kenchamma, a dalit woman, who continues to shell betel nuts

for a living, even while she is into her second term in the Gram

Panchayat has earned respect from all members of community

i.e. Dalits and Lingayats. In her first term as Sarpanch in 1993, it

is told that Kenchamma cried for not being able to utter a word

in her first meeting as a Sarpanch. Now her status has

undergone a remarkable change because of her political

participation, but her life as such, remains eerily unchanged.

She is still the poor Dalit woman overburdened with

responsibilities, toiling for daily wages, supporting her family,

and also looking after the development needs of the village.

FINAL ANALYSIS: A MUST READ

The book throws many questions that linger while we go

through the pages of this book. As the stories progress from

Deepanjali Majhi to Kenchamma, the reader breathes the

trajectory of women in local politics in India. A trajectory beset

by pitfalls and obstacles, but at the same time, illuminated by

heartening possibilities and carving into the fabric of Indian

society some deep cuts from which there can be no turning

back.

As regards, women in local governance are concerned; the

book makes us understand that we should learn to measure

their success relatively. For example, Sunita who was married

at ten, entered politics at twenty two years of age from a mute

Adivasi background is much more emancipated than any

metropolitan Indian or even Western woman. Not getting

things done with bribes, getting out of her house to go to court

because she has been accused on fake charges and silencing

higher caste men are her achievements. They are probably

bigger than any known politician. Then there is Maya who has

persuaded 12 other women to construct a road even before

becoming a Sarpanch. Her riding a bicycle to monitor the

development works is a revolution more significant than even

a woman becoming the head of the state. Kenchamma, the poor

Dalit woman undergoes death threats in her first election.

Deepanjali Majhi is disillusioned with the system, tense with

the inter-personal minefields that must be tread in local

politics, and has just come to terms with the reality that women

are always vulnerable in unique ways. If these struggles are

delaying developmental work, it is like latent heat being

absorbed to make something invisible happen- the

empowerment of these women. Once they are powerful

enough not to care, development will take place with a greater

speed and honesty.

The book manifests in more than one ways that every

humble woman is an abode of great power. Mostly because

they have to deal with struggles that would never cross the

path of an educated, modern woman. Their expectations are

humble and their everyday life makes it impossible for them to

dwell on their problems. It is not so important to be better than

everyone else. The true beauty of a life well lived is to be better

than what you were yesterday and also to help others on your

way, achieve that dream!

entrenched social hierarchies can react back with terrible fury if

they feel that the status quo is being challenged. They know

that they cannot count on any one else to protect them. So they

bide their time, they accept to continue to living lives of poverty

and marginalisation, even while achieving small changes,

providing education for their children. They are not aiming for

revolutions, they are aiming for a change.

All the women in this book are succcess stories, even if

they show that nothing is easy and at times, the idea of

“success” does not quite express what they have achieved.

They show that change in the unchanging world of rural

poverty, could be almost imperceptible. The boundaries have

been pushed, but still only from the limits of the home to the

village. Kenchammas of this world are wise, they know that

Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India 77

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10. Book Review: Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India

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Education (AICTE), Ministry of Human Resources Development,

Government of India, New Delhi.

United Institutes works on the motto of holistic education of its

students. Hence every measure is taken that their progress does not

remain constrained to the classrooms. Ample scope for

extracurricular activities along with classroom syllabus keeps the

student at par with the best of the institutes. The campuses are located

away from the city, landscaped stunningly to create a peace of mind

and make the environment academically inductive.

Special care is given to the courses of the student which demand

industrial trainings and visit. The Naini industrial area provides the

perfect opportunity for the students to gain hands on experience and

getting to know the grooves of the industry. The Greater Noida

campus has a great advantage of being in the NCR-region which is the

home ground of the corporate giants making it simpler for the

students to gain a practical work experience along with classroom

education. At United we believe in taking the course of progress in the

fields of technology and administration to the pinnacle. Hence our

motto remains- nurturing the young minds today, who will create

history tomorrow .

www.united.ac.in

United Institute of ManagementA/16, UPSIDC Industrial Area, Naini, Allahabad (U.P.)

Phone #- 0532-2686070

Fax- 0532-2687142

E-mail : [email protected]

[email protected]

Website: www.united.ac.in

UNITEDGroup of InstitutionsAllahabad • Greater Noida

ISSN No. 0975-7708 SAMIKSHA - United

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