Purpose
An interesting conundrum exists in India with its rise as an economic powerhouse. On one front, there is tremendous pride in asserting its Indian identity. On another front, it seeks to ...embrace Western practices to announce its entry into the world economy. This paper aims to examine the extent to which Indian information technology (IT) firms adopt Western concepts of a high performance work system (HPWS) and the correlates of such a system (pro-social organizational behavior and employee attitude). Data from 211 IT employees in India show widespread adoption of a HPWS, and more importantly several approaches to assessment indicate that a HPWS positively correlates to pro-social organizational behavior and employee attitude.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample consisted of IT professionals in India having a minimum of three years of work experience. The study has used a snowball strategy to generate the sample. Eight HPWS practices were included in the survey questionnaire to assess three dimensions of HPWS. Analysis was conducted to examine differences between the highest (i.e. top 10 per cent) and the lowest (i.e. bottom 10 per cent) and bivariate correlations of the surveyed employees regarding pro-social organizational behaviors related to altruism, job involvement and work involvement, and regarding employees attitudes related to job satisfaction, intention to stay in organization, level of morale and optimism.
Findings
HPWS is positively associated with employee attitudes and pro-social organizational behavior. It reflects the reality that HPWSs, at least as conceived by researchers from the West, have penetrated organizations in India. Moreover, they seem to complement each other and together they seem to have a positive association with employee attitudes and pro-social organizational behavior. As organizations in India continue with the march toward servicing the world in the IT sector, the present study suggests that they have a potent tool in a HPWS to keep employee attitudes and pro-social organizational behaviors high.
Research limitations/implications
The criticism of survey methodology approach adopted in the present study is that it has common method bias. That is, in the survey, respondents tend to score along a path with a common response. As a validation, the study has performed a treatment-by-subjects analysis of variance with matched participant scores on the three pro-social behaviors to determine whether the means of altruism, job involvement and work involvement were significantly different. As to convergence, much more causal data would be needed to make a definitive conclusion on the findings of the present study.
Originality/value
This is the first study of its kind to examine the adoption of Western concepts of a HPWS in Indian IT Industry.
The Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Beatty, James J.; Westerhoff, Stefan
Annual review of nuclear and particle science,
01/2009, Volume:
59, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The search for the origin of cosmic rays with energies above 10
18
eV has made considerable progress during the past few years. With new data from the High Resolution Fly's Eye experiment in Utah and ...the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, a suppression of the cosmic ray flux above 5 × 10
19
eV consistent with the predicted suppression arising from interaction with the cosmic microwave background (the so-called GZK suppression) has been observed. Recent results from Auger seem to indicate that the arrival direction distribution of cosmic rays with energies above the GZK suppression is not isotropic. Progress toward a better understanding of the chemical composition of the cosmic rays is under way. A new generation of detectors is providing data of unprecedented quality and quantity. In this article, we review these recent developments and briefly outline how our view of the highest-energy cosmic rays has evolved over the past several years.
This paper reports the successful fabrication of silica aerogel Cherenkov radiators produced in the first batches from a 96-tile mass production performed using pin-drying technique in our ...laboratory. The aerogels are to be used in a ring-imaging Cherenkov detector in the spectrometer of a planned balloon-borne cosmic-ray observation program, HELIX (High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment). A total of 36 transparent, hydrophobic aerogel tiles with a high refractive index of 1.16 and dimensions of 10 cm × 10 cm × 1 cm will be chosen as the flight radiators. Thus far, 40 out of the 48 tiles fabricated were confirmed as having no tile cracking. In the first screening, 8 out of the first 16 tiles were accepted as flight-qualified candidates, based on basic optical measurement results. To fit the aerogel tiles into a radiator support structure, the trimming of previously manufactured prototype tiles using a water-jet cutting device was successful.
•Mass production of 96 silica aerogel tiles for the HELIX RICH detector is on track.•The first 16 aerogel tiles measured 11 cm × 11 cm × 1 cm with a high crack-free yield.•The refractive index of the hydrophobic aerogel radiator tiles was 1.16 as required.•The transmission length at 400 nm of the transparent aerogel tiles was 34 mm.•Test of water-jet cutting of a tile to a trimmed size of 10 cm × 10 cm was successful.
Paralingual Web Design and Trust in E-Government Segovia, Roy H; Jennex, Murray E; Beatty, James
International journal of electronic government research,
01/2009, Volume:
5, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Can Web design improve the way governments serve their constituencies through the use of information technology i.e., e-government? This article proposes that the use of paralingual Web design can ...overcome possible trust issues in e-government with bilingual populations. An experiment was conducted where active e-government Web pages were converted to paralingual format and then site visitors were surveyed regarding their trust in the content and readability. The results of the experiment show that trust was improved for the minority language speakers, while the majority language speakers remained neutral with neither group indicating significant decrease in readability. These findings have important implications for societies with large bilingual or multilingual populations, where issues of trust among minority speakers and majority speakers may exist, as they indicate that paralingual Web design can help reduce these trust issues.
In many organizations, the HR function is facing significant challenges and undergoing a transition. Major transitioning initiatives range from cost cutting and reengineering HR to its realignment as ...a strategic business partner charged with building a workforce that becomes the firm's primary source of competitive advantage. A discussion centers around 3 questions: 1. How can organizations obtain a workforce with the potential to create a competitive advantage? 2. How can an organization build a workforce that becomes the firm's primary source of competitive advantage? 3. Once the workforce is built, how can an organization retain its intellectual capital and sustain its competitive advantage?
Although there is much interest in the implementation of Japanese management techniques in the United States, it is not clear which aspects can be successfully adopted here. The present study ...examined the compensation decision-making policies of 41 Japanese and 63 United States managers. The results confi rmed past research regarding the importance that U.S. managers place upon job performance in their pay decisions and the importance that Japanese managers place upon other factors beyond performance (e.g., job worth) in their decisions. In addition, both groups gave the same amount of pay increase on the average; however, U.S. managers were much more willing to give large or small increases, whereas the Japanese managers had little variance in pay increases from employee to employee. Implications for managerial policy and practices of Japanese managers operating in the United States are discussed.
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