Career Advancement of MBAs: A study on the effect of personal, professional,organisational and environmental variables

School of Management Studies, Cochin University of Science and Technology

House Building and Personal Finance-A Study of Salaried Employees in Kerala

School of Management Studies,Cochin University of Science and Technology

Personnel management practices in the co-operative sector in Kerala

A study on the personnel management practices in the co+operative sector in the Kerala State is carried out during the years 1989-91, with the overall objective of assessing the extent of application of modern personnel management concepts in the cooperative organizations in the Kerala State. The specific objectives of the study are to assess the effectiveness of the various personnel management practices followed in the cooperative sector, to analyse the nature and extent of compensating the employees in co—operatives, to measure the level of job satisfaction derived by the employees, to evaluate the industrial relations existing in the co-operative organizations and to suggest, if found necessary, ways and means of toning up the personnel management practices followed in the co-operative sector in Kerala

Emotional Intelligence and Organisational Role Stress — A study among managers in selected industrial organisations in Kerala

Emotional intelligence is very important in organisations and the ability to manage feelings and handle stress is an important aspect of El. Even though a number of studies have been done to prove that E1 is related to organisationally relevant variables like leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, performance, career success etc., and the theoretical grounding for emotional intelligence-stress-relationship seems sound, only a few studies have been done to establish this linkage. This study is an attempt to measure emotional intelligence and organisational role stress of managers working in industrial organisations and to examine the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Organisational Role Stress. It also attempts to explore the influence of personal and occupational variables viz., age, education, gender, marital status, experience, department, type of organisation and designation on emotional intelligence. The investigator has also examined the difference in the level of role stress experienced by junior, middle and senior-level managers. The main objective of the study is to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and organisational role stress.

Influence of personality factors on the consumption of personal care products

The study is significant from both an application perspective of marketing management as well as from an academic angle. The market for personal care products is a highly fragmented one, with intense competition for specific niche segments. It is well known in marketing literature that the bulk of the volume of sale is accounted for by the minority who are the heavy users. This study will help the marketers to identify the personality profile of such a group and understand how the interaction of personality factors at least partially explains differences in consumption. This knowledge might be useful for better segmentation using psychographic variables as well as for designing specific advertisement campaigns to target the vulnerable groups of customers. From a theoretical perspective, the research may contribute to understanding how specific personality variables and their interaction lead to differences in consumption. The knowledge corresponding to self theory, social comparison theory, persuasibility, evidence from psychology of eating disorders: these all may be integrated into a common frame work for explaining consumption of products having a social function.

Personal finance of gulf-returned Keralites

The study is about the Gulf-returned Keralites and their personal financial planning during the Gulf-period. The researcher has examined the nature of their income, expenditure, savings and investments during the Gulf-period and after their return. Even though the Gulf-returned Keralites had remitted huge amounts to Kerala, it appears that the majority of them are struggling hard to make both ends meet. The sample consists of 318 Gulf-returned Keralites selected by employing stratified random sampling technique, from 5 districts. After a pilot study, the data was collected through personal interviews using a structured schedule. In order to find out whether the respondents had personal financial planning during the Gulf-period, the researcher has evaluated 15 elements of personal financeusing a five-point-scale rating technique. The hypotheses were tested using correlation, t-test, chi-square and ANOVA, through SPSS.

Personal Finance of Gazetted Officers in Kerala

The purpose of personal financial management is achievement of personal financial freedom. It is a stage where finance will not be a hindrance against the fulfilment ofthe financial objectives of persons. After counting individual values and preferences we arrive at a standard or normal financial behaviour. Even though individuals differ in their tastes and preferences, there are a very large amount of commonality among them. The financial manager should list out the various financial objectives ofthe family. Then he should make the best choice from among the various alternatives on a priority based system. In short personal finance is concerned with the way in which a person manages his income and expenditure to achieve his personal financial objectives. Thus a proper personal financial planning is essential in every family for attaining financial discipline in the family. The fall ofthejoint family system, the growing financial responsibilities of modern families, limited chance ofincreasing income, growing population, financial insecurity of the government employees, lack of financial freedom, lack of proper personal financial practice and its awareness, the growing suicide rate on account offinancial crisis etc.,make the study a necessity

Development of a Biometric Personal Authentication System Based on Fingerprint and Speech

Biometrics deals with the physiological and behavioral characteristics of an individual to establish identity. Fingerprint based authentication is the most advanced biometric authentication technology. The minutiae based fingerprint identification method offer reasonable identification rate. The feature minutiae map consists of about 70-100 minutia points and matching accuracy is dropping down while the size of database is growing up. Hence it is inevitable to make the size of the fingerprint feature code to be as smaller as possible so that identification may be much easier. In this research, a novel global singularity based fingerprint representation is proposed. Fingerprint baseline, which is the line between distal and intermediate phalangeal joint line in the fingerprint, is taken as the reference line. A polygon is formed with the singularities and the fingerprint baseline. The feature vectors are the polygonal angle, sides, area, type and the ridge counts in between the singularities. 100% recognition rate is achieved in this method. The method is compared with the conventional minutiae based recognition method in terms of computation time, receiver operator characteristics (ROC) and the feature vector length. Speech is a behavioural biometric modality and can be used for identification of a speaker. In this work, MFCC of text dependant speeches are computed and clustered using k-means algorithm. A backpropagation based Artificial Neural Network is trained to identify the clustered speech code. The performance of the neural network classifier is compared with the VQ based Euclidean minimum classifier. Biometric systems that use a single modality are usually affected by problems like noisy sensor data, non-universality and/or lack of distinctiveness of the biometric trait, unacceptable error rates, and spoof attacks. Multifinger feature level fusion based fingerprint recognition is developed and the performances are measured in terms of the ROC curve. Score level fusion of fingerprint and speech based recognition system is done and 100% accuracy is achieved for a considerable range of matching threshold

"Right to Personal Liberty Under the Indian Constitution - With Special Reference to Judicial Process"

The nature and extent of protection secured to personal liberty has been a subject matter of great controversy and debate. The expression "procedure established by law" as a standard of protection for personal liberty has been looked upon as highly unsatisfactory and inadequate. For, unlike the specific attributes of liberty that are separately guaranteed under Art.19, ‘personal liberty‘ as guaranteed by Art.21 does not obligate the .Legislature to comply with the requirements of justice and reasonableness as and when it enchroaches upon that right. Though the concept of ‘personal liberty‘ has received an evolutive and expansive meaning through judicial process, the standard of protection which the judicial process could secure to personal liberty through the interpretation of Art.21 has been far from satisfactory Even after four decades of judicial process in the interpretation of Art.21 the problem of evolving a just and adequate standard of protection for personal liberty in that Article continues to be 21 crucial constitutional issue, craving for a. satisfactory solution. And the present study is a humble attempt to unravel this problem and to Search for a reasonable solution.

A study on the Effect of Psychological Empowerment on Job Satisfaction and Job Related Stress Among the Bank Employees

The present research is carried out to understand how psychological empowerment, job satisfaction and job related stress are related.In banking sector, employees are less satisfied and less motivated than employees in other lines of work (Kelley, 1990; Bajpai, Naval and Deepak, 2004). The banking industry also suffers from high employee turnover rate (Branham, 2005; Nelson, 2007) and high level of stress (Chen and Lien, 2008). There are no adequate studies linking psychological empowerment and job satisfaction, stress, turnover etc. among employees of banking sector. Lack of psychological empowerment could be a reason for these problems faced by banking sector. Further majority of studies in psychological empowerment are carried out in manufacturing sector and studies in service sector are concentrated on hotel industry and hospitals. Empowerment takes different forms in different contexts (Zimmerman, 1995). In the light of above discussion, the present research is directed to explore the dimensions of psychological empowerment of employees in banking sector and to find out whether high psychological empowerment can increase job satisfaction and reduce job related stress among employees in banking sector

“A Study on Human Resource Management Practices in Private Hospitals in Kerala”

The healthcare sector in Kerala is witnessing a spiralling growth due to the healthy economic development and the serious outlook of individuals towards personal health. Private sector is thriving exuberantly well since there is a wide gap between demand and supply for healthcare due to the lack of government initiatives. The proliferation of these private hospitals have paved the way for many unhealthy practices like poor working conditions, low wages, excess workload and lack of retirement and welfare measures to the employees. This state of affairs demanded a serious investigation into the functioning of the private hospitals in Kerala, especially on the human resource management practices, as the success of every organisation depends on the satisfaction level of its employees, which, in turn, will benefit the consumer, i.e., the patients. Hence the present study was undertaken to find out the extent of human resource management practices in private hospitals in Kerala with a view to suggest appropriate remedial measures wherever required

Cumulative Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Respect to Compact Segment Car Users

Earlier studies on measurement of customer satisfaction are based on either transaction specific or overall approaches. The transaction specific approach evaluates customer satisfaction with single components in the whole purchase process but the overall satisfaction was based on all the encounters or experiences to the customer throughout the purchase process. Consumers will comment on particular events of their purchase process when asked about transaction-specific satisfaction and they will comment their overall impression and general experiences in overall satisfaction (Bitner & Hubbert 1994) Through a critical review on the literature, it has been identified a new approaches to customer satisfaction, say, cumulative approaches that can be more useful than overall and transaction specific approaches for strategic decision making (Fornell et al 1996). The cumulative approach to customer satisfaction doesn’t study earlier due to the difficulty in operationalization of the concept. But the influencers of customer satisfaction are context specific and the prevailing models doesn’t give the sources of variations in the satisfaction, the importance of cumulative approaches to customer satisfaction has emerges that lights to a new research. The current study has focused to explore the influencers of overall customer satisfaction to form individual elements that can be used to identify the cumulative customer satisfaction.

A study on the Effect of Psychological Empowerment on Job Satisfaction and Job Related Stress Among the Bank Employees

This study focuses on psychological empowerment of employees in banking sector because of the reasons stated below: Firstly, very little research has been conducted in understanding empowerment as a psychological construct. Majority of the studies have been conducted on the various empowerment practices in the organizations. Secondly, there is no empirical evidence that the empowerment practice will create a subjective feeling of empowerment within the individual. Employee empowerment will be effective only if the employees actually experience the empowerment. Even if the organizations have the empowerment practices like providing power and open communication it is not necessary that the employee is empowered. Empowerment describes only the condition of work environment. It does not describe employees’ response to these conditions. These responses form the basis for psychological empowerment

Evolutionäres Personal- und Organisationsentwicklungssystem (EPOS)

Im Rahmen des Programms Lernkulturentwicklung hat die Arbeitsgemeinschaft berufliche Weiterbildungsforschung (ABWF) das Schulzentrum/Akademie Silberburg (AKAS) für zunächst zwei Jahre (2001-2002) gefördert, mit dem Ziel neuartige Wege zu einem umfassenden Lernkulturwandel zu erproben. Mit der Konzipierung und wiss. Begleitung wurden die Projektgruppe Zukunftsmoderation der Universität Kassel unter Leitung von Prof. Dr. Olaf-Axel Burow beauftragt. Nachfolgend geben wir einen Einblick in erste Erfahrungen mit dem Projekt und skizzieren einige Elemente unseres "Evolutionären Personal- und Organisationsentwicklungssystems" (EPOS). Schulentwicklung - so unsere These - ist dann besonders folgenreich, wenn - auf freiwilliger Basis - ein evolutionärer Prozess der integrierten Personal- und Organisationsentwicklung eingeleitet wird. Dieser Prozess muss von Lehrer/innen, Schüler/innen, der Geschäftsleitung sowie des sonstigen Personals getragen werden. Aufgabe der Berater/innen ist es, bedarfsorientiert Möglichkeitsräume und Trainingsangebote zur Verfügung zu stellen, um den evolutionären Prozess anzustoßen und zu unterstützen. Als besonders fruchtbar haben sich dabei Verfahren der prozessorientierten Zukunfsmoderation sowie des Biographischen Lernens erwiesen.

Untersuchungen zu kumulativen psychischen und physiologischen Effekten des fliegenden Personals auf der Kurzstrecke

Die fliegerische Tätigkeit auf der Kurzstrecke in der zivilen Luftfahrt unterliegt arbeitsspezifischen Belastungsfaktoren, die sich in wesentlichen Punkten von denen auf der Langstrecke unterscheiden. Eine hohe Arbeitsbelastung auf der Kurzstrecke ist mit vielen Starts und Landungen am Tag verbunden. Neben der Anzahl der Flugabschnitte können auch lange Flugdienstzeiten und/oder unregelmäßige Arbeitszeiten sowie der Zeitdruck während der Einsätze auf der Kurzstrecke zur Belastung für Cockpitbesatzungsmitglieder werden und zu Ermüdungserscheinungen führen. Bisher wurden flugmedizinische und -psychologische Daten hauptsächlich auf der Langstrecke in Bezug auf die Auswirkungen der Jet-Leg Symptomatik und kaum auf der Kurzstrecke erhoben. Deshalb wurde im Rahmen des DLR- Projekts „Untersuchungen zu kumulativen psychischen und physiologischen Effekten des fliegenden Personals auf der Kurzstrecke“ eine Langzeituntersuchung zur Belastung/Beanspruchung, Ermüdung sowie Erholung des Cockpitpersonals auf der Kurzstrecke über jeweils 56 Tage durchgeführt. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Deutschen Lufthansa AG dauerte die Untersuchung zu den Auswirkungen arbeitsspezifischer Belastungsfaktoren auf die Cockpitbesatzungsmitglieder der Boeing 737-Flotte von 2003 bis 2006. ZIEL: Unter Berücksichtigung theoretisch fundierter arbeitspsychologischer Konzepte war das Ziel der Studie, kumulative und akute Effekte auf das Schlaf-Wach-Verhalten, auf die Belastung/Beanspruchung sowie auf die Müdigkeit zu identifizieren, die durch aufeinander folgende Einsätze auf der Kurzstrecke innerhalb eines Zeitraums von acht Wochen auftreten können. Hierfür wurden Daten von 29 Piloten (N=13 Kapitäne; N=16 Erste Offiziere) aufgezeichnet. Das Durchschnittsalter lag bei 33,8 ± 7,9 Jahren (Kapitäne: 42,0 ± 3,8 Jahre; Erste Offiziere: 27,4 ± 2,2 Jahre). METHODEN: Über ein Handheld PC konnten effizient Fragebögen bearbeitet und das Sleep Log sowie das Flight Log geführt werden. Die subjektive Ermüdung und Arbeitsbeanspruchung wurden durch standardisierte Fragebögen (z.B. Ermüdungsskala von Samn & Perelli (1982), NASA-TLX) operationalisiert. Im Sleep Log und im Flight Log wurden das Schlaf-Wach-Verhalten sowie flugspezifische Daten dokumentiert (z.B. Dienstbeginn, Dienstende, Flugabschnitte, Zielorte, etc.). Der Schlaf-Wach-Zyklus wurde mittels der Aktimetrie während des gesamten Messverlaufs aufgezeichnet. Die objektive Leistungsfähigkeit wurde täglich morgens und abends mit Hilfe einer computergestützten Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) nach Dinges & Powell (1985) erfasst. Die Leistung in der PVT diente als Indikator für die Ermüdung eines Piloten. Zusätzliche Befragungen mit Paper-Pencil-Fragebögen sollten Aufschluss über relevante, psychosoziale Randbedingungen geben, die bei den täglichen Erhebungen nicht berücksichtigt wurden (z.B. Arbeitszufriedenheit; Essgewohnheiten; Kollegenbeziehungen). ERGEBNISSE: Unter Beachtung kumulativer Effekte wurde über die Studiendauer keine Veränderung in der Schlafqualität und im Schlafbedürfnis festgestellt. Die Müdigkeit nahm dagegen während der achtwöchigen Untersuchung zu. Die Reaktionszeit in der PVT zeigte an Flugdiensttagen eine Verschlechterung über die Zeit. Insgesamt wurden keine kritischen längerfristigen Effekte analysiert. Akute signifikante Effekte wurden bei der Ermüdung, der Gesamtbelastung und der Leistungsfähigkeit an Flugdiensttagen gefunden. Die Ermüdung als auch die Gesamtbelastung stiegen bei zunehmender Flugdienstdauer und Leganzahl und die Leistung nahm in der PVT ab. Der „time on task“ Effekt zeigte sich besonders in der Ermüdung durch die fliegerische Tätigkeit ab einer Flugdienstzeit von > 10 Stunden und > 4 Legs pro Tag. SCHLUSSFOLGERUNG: Mit diesen Ergebnissen konnte eine wissenschaftliche Datenbasis geschaffen werden aus der Empfehlungen resultieren, wie die Einsatzplanung für das Cockpitpersonal auf der Kurzstrecke unter flugmedizinischen und flugpsychologischen Gesichtspunkten optimiert werden kann. Zudem kann ein sachgerechter Beitrag im Rahmen der Diskussion zur Flugdienst- und Ruhezeitenregelung auf europäischer Ebene geleistet werden.