This issue has a mix of both empirical and review papers. The first paper is a review paper and it examines the importance of employee retention in human resource management literature. The second paper is an empirical research paper that looks at the consequences of performance appraisal justice perception on employees’ attitudes and behavior. The final paper is again an empirical paper and it reports the effect of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction of faculty members.

The first paper, “The Vital Role of Employee Retention in Human Resource Management: A Literature Review”, by Ali Ahmed Qayed Al-Emadi, Christina Schwabenland and Qi Wei, tries to capture the importance of employee retention. Retaining employees has been a challenge not only for the human resource management professionals but for managers in general as it has huge impact on the organizational outcomes. There is a plethora of research that has focused on employee retention but what is different about this paper is that it first tries to determine the relevant theoretical framework under which the issue of employee retention could be discussed. Secondly, it tries to identify the factors that can influence the employees' decision to stay with the organization in public sector. Thirdly, it tries to examine the factors that influence the employees’ decisions to shift to a semiprivate sector, and finally, it also tries to answer as to which HRM practices can positively influence employee retention. With respect to the final question, the paper suggests that effective HRM practices in the areas of training and development, performance appraisal, recognition and promotion opportunities tend to impact employee retention positively. It is heartening to see that most of the issues highlighted have to do with growing and being recognized for one’s work. What would be interesting to see is if the factors can hold good in different economies especially with reference to the movement of employees from public to private sector where the pay differentials are very high between these sectors. Since this review paper focuses more on the HRM practices, there is a possibility of including individual level factors too in the model of employee retention.

The second paper, “Consequences of Performance Appraisal Justice Perception:
A Study of Indian Banks”, by Sapna Taneja, Ravikesh Srivastava and N Ravichandran, examines empirically the consequences of performance appraisal justice perception. Specifically, it tries to examine how employees’ fairness perception impacts their attitude and behavior. The formulation of this research follows the structure of planned behavior where justice perception would form the part of cognition, which would then translate into dependent attitudes which would ultimately lead to a set of behaviors such as to stay or quit the organization. Most individuals would like to work in an organization which is perceived to be fair and just and perceptions of fairness and justice tend to define their attitude and behavior towards the organization and its stakeholders including the customers and its employees. This paper in particular looks at employees of private and public sector banks and tries to capture the consequences of performance appraisal justice perception on their attitude and behavior. The paper also makes use of factor analysis to confirm the factor structure of the justice and outcome variables. Later, using multiple hierarchical regressions, it tries to establish the underlying relationship between appraisal fairness perception and employees’ reactions. The results indicate that informational and distributive justice predict performance appraisal system satisfaction and satisfaction with feedback. Informational justice seems to be fine, but intuitively one feels that instead of distributive justice, procedural justice should have emerged as a more significant predictor. On the other hand, the results predicting intention to quit seems to have a negative relationship with distributive and procedural justice, which seems to be on the intended lines. The study ends with emphasis on justice and advocates that justice should be given prime importance in organizations in order to generate positive outcomes for performance appraisal systems.

The final paper, “The Effect of Emotional Intelligence on Job Satisfaction of Faculty: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach”, by Parikshit Joshi, S K Suman and Mudita Sharma, looks at examining the effect of emotional intelligence on the job satisfaction of faculty members. In today’s academic environment, being a good teacher involves not only being good in terms of teaching but also being capable of doing research and taking up additional administrative responsibilities. Added to this pressure to perform in various areas, the issue of managing students in the classroom is becoming a great challenge. The challenge is compounded by the fact that the students have sufficient reasons to get distracted (courtesy electronic gadgets) and on an average, their attention span seems to be declining. To top it all, the respect for the teacher in general is also declining. The outcome of all these is that teaching is not only an academic exercise, but to a large extent is also an emotional exercise as there are numerous occasions for a faculty to get upset with the affairs of managing the students in the classroom. In such a situation, display of appropriate emotions may result in defining the learning experience as a meaningful one, or else there is a high possibility that it may degenerate into a frustrating experience for those who want to learn and an emotionally draining experience for the teacher who wants to teach. It is therefore, interesting to come across a study like this which examines the relationship between emotional intelligence and the job satisfaction of faculty members. The study was conducted on the faculty members of management and engineering colleges and the findings, as expected, reveal a positive correlation between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. What would also be interesting to examine is the relationship between emotional intelligence and their perception of their performance in the classroom or their teaching effectiveness.

--Vivekanand
Consulting Editor