Search results

“NTL suffered huge losses in its foreign exchange hedging activities as its highly complex leveraged structured products backfired badly in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 and 2008. The CFO and the Treasury head have both been sacked, and Joshi, the new CFO, has embraced aggressive litigation as NTL's survival strategy to cope with the losses that threaten its solvency. In the meantime, NTL also faces tax investigations and whistleblower allegations of fraud, and it finds that the record-keeping of its derivative transactions was hopelessly incomplete and patchy. A complete reconstruction of the entire derivative transaction history is the only way to rebuild trust, and that task falls on Reddy, a seasoned derivatives expert brought in by the Board specifically for this purpose.

In this dire situation, Seth, the founder Chairman of NTL decides that NTL needs to put all this behind it and focus on rebuilding the business. The challenge for Seth, Joshi and Reddy is to go about doing this in an environment that offers very few rays of hope.”

It is well known that it is difficult to dislodge incumbents if new entrants provide identical services via identical channels. Hence, it was expected that, especially in a broadband world, the main competition for fixed‐wire networks would come from cable operators. The UK was one of the first countries in Europe to develop cable as a practical alternative to fixed‐wire telephony, but in the event not only was the initial structure of the industry seriously flawed but the cost of creating cable networks proved to be a recipe for bankruptcy. However, once restructured post‐bankruptcy, the remaining two cable operators may finally fulfil their destiny.

Northern Textiles (NTL) used highly complex derivatives to hedge its currency risk, and these structured products have been profitable in the past. But in 2008, unanticipated movements in exchange rates have led to serious losses. Seth, the Chairman of NTL, has come to know about the losses on a specific deal, but the Treasurer has ensured that he is the only person who understands the derivative book in its entirety. Though Seth is not aware of how grave the problem is, he realizes that he must review NTL's risk management policies and perhaps even replace the CFO.

The George Washington University organizational behavior students have been privileged to learn from professors who were students of three different founders of the field. The three strands discussed here are Roethlisberger and the Harvard Business School, Kurt Lewin and NTL, and Herzberg. This learning experience is very different from introductory textbooks, which give the impression that the field has made consistent, linear progress from the early days until today. The enriched experience includes a sense of the false starts, values conflicts, egos, lack of cross‐communication, and other dimensions of the human condition that played a role in the founding of OB&D. This article reviews the development of these strands and points out that, although there are similarities, they were working on different problems, using different data sources, with different units of analysis. The article concludes with a glimpse at how these three founders would view the field of OB&D today.

Early in one’s career in psychology, certainly starting in graduate school, if not sooner as a psych major in college, a choice point gradually emerges between seeking a career as a scholar, a scientist, and perhaps as an academic versus pursuing the life of a practitioner, one who applies the work of the former, the scholar. We faculty will often cast this choice in the form of a “tension” between science and practice. Ironically, I have never felt such tension. The purpose of this chapter is to explore choices we make in life and career, the consequences of these choices, and what we can learn in the process, that is, along the way and the implications for organization change and development.

The detrimental influence of perceived work–family conflict (WFC) on employees' job-related attitudes has been examined in individualistic cultures. However, this relationship needs to be studied in collectivist societies, where the “family” is a salient social institution with family-centric work ethics. This study empirically investigates the role of nurturant task leadership (NTL) behavior in attenuating (1) the negative direct effect of perceived WFC on job satisfaction and (2) the negative indirect effect of perceived WFC on job satisfaction, mediated through affective commitment (AC) on a sample of employees from a public sector bank in India.

The study adopts a cross-sectional research design, and the data were collected from 244 executives working in the banking sector of India. The direct, indirect and moderated effects were analyzed using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression.

NTL behavior was found to moderate the negative direct relationships between perceived WFC and job satisfaction as well as the negative indirect relationship between perceived WFC and job satisfaction, mediated through AC.

The study contributes to existing literature on WFC by introducing an important boundary condition in NTL behavior, thus providing impetus to further research in this direction through research designs that allow for causal inference and generalizability.

Findings from this study can provide useful pointers to organizations dealing with employee performance challenges owing to WFC. Results indicate that leaders who exhibit NTL behavior are more likely to attenuate the negative influence of WFC on employee attitudes and performance.

This study is among the first empirical examination of the effectiveness of NTL behavior in mitigating the negative effects of perceived WFC on job satisfaction.

How does a fast‐growing company with a regional structure, resulting from the rapid coming together of between 20 and 30 separate businesses, shift the focus to a national corporate culture that emphasizes common best practice and drives quality through consistent messages? That was the problem facing ntl which, since its entry into the UK telephone and cable television markets in 1993, has grown into the UK’s largest cable company, with 13,000 employees.

Reflections on gender and OD over a 50-year career as a scholar, an OD practitioner, and a woman managing a complex life and career.

My journey in OD has spanned 50 years which is also about as long organization development has been around. In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences with special attention to issues of gender. I will also mention some issues of concern that confront us as OD scholars and practitioners, especially the balance between thinking and doing. As I describe my experiences, I hope they will lead to an appreciation of all that has happened in just 50 years! My experience is not everyone’s experience. I make no claim to that. I hope that some of the issues I raise resonate with you, or fill in some blanks, or lend a different perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically major factors that affect housing prices in Istanbul, Turkey using the classification and regression tree (CART) approach.

The data set was collected from various internet pages of real estate agencies during June 2007. The CART approach was then applied to derive main results and to make implications with regard to the housing market in Istanbul, Turkey.

The CART results indicate that sizes, elavators, existance of security, existance of central heating units and existance of view are the most important variables crucially affecting housing prices in Istanbul. The average price of houses in Istanbul was found to be 373,372.36 New Turkish Liras. The average size of a house was 138.37 m². The average age of houses is 15.07 years old with the average number of rooms being 3.11. The average number of baths is 1.43 and average number of toilets is 1.22. Only 5 percent of homes have storage space, 45 percent of homes have parking space, 64 percent of homes are heated with furnace, whereas only 29 percent of homes are used central heating system. Among the 31 variables employed in this study, it was concluded size, elavator, security, central heating unit and view are the most important factors that have impact on housing prices in housing market in Istanbul.

Future research and analysis of housing market in Istanbul and in Turkey can benefit from the method used in this study and findings derived from this research to come up with more general model(s) to include more houses in a wide range of regions in Turkey to analyze the determinants of housing prices in Turkey in general.

Examining housing prices using the CART model is relatively new in the field of housing economics. Additionally, this study is the first to use the CART model to analyze housing market in Istanbul and in Turkey and derive valuable housing policies to be used by the authorities.