Supervisors' Power and Turnover Intention: The Moderating Impact of Leader-Member Exchange Strategy

-- May-Chiun Lo and T Ramayah

Building upon the `social exchange theory' notion (Blau, 1964), this paper investigates the moderating impact of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) strategy on the relationship between power and turnover intention. While power and LMX were conceptualized as seven and four dimensional constructs respectively, turnover intention was treated as a unidimensional construct. 91 pairs of Malaysian managers and their subordinates voluntarily took part in this research. The findings suggest that the hypotheses for direct effects received high support, indicating that power is a direct predictor of employees' turnover intention. The paper also discusses the implications of the findings and potential limitations.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Framing a Strategy for Competitive Car Market Using Balanced Scorecard through Hybrid Intelligence for Maruti Udyog Ltd.

-- Soumya Banerjee and Debapriyo Nag

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is being regarded as a new measure of performance for any organization, and is also being used in strategic planning, encompassing operational logistics and market presence of that particular organization. A company model referred here, as a value chain model, simply follows business rules, to make a decision about investment. The different permutations and combinations concerning any product-based company yield a complex combinational domain. In this context, this paper proposes, an innovative agent-based modeling for a strategy-oriented balanced scorecard, where agents are bio-inspired. Typically, pheromone concentration module, along with predefined rules using rough sets, would like to predict the most suitable strategy for any company. The introduction of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristics, functionally establishes a proper interface between management sciences and adaptive intelligence.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Group Affiliation and Firm Performance: Evidence from Indian Cotton Textile Industry

-- Kunal Gaurav

India is the world's third largest producer of cotton and the second largest producer of cotton yarns and textiles. Indian economy, as an emerging market, offers certain advantages to business-group affiliated firms. It is revealed by literature that the emerging markets hold weak infrastructure and poorly functioning institutions, leading to severe agency and information problems. It is believed that group-affiliated firms perform better than group unaffiliated firms in emerging markets. This study aims to validate the ongoing debate regarding group affiliation and performance by comparing the performance of group-affiliated firms and group unaffiliated firms (independent firms) in the Indian cotton textile industry.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Implementing Balanced Scorecard at ION Tyres

-- K Ranganathan and Indranil Mutsuddi

This paper reviews the need for a balanced scorecard and the reasons behind the development of this approach. Earlier, the success of an organization was measured by using only financial metrics. However, the shortcomings of this approach was highlighted by M/s Blake and Norton, the proponents of the exciting concept of Balanced Scorecard (BSC), after their study of corporates where only 10% of the formulated strategies were successfully executed. This is due to the lack of focus on strategic issues and effective execution. In the 2006 survey on strategy carried out by a global management consultant firm, Mckinsey, a majority of the executives expressed that their first concern was how strategy is implemented and second concern was about how performance is measured. This paper presents a case study of a successfully implemented Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in an automotive industry. Further, the myth that a huge expense is involved in implementing BSC is broken, as in reality, it is only the top management's will (stemming from potential benefits) and measuring performance (across all parts of the organization) along the four quadrants of Finance, Customer, Internal Business Process, and Learning and Growth.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Ergonomic Experimental Analysis of Eye Strain on VDT Users: A Strategic Prevention Perspective

-- P Suresh and R Kesavan

The major objective of this research is to study the occupational hazards of people working with Video Display Terminals (VDTs). The introduction of VDTs in the work place has brought about increased visual complaints such as eye strain, eye soreness, blurred vision and headache. Eye strain is defined as a kind of visual discomfort that occurs due to prolonged study of visual details with reduced eye movements. As this is one of the major problems reported by millions of people working with VDTs world over, studies on eye strain due to continuous exposure to VDT have gained importance. An experimental investigation has been made to study the effects of the viewing angle and distance of users from the VDT, time of exposure, illumination level and font size, on eye strain. The optimal values for these factors on eye strain have been determined.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.