This issue deals with a variety of topics such as organizational justice, job mobility, Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), psychological climate, organizational
effectiveness, work engagement, women self-help groups and organizational culture. The variety of topics, which has been a recurring feature of the past few issues, lends itself to the research interest of a wider group of researchers and scholars.

The first paper, “Interactional Justice and Job Mobility Preparedness: Mediating Role of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)”, by P B Srikanth and L Gurunathan, deals with interactional justice and job mobility preparedness where the authors have also examined the mediating role of leader-member exchange. Interactional justice as a component of organizational justice does not necessarily receive much attention from researchers as compared to the other two components of organizational justice—distributive and procedural justice. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the study focuses on social exchange relationships at work to understand how these relationships drive the behavior of employees in the workplace. The research has been well conducted and reported and makes interesting reading. More importantly, the authors have been able to come up with practical implications of this research that tends to determine what kind of employees engage in job mobility preparedness and under what circumstances such behavior would be exhibited. For example, the results presented in this study indicate that an employee’s perception of an event like performance appraisal or interaction with the supervisor becomes a critical experience in his/her career which influences employee attitudes and behavior leading to job mobility preparedness. Another significant contribution of this study is in terms of bringing out the difference between the two related but different concepts—procedural and interaction justice.

The second paper, “Psychological Climate and Organizational Effectiveness: Role of Work Engagement”, by Aakanksha Kataria, Pooja Garg and Renu Rastogi, deals with understanding the relationship between psychological climate and organizational effectiveness. The authors have tried to examine the mediating role of work engagement.

A model was developed and tested to examine the premise that employees’ favorable perceptions of the organizational settings are directed towards increased organizational effectiveness through an individual-level construct called as work engagement. Using SEM approach, the authors report that the relationship between psychological climate and organizational effectiveness is fully mediated by work engagement. The research has practical implications as the finding of this study suggests that engaged employees, through their positive psychological experiences and positive attitudes, could further enhance the psychological climate of an organization and thereby contribute to the effective functioning of the organization.

The third paper, “Profiling of Organizational Culture Using OCTAPACE Framework in Indian Insurance Industry”, by Ajay Solkhe, uses OCTAPACE framework to profile the organizational culture of the Indian insurance industry. Along with other factors, organizational culture has been recognized as an important determinant of organizational performance and OCTAPACE has been widely used for profiling the culture of organizations. But to what extent the same framework can be extended to profile the culture of an industry and whether organizations within the same industry have similar cultures, are some of the questions where more clarity is required, so that the OCTAPACE framework could be used more effectively in profiling culture at different levels. This question assumes importance since culture is very specific to a particular context and tends to develop over a period of time, and organizations in the same industry may not share a similar history or context. The same gets reported in the concluding part of this paper where the author states that various dimensions of the OCTAPACE culture exist at varying levels in the organization under study and significant differences in the OCTAPACE culture were observed in between the organizations.

The last paper, “A Study on the Relationship Between Workgroup Process and Group Members’ Satisfaction with Reference to Women Self-Help Groups”, by Latha Govindarajan and V Padhmanabhan, deals with women self-help groups. Women self-help groups are formed with the purpose of promoting women’s economic and social empowerment, and in some parts of our country, they have been able to achieve their purpose. It therefore becomes important to examine and conduct research on these self-help groups to see what can make them more effective and help them pursue the objective of promoting women’s social and economic empowerment. This paper does a good job of reviewing the relevant literature on self-help groups, based on which the authors have defined the objective of their research. This paper essentially tries to examine the relationship between members’ satisfaction and process dimension of workgroup characteristics. As an added objective, the study also explores the important predictors of self-help group satisfaction. Since the study was conducted on self-help groups that came under the women’s welfare project of the Tamil Nadu state, the results of the study have been discussed with reference to the above-mentioned project. Nevertheless, this is an important area of research and more such research needs to be conducted to improve the effectiveness of self-help groups.

--Vivekanand
Consulting Editor