Asia-Pacific Journal of Management Research and Innovation

This paper investigates in the context of the Indian markets the linkage between the effects of an inverted yield curve and the performance of stocks of different market capitalizations i.e. the small, big and mid-cap stocks for the period 2007–09. An attempt was made to find out if there is any particular stock group that performed significantly well during the period of inverted yield curve and more specifically if there is a ‘Big Firm Effect’ associated with the Yield Curve Inversion wherein the Big-cap stocks outperform the mid and the small stocks in the post inversion period. The study indicates that in the case of Indian markets there is no Big firm Effect associated with the inverted yield-curve phenomenon which is unlike the results of the studies based on the US market. Thus the investors in the Indian market should be careful while taking any investment decision based on the inverted yield curve phenomenon as its role and implications are quite different here in India as opposed to the developed markets like the USA.

In the age of transnational capitalism, significant amounts of capital are flowing from developed world to emerging economies like India. An important feature of the development of stock market in India has been the growing participation of Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) in the last 15 years. In India, major portion of FIIs has gone into equities since its inception in 1990's. Given the huge volume of these flows, especially after 2003, its impact on domestic financial market is worthy of a rigorous empirical analysis. The existing literature suggests that the short-term nature of FII has a possibility of bidirectional causality running between it and stock returns. As the Indian equity market is growing, the trend and future prospects in FIIs has become a topic of great concern. The paper is intended at exploring the causal relationship between FIIs inflows and volatility in indices of NSE by adopting Granger Causality test in a bivariate VAR framework. The objective of paper was to explore answer to the research question “whether movements in FIIs inflows have an effect on stock market returns or movements in stock market returns have an effect on direction of FIIs inflows in India in particularly at National Stock Exchange, one of the fastest emerging stock markets with high volatility. The analysis covered daily data series on FIIs inflows and S&P CNX NIFTY for seven financial years from April 2003 to March 2010. To investigate whether the data is stationary or not, the researchers used Augmented Dickey Fuller test and Phillips Perron test.

Recent trend shows that Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) has become one of the popular and dependable methods of raising cash. This paper aims at understanding the waves and pattern of Indian IPOs. It was found that most of the IPOs were from private sector companies. The industry-wise trend in IPOs showed that most of the IPOs were launched by IT sector companies. It was observed that year 1999–2000 and year 2005–06 was best in terms of investors' response whereas the period from 2001 to 2003 was worst in terms of investors' optimism. Current waves of Indian IPOs are divided into hot market IPOs and cold market IPOs. A multivariate regression model is applied to empirically analyze issuers' approach to time their issue with hot market condition. The result suggests that Market timers, identified as firms that go public when the market is hot, tried to maximize the total proceeds at the time of IPO.

Indian stock market has witnessed various confrontations during last two decades resulting into occurrence of alternate phases of the market cycle. The recent financial crisis occurred in the world stock markets has caused vigorous movements in the Indian stock markets, but India has emerged as one of the soundest emerging economies of the world after this crisis. The present study is focused to examine the time varying volatility of Indian stock market specifically in equity market and has considered S&P CNX Nifty index of NSE (National Stock Exchange) for a period of approximately a decade, i.e., March 2001 to October 2010. For the alleged purpose, a total of 2415 daily observations of closing value of market proxy have been considered for all empirical tests for the study period. It is further destined to study whether there is an improvement in the persistence of stock market volatility during last decade or not. The findings of the study documented that the Indian equity market has witnessed the prevalence of time varying volatility where the past volatility has more significant impact on the current volatility. The identification of persistence of conditional volatility can help the investors to forecast their returns from equity market under alternate market phenomenon.

Inclusive growth refers to ensuring that all the phases of development (designing, implementation, monitoring, evaluation) include the whole population of economy. The primary objective of this research is to illustrate and assess the role of microfinance outreach by MFIs towards bringing inclusive growth in Assam. Top 34 MFIs are selected based on their number of active clients. Primary data is collected from MFIs during June — October, 2010. The study concludes that the microfinance outreach by MFIs of Assam is growing at a faster pace of 38.51% in the last three years and also playing an important role in providing financial services to the poorer section of the society — not reached by the formal banking and other financial systems. The results of this study indicate that the aggregate outreach of the MFIs of Assam is 1.30% of the total population and 3.77% of the poor against the national outreach of 5%. Finally, the study concludes that the aggregate outreach rate of Assam is much lower than the national average, but given the policy environment growth in outreach by MFIs is satisfactory.

With the advent of e-banking and globalization, the banking sector in India is getting fierce day-by-day, making it difficult for the banking organization to manage the competition effectively. The key lies in gaining competitive advantage in today's era of competition, paying attention to more critical service quality attributes as a part of customer service management with respect to the internet banking. Though many studies have been undertaken to address the issue of identification of determinants of internet banking service quality, but research on the examination of key attributes of internet banking service quality fostering customers' preference towards internet banking offerings of a particular bank seems to be virtually unexplored. Against this backdrop, the present study aims at exploring key antecedents of e-service quality that can lead customer preference towards internet banking offerings of a particular bank. To achieve this objective, the study conducts discriminant analysis to screen the perception of customers towards public sector bank's and private sector bank' internet banking service quality and to find out which variables are relatively better in predicting customers' preference towards internet banking offerings of a particular bank. This research has implications for bank marketers as well as for researchers interested in online marketing.

A decade of financial sector reforms has strengthened the fundamentals of Indian economy and paved the way for efficiency in operating performance of the banks. The most important achievement of the financial sector reforms is to bring a marked improvement in the financial health of commercial banks with respect to capital adequacy, profitability, asset quality and risk management. Now banks have to compete not only with the same business line but also with mutual fund, insurance, post office and NBFCs to attract the customers and they have to adopt the technology-oriented reforms to stay in their business. Further deregulation has opened up new opportunities for banks to enhance their revenues by diversifying into investment banking, insurance, credit cards, depository services, mortgage financing etc. A positive outcome of competition is the emergence of choice system in selecting the services by the customers and increased levels of sophistication and technology in banks have facilitated the customers to get the services at their door-step. the government also has adopted many initiatives, which changed the face of traditional banking sectors. In the light of the recent measures initiated by the government, the wings of the banks have spread across the country to improve their operating performance. This paper has made an attempt to analyze the operating performance of the Indian banking sector on the basis of the indicators like Capital adequacy ratio, Non-performing Assets (NPA), Cost of funds, Return on funds, Spread and Credit — Deposit ratio.

The application of information and communication technologies in developing countries represents an important tool that can determine economic development and prosperity. One of the main areas in which technology can have a powerful impact on the economic activity is the introduction of Internet banking and multichannel banking services. The paper investigates and analyzes the present situation of multichannel banking in India. This paper examine the adoption and impact of ATM, Internet banking and Tele-banking services on customer satisfaction and retention by leading Indian banks. The ICT channels have positive impact on the customer satisfaction. Some characteristics such as availability of cash and location/proximity of ATM, time to process request has very high customer satisfaction across both private sector banks and public sector banks

The philosophy of quality management cannot be deliberated upon without understanding the role of Total Quality Management (TQM) in problem solving and defect prevention in day-to-day management and emergence of Six Sigma arising out of the lacunae of TQM. With the modern marketing relying heavily on customer satisfaction and product quality, these techniques have become inevitable for every modern business organisation. The present study is an attempt to highlight the major concerns of TQM and Six Sigma, their components, advantages and impact on customer satisfaction. The paper also seeks to discuss two case studies on Six Sigma implementation, explaining how it leads to improvement in service along with cost saving to the company.

Risks are unavoidable in almost every construction project whether it is building projects, civil works, or any other type of construction projects. Risk is inherent in all human endeavors, including construction activities, and the risk factors involved are diverse and varied. Managing construction project risks is considered as compulsory for any project to be successful. Thus, this study aims to identify and classify the types of construction project risks, to evaluate the level of construction project risks and finally, to identify the methods available to reduce or mitigate the construction project risks. This study also demonstrates a quantitative approach to Construction Risk Management through Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The entire methodology is explained through a case study of the Delhi metro bridge collapse and its effectiveness in building a speedy and well judged response is demonstrated.

In this paper, an attempt was made to study the leadership styles and orientation of sales managers in the insurance sector. The sales managers are team leaders, who have to motivate, guide and coach the members towards key result. To study the leadership styles exercised by the sales managers, orientation for task and orientation for people were examined. Their scores were plotted into Blake and Mouton's managerial grid matrix to understand their leadership styles. 60 sales managers of private insurance companies in Vellore were identified for the study through snow ball technique of sampling. The result revealed that the size of the team was significantly related to frequency of team meetings and achievement of targets. Also, task orientation and people orientation were considered relatively important by the sales managers in leading their team. 96.7% of the respondents exhibited Team Leader style in varying degrees.

The study attempts to find popular and unpopular television programme categories among the Indian audience and its implications for commercial broadcasters and advertisers. Empirical analysis of data collected from 520 respondents revealed that programme categories popular among the respondents are soap operas, infotainment, news, reality shows and movies. The programme categories which are unpopular among the respondents are teleshopping, travel shows, super natural thrillers, programmes for children and sports. However, lacking widespread popularity, these programme categories are popular in niches. These results further build upon available TRPs, since TRPs are only available for few top programme categories. Also, TRPs fail to establish niches in which specific programmes are popular. It is therefore implied that to ensure profits, commercial broadcasters and advertisers must select popular programme categories. They can also benefit by correlating viewership statistics with age and catering to the resultant niches such as tele-shoppers, business enthusiasts, sports lovers etc.

The agency-client relationship is a very complex topic with many differing opinions on what makes a successful or unsuccessful relationship. There is no single factor which cements a strong bond between the agencies and the clients. It's a multitude of them, which makes it difficult to pinpoint a particular aspect and which could be responsible for making or breaking an agency-client relationship. A client does not approach an agency only because it produces creative stuff or it has media strength. The Client's turnover situation arises even when a thorough selection process has been used, and the various guidelines for liaison and coordination with the agency have been followed in the right spirit. In this context the research study has carried out by taking into consideration of 25 leading ad-agencies in New Delhi, offering services to both national and international clients and 50 clients these ad-agencies with the following specific objectives were i) the reasons behind the client's turnover from one ad-agency to another stated by the clients, ii) reasons quoted by the ad-agency for the clients turnover and iii) the steps taken by the ad-agency to retain their clients. The main finding of this study is the reasons for broken agency-client relationships are complex and very varied. However, the study reveals failure in understanding the clients needs, poor agency performance; lack of confidence, poor creativity appear to explain most failed agency-client relationships.

When we speak about the term “Women Entrepreneurship” we mean, an act of business ownership and business creation that empowers women economically, increases their economic strength as well as position in society. Hence women-entrepreneurs have been making a considerable impact in all most all the segments of the economy which is more than 25% of all kinds of business. In India “Entrepreneurship” is very limited amongst women especially in the formal sector, which is less than 5% of business during the last two decades however, Indian women have entered the field of entrepreneurship in increasing numbers. With the emergence and growth of their businesses, they have contributed to the Indian economy & society. These women entrepreneurs have entered many industries and sectors. Many of the earlier obstacles to their success have been removed, yet some still remain. Further, there has been much progress in the training and development of women entrepreneurs within public policy and academic programs.

The present study attempts to investigate the most preferred leadership behaviors among the transformational and transactional leadership styles and its impact on Employees' organizational commitment in BHEL. For this study 158 sample respondents had been drawn out from among the Senior Engineers and the Trainee Engineers group. Statistical tools like One-Way ANOVA, Correlation analysis and Regression analysis were used to find out whether there was any significant difference in the leadership styles based on the position and pay and to find out the degree of association between preferred leadership styles and organizational commitment. The results of the study concluded that while the positional identity of the respondent had some significant impact on leadership style perception and organizational commitment, salary did not seem to make a difference from among the sample respondents.

Increasingly, people choose ecological products when they do the shopping, not only because it is a healthier option but also because it helps to sustain the environment for future generations. They are prepared to switch products for ecological reasons and stop buying products from companies that cause pollution. Firms and other economic institutions are aware of the importance of reflecting these attitudes towards the environment in developing their products. This paper is focused on environmental attitudes as meaningful mediator of ecological behavior. A three-dimensional approach to this variable has been developed, which addresses its emotional, cognitive and co native components. A random sample survey of 384 individuals was used to verify the conceptual model and framework. This model was assessed initially by principal factor analysis and subsequently, by reproduced correlation. Findings of this study showed that environmental attitudes have a significant effect on ecological behaviour.

Group level variables such as group task, group process, group composition, group cohesiveness and group structure have been found to have effect on the behaviour and affective states of their members. Hence there is a strong need to device a comprehensive understanding of the effects of group factors on the individual with the consideration of the relationships among these group factors and their relative importance in predicting commitment. Four different firms situated in different localities in Chennai city have participated in this study and purposive sampling was adopted for the selection of 475 employees from these firms. A structured questionnaire was distributed and collected data were analysed using hierarchical stepwise multiple regression analysis to assess the extent of variance in commitment can be explained by group factors. The results show that the task autonomy feedback, task related support, task interdependence, task variety and work group climate have emerged as important predictors of both organizational and job commitment in the diverse organization.

The potential for increased levels of stress in the contemporary work environment has made work stress a burgeoning area of concern for individuals and organisations. However, the organizational and work related factors do not lead to stress unless perceived as stressful by the individual employees. The literature has underlined the importance of individual differences in explaining the phenomenon of work stress and has strived for convergence of the diversity in the level of work stress on account of the presence of difference in individuals. It is with this background that present composition has been designed to comprehend those individual differences which account for variation in work stress among the employees. Taking the sample of 575 employees working in various sub-sectors of service sector of Jammu & Kashmir (India), the study has documented the existence of significant differences between the level of work stress and personal characteristics like age, gross monthly salary, work experience, marital status and educational qualification besides the personality traits, namely, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. Thus, study recommends that in addition to the stressors in work environment, the organisations should devise and invest in strategies that recognise the individual differences.