South Asia

In this chapter we are going to analyze some of the main components of the leadership behavior of the sales managers from the Indian industrial companies. Based on the text: Leadership behavior and organizational commitment: a comparative study of American and Indian salespersons by Sanjeev Agarwal, Thomas E DeCarlo and Shyam B.Vyas, we can observe the similarities and differences of leadership behavior between Indian sales managers and American sales managers.

Due to the great importance of the role played by the sales force in the company's performance, it is appropriate to know how those leadership behavioral factors can affect the employees commitment with the company. The two cultural variables that were studied in this research were power distance and individualism. This research shows how these variables interact with the "chief-subordinate" relationship.

To get a better understanding of the findings of this research is necessary to explain two important elements of leadership behavior: consideration and initiation of structure."Consideration is the degree to which managers develop a work climate that promotes subordinates' trust and respect for subordinates' ideas and feelings". Initiation of structure refers to the degree in which managers define the roles of their subordinates in job- related activities, specify procedures and assign tasks.

Another important factor related with the analysis of this research is the role stress, which is composed by two elements: the role ambiguity and the role conflict, the first one is defined as the lack of role clarity that an employee must face when there is no authority who can lead him at the moment to perform certain task. The second one represents the degree of conflict that an employee can find from different conflicting demands that come from internal actors (managers) and external actors (customers).

According to the study, the Indian managerial culture shows a high power distance and low individualism (HPD/LI), just the opposite case shows the American managerial culture (LPD/HI). Based on the previous statements, the researchers made some hypothesis about how do these elements interact between each other according with their respective cultural background. The main outcomes of this research show the following conclusions. In the relationship between initiation of structure, role ambiguity and role conflict, exist a negative correlation in both countries with more strength in the American case, the Indian sales persons don't perceive a decrease of role ambiguity as their managers develop an initiation of structure because the Indian sales persons are strongly dependent of their manager and are conform with this/her leadership behavior , so they take for granted the paternalistic and authoritarian management style. They are prone to accept the manager behavior, meanwhile the Americans value any type of help that their supervisors could offer them, because the American sales persons are used to fix daily work problems by themselves.

Regarding the other relations between consideration and role stress (negative correlation), between consideration and organizational commitment (positive correlation) and between role ambiguity and organizational commitment (negative correlation), both countries have shown similar perspectives and managerial tendencies, the reason could attribute to the fact that sales persons from both countries have received similar sales training programs, have received high level of education and all of them have been exposed to the standardization process that the globalization brings, so this entails to a convergence in the leadership behavior of the sales managers. 

Proposed Question:

1. What are the key challenges for the future development of the outsourcing industry in India. Please provide examples from the case and recommendation to address such challenges.

The workers in the outsourcing sector face a lot of stress due to their demanding activities, most of them characterized by high levels of time efficiency and monotonous tasks. Most Indian employees in the outsourcing industry are college educated, so they have a motivation of being promoted in the company, unfortunately the employees perceive the jobs in this industry as short length activities, this means this sector doesn't  provide a long term career for the employees. In spite of the high wages that employees earn in this industry, the lack of opportunities of professional development is one of the main reasons of the high turnover rate presented  in this sector. Another challenge is the lack of qualified and talented workers to fulfill the strategic charges that this sector requires.

The CAMS human resource area tries to reduce the unconformity and stress levels among employees through certain activities focused on  "bonding and sharing" experiences and knowledge. Also the company complies with statutory requirements in oder that its employees can feel that they have steady jobs.The most advisable action to face all the previous challenges is to develop strategies to increase retention rates such as the implementation of policies that foster the professional promotion among employees.

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Text: Agarwal, Sanjeev, Thomas E DeCarlo, Shyam B. Vyas, & Source:. 1999. Leadership Behavior and Organizational Commitment: A Comparative Study of American and Indian Salespersons. Journal of International Business Studies, 30(4): 727-43.