In a globalized business world, it is important to understand the contextualization of organizational behavior concepts and its implications on people’s issues in a cross- cultural context. In this issue, the papers have discussed topics from a cross-cultural perspective.

The first paper, “Correlates of Employees’ Attitudes Towards Participation in Decision Making”, by Hana Ornoy, examines the influence of cultural differences in forming employees’ attitudes towards participation in decision making. Traditionally, studies examining the issue of participation in decision making generally focused on the interest and desire of employees to participate. Breaking away from this tradition, this particular paper suggests that global managers should not only consider the motivation of employees for participation in decision making but should also take into account the cultural background of the employees.

The second paper, “Employee Attrition in the Malaysian Service Industry: Push and Pull Factors”, by Jessica Sze-Yin Ho, Alan G Downe and Siew-Phaik Loke, examines the push (interference with work-family-lifestyle balance, poor relations with co-workers, work stressors, unsatisfactory supervisory relationships) and pull (offers of better compensation, more interesting work, promotion opportunities, desire to return for academic studies) factors for attrition among the young well-educated professionals within the growing Malaysian service industry. By identifying these push and pull factors, the study hopes to provide valuable insights to employers with respect to understanding the needs of young Malaysian professionals (who are prone to job-hopping, a feature which is so characteristic of any fast growing industry), so that organizations can design innovative strategies for attracting and retaining these young professionals.

The third paper, “Examining the Factor Structure of Wong and Law’s Emotional Intelligence Scale with a Pakistani General Population Sample”, by Jahanvash Karim, examines exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling for assessing the factorial and construct validity of the Wong and Law’s Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS). The premise of this paper is that measures of emotional intelligence are likely to reflect the dominant cultural values of the society of their origin and would therefore tend to include statements that are likely to be problematic outside the particular culture. WLEIS was administered on a sample drawn from Pakistan to assess the construct validity of the scale and it was found to be valid.

The fourth paper, “Human Resource Management Practices and Organizational Commitment in Higher Educational Institutions: A Kenyan Case”, by Dinah J Kipkebut, examines the impact of demographic characteristics and HRM practices on multi-dimensional organizational commitment in a non-western context. The findings of the study suggests that though HRM practices are more important than demographic characteristics in influencing organizational commitment, demographic characteristics and HRM practices differ in their influence on each dimension (affective, continuance, and normative) of organizational commitment.

The fifth paper, “Concurrent Validity of Peer Appraisal of Group Work for Administrative Purposes”, by Arvind Sudarsan, focuses on the need for developing ways of validating the results of peer review. This is warranted because there is an increased incidence of the use of peer reviews in organizations today despite the fact that peer reviews require a large number of competent assessors to make it effective and it also tends to suffer from self-serving assessments. Given this context, it is necessary to develop some method to validate the results of peer reviews.

The final paper, “Dispositional Predictors of Organizational Commitment: A Theoretical Review”, by Kuldeep Kumar and Arti Bakhshi, is a theoretical review of the dispositional predictors of organizational commitment. Organizational commitment is a well-researched topic, and what differentiates this paper is the fact that much of the published work on organizational commitment tends to focus on examining the environmental rather than dispositional sources of commitment. This paper primarily focuses on collating varied researches with the objective of providing some clarity with respect to the understanding of the dispositional predictors of organizational commitment.

-- Avinash Kumar Srivastav
Consulting Editor