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The purpose of this paper is to focus on Swami Vivekananda’s teachings on higher self-development through karma yoga – spiritualizing contemporary life in today’s fast-paced world – and on evolving a more humane civilization through the service of enlightened citizens.

Stressing the essential role of self-development in human progress, Swami Vivekananda taught Vedanta to East and West as a practical dynamic philosophy.

With his prophetic vision, he adapted ancient wisdom for modern living in his concept of karma yoga. Extending the idea of “holy” to the whole of human endeavor, whether exploring truths in the world or discovering the light of the soul within, Vivekananda deemed every struggle sacred when pursued with sincere, selfless intent.

Each action taken in the right spirit, Vivekananda taught, can manifest our innate divinity and bring us one step closer to our sublime nature, which acts in the common good.

My study and practice of yoga have impacted my understanding of leadership and changed how I teach it. After providing an overview of the history of yoga, this paper discusses how yoga has informed and influenced my teaching of leadership. The concepts of knowing oneself, Kula, being present, and ethics are central to both yoga and leadership education. The paper also describes the health benefits of practicing yoga for leaders

This paper aims to provide an overview of the relevance and applicability of the Hindu tradition to organizational learning.

Attempting to separate the spiritual from the religious aspects, a primarily theoretical approach is used to delineate the basic concepts in Hinduism and their applicability to various aspects of employee and organizational functioning.

Concepts such as Yoga, Dharma, Karma, Yajna and Lokasamgraha are discussed.

This paper stems from the recognition of cultural differences and the need to explore alternative paradigms to understand and enhance organizational functioning.

This paper's aim is to compare and contrast two ancient philosophies to determine their contribution to leadership. Fresh aspects to inclusiveness and resilience in leadership are to be examined.

The paper uses a conceptual analysis as the basis for future empirical testing. The respective contribution of Sun Zi's Art of War and the Bhagavad Gita to academic and practitioner literature is examined before key traits on leadership that are common in both documents are collated. These features are then investigated on their practical application to business. Based on the research gaps and shortcomings identified, new areas for further research are recommended.

These two ancient texts have contrasting ideas, yet there are areas of complementarity to suggest that Indian and Chinese leaders can learn from each other.

Future research may explore how in different forms of ownership including joint ventures or host country operations the perspectives of leadership can impact on the behaviour of managers towards employees of a different culture.

Both Chinese and Indian cultures are growing in importance. This paper helps leaders from each culture to better understand the different mind‐sets.

Previous research has focused on the contrasts whereas this research focuses on the synergies between the Art of War and the Bhagavad Gita.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the cross‐cultural reliability and validity of the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI‐2) in a cross‐cultural context.

Using a competency‐based approach to social and emotional intelligence (EI), the paper presents data on Indian managers from the manufacturing and service industries collected using self‐report and multi‐rater assessments. Factor analysis explored the latent structure of social and emotional intelligence competencies on the Indian sample. Divergent validity was assessed using a Stress Personality test. Internal reliability of the ECI‐2 was also determined for a sample of 400 Indian managers.

A two‐factor structure has emerged in the cross‐cultural context similar to the latent structure of the construct explored by the test developers of the ECI‐2. However, six items did not have significant loading. ECI‐2 has been found to have statistically significant reliability coefficient and divergent validity with Stress Personality test on the Indian sample.

The competency‐based approach to emotional and social intelligence, with a two‐factor structure, has found empirical evidence on the managerial sample in the Indian context. Future research can test this on other professional groups. Norms can be developed for various professional groups using a competency‐based framework of EI.

ECI‐2 can be used with modification based on the findings for talent management, employee development, counseling and succession planning for Indian managers.

Cross‐cultural validation, in the Indian context, of a competency‐based framework of emotional and social intelligence and its measure is useful for researchers and practitioners and for professional and leadership development of managers.

The purpose of this article, based on the Indian philosophy of Karma that all individual actions have the power to bring joy or sorrow based on the nature of action, is to propose a new construct, salesperson's Karma Orientation, and discuss its antecedents and outcomes.

The paper reviews literature on oriental philosophy of Karma yoga, and on self‐leadership, and self‐control to propose the new construct, its antecedents, and consequences in a sales context.

The paper puts forward four dimensions of Karma orientation of salespersons: work as selfless action, work as duty towards others, detachment from work‐related rewards, and equanimity under environmental influences. Salesperson's Karma orientation is useful for developing relationship with customers, enhances selling effectiveness, ethical behaviors, and spiritual well‐being, by providing the salespersons with a sense of duty, and ownership towards their work.

The concept of Karma orientation would be useful for stressful jobs such as sales, and managers would find it useful as a coping strategy, as well as for improving performance of employees.

The paper proposes a new construct of Karma orientation at an individual boundary spanning sales employee's level. The paper also propose its important antecedents and outcomes.

This study is a part of two sequential studies (quantitative and qualitative) carried out to study the impact of managerial communication on employees’ attitudes and behaviours. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using the critical incident technique, this study explores the effects of managerial communication practices on employees’ happiness, job performance, commitment, absenteeism, and turnover intentions. Totally, 101 employees in three manufacturing organisations in eastern India narrated critical incidents related to happiness and superior performance, unhappiness and inferior performance, absenteeism, and the desire to stay or quit. The incidents were further content-analysed.

Results revealed that collaborative approach, respect and recognition, flexible working arrangements, trust, clear direction, autonomous and challenging tasks are important indicators to make employees happy and drive them towards superior performance. Contrarily, the dominant nature of the superior and more bossism than required, humiliation, biased approach, and lack of flexible working arrangements are detrimental to employees’ performance. Collaborative approach, respect/recognition, person-job match, autonomous and challenging tasks, flexible working arrangements, brand image, and location near hometown are the propellers for continuing service in organisations. Contrarily, hierarchical/dominant approach, humiliation, lack of respect and recognition, biased approach – different rules for different people, monotonous and boring assignments, and uncompetitive pay are the propellers for not continuing service in organisations. Humiliation, lack of flexible arrangements, and overwork are the causes for employees’ absenteeism.

This study is not without limitations. First, there were some critical incidents with apparent overlapping content areas. To overcome this situation, the authors decided to give preference to the primary theme emerging out of an incident. Second, the observations made in this study were limited to descriptions of what happened in only three organisations. This limits the ability to generalise the results.

Organisations can train supervisors to develop people-centric communication practices, communicate with respect and recognition, implement flexible working arrangements, improve job design, involve employees in important decisions, offer them with autonomous and challenging tasks, so that employees realise their full potential and become happy contributors to their organisations.

The study attempted to capture employees’ lived experiences and provided them with narrations of situations that are commonly and uniquely experienced.

Like the quixotic character that never knew that he was speaking all through his life in pure and simple prose, Gandhi never realized that what he was preaching and practicing throughout his life was in fact the basic principles and theories that could be subsumed under the contemporary discipline of political economy (PE). Gandhian political economy (GPE) is replete with many of the characteristics of classical and Marxian political economy and these are mentioned at relevant places throughout this work. It also assimilates some of the major features of contemporary heterodox political economy, in particular, the class analysis of Neo‐Marxism; gender, ethnicity and class analysis of Feminist political economy; the analysis of justice, ethics and institutional trust of social political economy; the analysis of the significance of institutions and institutional change of the institutional‐evolutionary political economy; and the importance of the interdisciplinary focus on contemporary issues like development and international political economy.