Spotlight on Global I-O
Lori Foster Thompson1
North Carolina State University
1 As always, your comments and suggestions regarding this column are most welcome. Please feel free to e-mail me: lfthompson@ncsu.edu.
In 2009, Shreya Sarkar-Barney and Matt Barney managed to land themselves in what is said to be a veritable playground for I-O psychologists. How did they do it? A. They’re lucky. B. They’re ingenious. C. They relocated to India. D. It is written.
Written on the following pages, that is. Have you been wondering what I-O psychology is like in India? Do you feel it’s high time TIP points its spotlight toward India, a country with a growing population and major implications for the global economy? If so, this column is for you! The following pages provide an excellent overview of I-O psychology in a land far away, compliments of two SIOP members with experience practicing domestically and abroad. Read on for details.
India: Promises and Pitfalls for I-O Psychologists
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Shreya Sarkar-Barney
Human Capital Growth
Matt Barney
Infosys Leadership Institute
With a GDP growth rate between 7% and 9% and an expanding population that will surpass China in 2015, India should be on the radar screen of applied workplace psychologists. It is with optimism about both science and practice that our family of I-O psychologists moved to India. In 2009, Matt was recruited to be responsible for the Infosys Leadership Institute, a large Bangalore-based multinational software firm. This offered a unique opportunity for Shreya to return to her country of birth and grow her talent management consulting firm.
With a median age of only 25, there is an enormous labor force hungry to get ahead and get rich in India’s internal demand-driven economic gold rush. While the rest of the world was reeling under the recession, strong domestic consumption propped up the Indian economy to relatively healthy 6% growth. Efforts in other parts of the world to seek efficiencies and cut costs continue to offer growth opportunities to the Indian outsourcing and technology industries. This has fueled a need for talent that is technically skilled and also effective operating in a professional, global workplace.
Unfortunately, India’s mass education system has failed to supply a skilled workforce that would be considered globally competitive. Children are taught rote memorization and not critical thinking or professional skills such as communication or teamwork. A 2005 study by McKinsey and the Indian IT association NASSCOM suggests, “Currently only about 25% of technical graduates and 10%–15% of general college graduates are suitable for employment in the offshore IT and BPO industries respectively” (p. 16). This is part of the reason why Infosys funds the largest corporate university in the world. To appreciate the scale of the need, consider that, in the next 12 months alone, the Infosys training center in Mysore will develop 15,000 student trainees with minimal, entry-level software skills. The skill shortage has created a huge demand for vocational education institutes, certification programs, and finishing schools to prepare new graduates to enter the workplace. The prime newspaper-ad real estate is typically dominated by educational ads for enrollment in “personality development” programs or “spoken English,” in addition to a variety of software engineering and MBA programs. Compared to the west where the sports page is primary, the national daily newspapers like Times of India, The Hindu, and The Economic Times publish weekly special sections dedicated to education, training, and career advancement. Needless to say, there is a huge cultural emphasis on self-development and success through education.
Opportunities and Challenges
A shortfall in skilled professionals in many business sectors has led to a wide variety of HR challenges at every stage in the employee life cycle. To address the wide variability in skills, there is a need to select for aptitude (e.g., cognitive ability, personality traits, and values that are hard to mold). However, estimates from one of the global consulting houses suggest that only about 25% of the large corporations in India use testing for selection or development. Compared to hiring for the right aptitude and skills, Indian firms generally focus more attention on developing skills through formal training interventions. This is evidenced by companies such as Infosys investing 7 months in paid employee development. Such efforts are quite common across organizations and could partly be due to the economic need to create more jobs for the second most populated country in the world. Similar to other growing economies, there are also challenges around retention of highly skilled talent. Wages keep increasing with a trend toward better perks, thus forcing HR policies to constantly upgrade and find ways to keep employees engaged in and attracted to their work. As one can imagine, the demand for a systematic approach to attract, hire, develop, and manage staff is significant in India, creating an ideal playground for I-O psychologists.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a large I-O community to support this work. The SIOP site lists only a handful of members from India, and the majority of them appear to be in academics. A vast number of the talent management positions are staffed by MBAs or others who have migrated from other disciplines. It is possible to get a master’s and a PhD in industrial psychology through Indian universities. However, the curriculum has arguably failed to keep up with the times due to funding challenges and a traditionally Indian approach to academics.
Due to the small number of I-O psychologists that work in India, OD practices seem to be more popular than I-O psychology. India has a large and well-organized OD community that recently hosted the global OD conference in Hyderabad. In speaking with some of the members and reviewing their Web site (www.odsummitindia.org), it appears that many of the OD practices focus on group interventions popular in the 1960s, such as T-groups. This partly could be due to the matches between such approaches and Indian philosophy, which focuses on communities and interactions that are personal and deeply emotional. Except at the senior-executive levels, there is generally a greater preference for group interventions than individual assessment and coaching. Many still use horoscopes and other traditional methods to recruit staff and make “auspicious” business decisions. It is common practice for resumés in India to include a photograph, age, date and time of birth, horoscope, and marital status. One recent resumé sent to Matt also had information about the candidate’s husband and her ophthalmological correction measurements for each of her eyes, noting she was “short sighted”!
Many project that the Indian economy is at a tipping point. There is a tremendous demand for improving productivity by upgrading skills. This provides multiple avenues for I-O psychologists to help. There are many job openings primarily with multinationals that may have I-O psychologists at their headquarters and need similar skill sets to adapt various interventions to the local needs. For someone looking for opportunities in India, this is the right time. Many of the major global I-O consulting houses are setting up shop in India and have a need for a variety of positions ranging from sales to service delivery (e.g., assessment, competency modeling, and training delivery). Some big areas of need across industry are in leadership and management development. Being a hierarchical culture and a largely young workforce, the demand is for developing young leaders to take on profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities and lead global teams. Many Indian businesses are buying large companies outside of India, such as Tata’s purchase of the Jaguar Land Rover brand (previously UK based), or expanding in Vietnam, Africa, and the Middle East. There is a need to help Indian managers become global managers with an ability to work under labor laws that are much more complex than in India. One unique feature of Indian businesses is that many are family owned. This requires a specific skill set to deal with the strong culture passed down by the family and create a performance-based culture that will be seen as attractive to the nonheirs of the business.
For those seriously looking at living and working in India, it is also important to be aware of some of the challenges. The hardest part is getting used to the poor infrastructure. It is not uncommon to have long power outages and intermittent broadband connections. Also, there is a strong cultural focus on frugality so one needs to learn to make do with fewer resources. There are several things one can do to prepare for working in India. A course in cross-cultural psychology is highly recommended. Many of the GLOBE project studies are extremely useful to understanding how leading in India is different from the rest of the world. Having high levels of patience and adaptability will be good survival skills. In general, people plan their time only a week in advance and have less structured ways of operating, which may impact other people’s calendars. There is less emphasis placed on timeliness, so remaining flexible to when and how things happen will help one avoid frequent frustration.
Personal Accounts
Although we have both acquired experience working as I-O psychologists in the U.S. as well as India, our career paths have certainly differed. Accordingly, we each have distinct insights into the unique aspects of practicing I-O in India. Our individual commentaries on these observations are provided below.
Shreya: Although I continue to do leadership development and training evaluation work with clients around the world, in India I am seeing an increase in demand for helping support collaboration effectiveness between U.S. multinationals and their local partners. This type of work is extremely interesting, almost like looking through a kaleidoscope, with the multiple angles around the issue pointing to challenges related to team effectiveness, cultural differences, skills, resources, processes, and leadership. In particular, I am noticing hidden challenges due to cultural differences. In one case, the Indian and U.S. teams were completely at odds with each other. The Indian team felt that they had overcome insurmountable challenges to meet their U.S. client’s specifications, yet the client was unhappy. The U.S. team on the other hand could not understand what went wrong despite their clear directions. Turns out that each side had an unspoken assumption of what was important. The Indian team went to extraordinary lengths to save costs by building many of the parts in house rather than procuring them. As noted, frugality is a deeply engrained mindset for Indians (long-term orientation per Hofstede). Americans, as a culture, score higher on short-term orientation. This shows up in their focus on speed and having tight timelines with dependencies built into their plan. Delivering the right product a little too late meant the combined team had missed on multiple deliverables, something that was not evident to their Indian partners. Another area one has to be careful about is the use of I-O methods. In general, high-touch approaches (e.g., face-to-face meetings) are required to build trust. If using assessment instruments, American English may not always translate in the way it was intended. I learned this the hard way doing a team survey. An item that read “my performance impacts the performance of my team on the project” was rated very low by the employees in India, which concerned the U.S. collaborators. Upon further probing I learned that many Indian respondents interpreted the item to mean “does a team member’s motivation level impact the other members’ willingness to contribute!”
Matt: A pleasant difference with the people I work with at Infosys is that leaders respect science more than European or North American leaders I’ve worked with, on average. They respect the PhD a great deal. The core science we use isn’t any different, but the way in which I do it is a little different. Indian methods of communication are slightly less direct than what we are used to in the U.S., and saving face, while it is not as critical as it is in Japanese culture, is relatively more sensitive. Things don’t always work as planned, but Indians are used to adapting to adversity much more than people in Europe and North America. One of my biggest changes in the way I work is that I have three telephones and no voicemail at work. Technically, I have voicemail on one of the lines, but no one can tell me the password, and no one uses voicemail anyhow. Dialing a phone number on a regular line or a VOIP line is an enigma, wrapped in a puzzle, baked inside a Rubik’s Cube, so I had to learn to be patient with many obstacles to making a simple call. Most people expect you to answer all your calls all the time. Even though that’s not possible, people will sometimes get upset and send an e-mail indicating that you’re not picking up your phone. Even though everyone I work with speaks English, which is the official business language, I go out of my way to say thank-you and other pleasantries in one of the local languages to show my respect for people whose country I’m living in. They graciously laugh at my lame I-O jokes like, “how do you say ‘homoscedasticity’ in Kannada?”
Conclusion
I-O psychology in India is exciting, and challenging, and worthwhile. The country holds significant promise for both the science and the practice of I-O psychology, even though cultural nuances will require appropriate adjustments, with challenges similar to working in other developing countries. But with 1.2 billion prospective subjects and counting, we savor the opportunity to work here.
Concluding Editorial
So there you have it—an informative synopsis of I-O in India, where opportunities for our science and practice abound. I-O’s inroads into this important area of the world point to an exciting future for our profession and India alike. And with Shreya and Matt in the mix, there’s just no telling how much progress will have occurred by the time the inevitable sequel to Slumdog Millionaire makes its debut. Precisely what that will entail is another topic for another day, but suffice it to say I’m hoping for an I-O heroine whose feedback and goal-setting intervention straightens out all the bad guys before anyone really has a chance to get hurt. Time will tell.
Reference
NASSCOM-McKinsey (2005). NASSCOM-McKinsey Report 2005: Extending India’s leadership of the global IT and BPO industries. Retrieved February 2, 2010, from locations/india/mckinseyonindia/pdf/NASSCOM_McKinsey_Report_2005.pdfwww.mckinsey.com/.