Netra Neelam

Perceived value of internship experience: a try before you leap

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how internship value is manifested in the context of a business school. The authors have examined the internship experience in terms of experiential learning and employability. Specifically, the authors investigate the factors that determine internship at four phases: design, conduct, evaluation and feedback. Design/methodology/approach The authors have applied a mixed method approach. In all, 110 students of a busines school were first surveyed on their expectation, motivation and level of preparation through a self-administered questionnaire before internship. Based on the survey result, eight of these students were interviewed in details about internship expectations from industry, the selection process for internship, communications or exchanges between intern and companies prior to internship and perceived industry expectation from interns. At the next phase, authors used a qualitative research approach by conducting semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 interns and their mentors after internship period. They were interviewed on design, conduct, evaluation and feedback process of the internship. Interviews tried capture what kind of leader-member exchange led to satisfactory internship experience and outcome from view of both inter and mentor. Findings The authors find that at various stages of internship program quality of mentor – intern exchanges (as defined by leadership exchange theory), and task characteristics as indicated by autonomy, task variety, task significance and performance feedback determine intern’s performance. An intern’s performance is antecedent to an intern’s and a mentor’s satisfaction and overall internship value. The authors also found that intrinsic capability of intern such as critical thinking ability and learning orientation result in enhanced value of internship experience. The proposed models, postulate that at designing stage, lower the level of communication from employers, higher the feeling of ambiguity and lower the perceived internship value in terms of experiential learning and perceived employability. Feeling of ambiguity is moderated by existence of prior work experience of interns. At conduction stage, mentor-intern exchange is directly related to flexibility in structure of the program and inversely related to dependency on peer learning. Mentor-intern exchange also related to mentor and intern’s learning value. However, the learning value is moderated by learning orientation of the intern. Originality/value The authors have tried the summer internship experience from the perspective of interns and mentors. This is the uniqueness of the research.

A comparative study of learning organisation practices of Indian businesses

Purpose: In this study we compared the learning organisation practices of Indian Businesses across sectors. Methodology: The study is based on a sample of 406 managers of banking, information technology and information technology enabled services (IT/ITES), manufacturing, hotel & hospitality and hospital and healthcare sectors. Learning organisations have been assessed through lens of holistic framework, strategic thrust, shared vision, empowerment, information flow, emotional maturity or internality, learning and synergy which are considered as managerial levers of dynamic capability. Findings: It was found that profiles of Indian businesses are perceived to have low to medium level performance in dimensions of learning organisation (LO) practices across sectors. They are found to be low in internality or emotional maturity but high in strategic thrust. Among the business sectors, hotel & hospitality services & manufacturing industries have significantly higher LO scores Significance of dimensions of LO differ across sectors as captured through sector-wise exploratory factorial analysis (EFA).

An empirical study on different motivational level of students across two disciplines: does discipline of study matter?

The understanding of motivation factors of students at undergraduate level may bring about insights into understanding their desire to pursue various career options. This present piece of empirical study aims to highlight if there is any difference in the motivational level among the undergraduate students across two disciplines: management and design on the McClellands three basic motives for behaviour i.e. power, achievement and affiliation. Results indicate significant difference in power and achievement motivations between the two groups of students with management students having significantly higher power motivation and significantly lower achievement motivation than the students of design discipline, though both the groups of students have high achievement orientation.

Brand Awareness Quotient: A Metric for Effectiveness of Employer Branding Initiatives

There is a need to appropriately measure the effectiveness of Employer branding initiatives taken by an organization. There are a lot of questions to be addressed while measuring the effectiveness of the past or existing initiatives and formulating a new Employer branding strategy such as: Do the objectives of the Employer branding completely meet the initiative? What is the reach of the initiatives? Whether to continue with the same initiative or not in future? Hence while designing a new improved Employer branding strategy, there needs to be an appropriate initiative measurement methodology which can address the above questions quantitatively. This paper is an attempt to create A matrix “Brand Awareness Quotient” which will help in measuring the efficacy and support decision making for formulating the new strategy the same. This quantitative way of scoring and analyzing each and every initiative provides a 360-degree overview of the complete Employer branding strategy of the organization. KEywoRdS Awareness, Brand, Employer, Matrix, Quotient, Strategy