Payyazhi Jayashree

The effect of autonomy, training opportunities, age and salaries on job satisfaction in the South East Asian retail petroleum industry

South East Asian petroleum retailers are under considerable pressure to improve service quality by reducing turnover. An empirical methodology from this industry determined the extent to which job characteristics, training opportunities, age and salary influenced the level of job satisfaction, an indicator of turnover. Responses are reported on a random sample of 165 site employees (a 68% response rate) of a Singaporean retail petroleum firm. A restricted multivariate regression model of autonomy and training opportunities explained the majority (35.4%) of the variability of job satisfaction. Age did not moderate these relationships, except for employees >21 years of age, who reported enhanced job satisfaction with additional salary. Human Capital theory, Life Cycle theory and Job Enrichment theory are invoked and explored in the context of these findings in the South East Asian retail petroleum industry. In the South East Asian retail petroleum industry, jobs providing employees with the opportunity to undertake a variety of tasks that enhanced the experienced meaningfulness of work are likely to promote job satisfaction, reduce turnover and increase the quality of service.

Aligning change deployment: a Balanced Scorecard approach

Purpose – Change literature emphasizes the significance of aligning change at a systemic level for sustained effectiveness of strategic change initiatives. While this body of literature emphasizes the significance of psychological and process dimensions of managing change, research on an integrated and strategic approach to deploy, track, measure and sustain large‐scale changes has been limited and inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in the literature to propose a holistic conceptual framework for identifying, formulating, deploying, measuring, aligning and tracking strategic changes in organizations.Design/methodology/approach – Specifically, core concepts drawn from scholarly literature and practitioner writings from distinct fields of change management and strategy deployment tools, primarily the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as proposed by Kaplan and Norton, are reviewed, synthesized and critiqued, to inform and advance the integrated framework proposed.Findings – The suggested a...

Leadership Development Programs: Investigating the Impact of Contextual and Cultural Factors on LDP Effectiveness in United Arab Emirates

The interest in leadership continues to grow over the past few decades. Leadership Development Programs (LDPs) have become a priority for all sectors, especially for the public sector. However, LDPs tend to be based on Western leadership theories, and predominantly utilize Western leadership development approaches, and do not consider the influence of national culture in their utilization, namely high-context cultures, as exists in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This exploratory study focuses on elucidating leadership conceptualizations among Emirati leaders identifying their perceptions of the factors that impact on LDPs and leadership outcomes in the UAE public sector. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 leaders from three Dubai government organisations and data were analyzed using NVivo 10. The significance of the findings of the study are: (1) leadership conceptualizations were based on the common themes of inspiring others and communication, (2) mentoring and coaching were noted to be among the best mechanisms utilized in LDPs, (3) leadership challenges included access to financial resources, adapting to ‘smart’ government, and building and retention of leaders– hence the need for effective LDPs. The study provides a unique and significant contextual contribution highlighting improvement in opportunities for leadership development programs in the UAE public sector.

Attainment and enactment of leadership among women in the United Arab Emirates: Proposing relevant theoretical foundations

Scholarly research on women and leadership within the Arab Middle East (AME) region is still in its infancy, despite significant developments in the regional socio-economic context. This conceptual paper presents a review of the Western and Arab Middle East literature, focusing on key aspects such as gender role expectations, gender stereotypes, and leadership evaluation prejudice as they relate to women and leadership. We also highlight the influence of contextual variables identified in the AME literature, such as traditional and contemporary socio-cultural norms. While this literature provides rich information on the issues of womens leadership in the region, it falls behind the Western literature in terms of established theoretical foundations. We suggest that the context-based application of relevant theoretical perspectives to research on womens leadership in the AME region, can generate potential adaptations of existing theory, or highlight the influences of new variables.

Case 11: Gender Inclusive Leadership for Innovation and Change: An HR Head’s Reflections

Therese Sevaldsen was the Head of Human Resources at Philips Middle East and Turkey, based in the regional headquarters in Dubai, UAE. Throughout her years at Philips, she had led major HR transformation projects. Her passion, dedication and expertise had placed her as an influential role model at Philips. She was known to be business oriented, passionate about people, and a strong advocate for women in leadership. She adopted a leadership style which was inclusive and based on trust. In addition, she tried to be an inspirational leader, providing clear direction, encouraging her team to challenge the status quo, and leading them to implement new innovative HR solutions that better served internal and external customers. Prior to her role at Phillips, Therese was the Head of HR for Schneider Electric in Dubai, a fortune 500 Company with 2000 employees across 14 countries, and 1 billion EUR revenue. Before this she had a number of business partner roles in Schneider Electric and other companies in the lighting and high tech industry. Therese was a mother of two school-aged boys. She enjoyed balancing her personal life with a very successful career. Activities like building Lego structures with her boys, and family Sci-Fi movie evenings gave her immense pleasure. She had just returned from a Best Practices session, held this morning at the Dubai Business Women’s Council, as part of the International Women’s Day celebrationsfor 2017, in which her CEO had spoken about the various steps Philips was taking to ensure gender equality. It was only 2 days before, that Therese and her team at Philips MET had received news that they had won an award for being among the best places to work within the UAE. This accolade was further validation for the key value espoused by Philips, which had people at its core (Exhibit 1). Further, as the Performance highlights in 2015 indicated, 1.7 billion lives had been improved by Phillips Green Products alone, 0.88 billion lives by Phillips Care Products and 0.3 billion by Phillips wellbeing products (Philips Annual Report 2015, and Exhibit 2).