An in-depth examination of what makes a business firm successful amidst growing competition is becoming a serious concern for both big enterprises and startups. Mere strategizing on financial investment and marketing apparatus alone without giving due attention to human capital of the firm will not serve the purpose. Keeping this in mind, the emerging think tanks of the service industry are brainstorming on how to gear up the organizational resources to the volatile market conditions without compromising on the basic principles of business management philosophy. This line of thinking has led to the focus on the stock market operations, precisely on the behavioral pattern of investing community, which is expected to pave a new way in terms of strategy formulation and execution. Ever since, Behavioral Finance emerged as an independent field of significance in the gamut of financial modeling, creating the need and necessity to carve out a separate niche in terms of utility and rewarding experiences, many attempts have been made to examine it from a different perspective. Surely, the retail investors’ growing confidence in the stock market domain is also reflected through the scale of intra-day trading and thus emerged a need to study the behavioral pattern of investors in tune with the changing times. The first paper, “Behavioral Biases in the Decision Making of Individual Investors”, by Ravindra Jain, Prachi Jain and Cherry Jain, goes a long way in determining the value of rationality and wisdom in the investment decisions of individual investors. The factors determining the judgment patterns of investment, as pointed out in the paper, have validity in terms of disputing the conventional literature available on the subject matter. Though it is an unpredictable phenomenon of forecasting the risk incidence in a volatile market based on past experiences, still a kind of mental accounting is suggested to stay relevant in the market as a successful player.

Similarly, a new perspective on Human Resource Development (HRD) is also expected from the changing scenarios, leading to an atmosphere of fair employment relations wherein all HR practices towards organizational efficiency will be tested upon. Truly following the legacy of ‘industrial relations’ climate, most of the firms are trying to justify their Human Resource Management (HRM) initiatives as a strategic makeover of organizational demands and priorities, and this has created enough space for research on the inevitability of ‘employee relations’ as something different from the past experiments. As such, minimizing the gap between HRD and HRM from the conceptual point of view, no doubt, becomes imperative for a sustained value out of the investments made. In the second paper, “A Study on the Effect of Human Resource Development on Employment Relations”, the authors, A Radhakrishna and R Satya Raju, propose a new equation for the success rate of HRM practices purely on monetary lines and prove that there is a dependent relationship between HRD and employment relations by taking inputs from the steel industry.

Again, many studies in the past have examined the growing dependency between High Performance Work Practices (HPWPs) and employee satisfaction leading to many confusing strategies and propositions on the work front. This gave rise to the necessity of bringing in new initiatives in employee engagement through HPWPs as a mediator, as reflected in the next paper, “Organizational Role Stress in Dual-Career Couples: Mediating the Relationship Between HPWPs, Employee Engagement and Job Satisfaction”, by Naval Garg.

In recent times, many studies have pointed out the changing perceptions of customers towards service quality of banking and insurance firms that need to be taken care of in formulating marketing strategies and designing of products. The growing competition between private insurance players and the dominant government agency, Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), needs to be judged on the basic parameters of service quality dimensions as expected by the customers based on their perceptions and reality. In the fourth paper, “Antecedents of Customer Perception of Service Quality of Life Insurance Corporation of India”, the authors, S Rani Lakshmi and P Santhi, examine the popular impressions held by the customers of LIC in terms of reaching out to the customers.

Inspired by the ideology that a more balanced growth of an economy is reflected through fair distribution of wealth generated through various means, which otherwise is known as inclusive growth and development, many initiatives are found to be taken by governments to bring the neglected groups and individuals into the ambit of development policies. Further, noting the fact that the objective of making financial inclusion a phenomenal success depends, to a large extent, on cooperative sector catering to the needs of rural India, the last paper, “The Role of Urban Cooperative Banks and Non-Agricultural Cooperative Credit Societies in Financial Inclusion: A Study in Howrah District, West Bengal”, by Amit Basak, sheds light on Howrah district’s experiences in this regard. The paper also suggests ways for increasing the efficiency of existing operations of both banking and non-banking financial institutions of the country.

-- Radha Mohan Chebolu
Consulting Editor