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While English is the most commonly used language for market research, surveys and customer feedback in India, it does not reach the subcontinent’s entire population. Therefore, many questionnaires are bilingual, offering the respondent a choice between English and an indigenous Indian language. This, however, presupposes that answers to items are not influenced by people’s language proficiencies and response styles in different languages. This paper aims to examine whether market researchers in India should be careful about nonrandom measurement error caused by language response bias.

English and Kannada questionnaires are administered in a test-retest scenario to 160 respondents in the Indian Tier-II city of Mysore. The data evaluation is organized by dispositional (language proficiency in English and Kannada) and situational influences (language of the questionnaire in English or Kannada); a series of tests to elucidate language response bias is conducted.

While the significance of the two-tailed English-Kannada paired-sample tests is borderline, a more detailed look reveals surprising differences for the dispositional as well as situational linguistic influences. Moreover, the response style peculiarities in the Indian multilingual environment are not always consistent with differences in other international bilingual environments.

High-quality data are central to all empirical research, but situational and dispositional language response bias seems to contaminate questionnaires in the Indian multi-lingual environment. This study highlights the effect and provides Indian market researchers with some first strategies for managing the challenge.

As clients of India's IT services providers continue to complain about knowledge loss caused by high attrition rates in their offshore delivery factories, the linkages between organizational culture and commitment of the Indian employee base are of interest to researchers as well as practitioners. This paper seeks to address these issues.

Data was collected in the first half of 2012 through the ICCA™ appraisal framework from 291 Indian IT executives and managers working for two IT services sourcing provider organizations in Pune and Bangalore, India. To analyse the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used together with multiple regression and confirmatory factor analysis.

Taken together, this research makes several contributions. First, the results of data analysis exhibit that, among the organizational culture dimensions, in‐group collectivism and performance orientation are the antecedents with the biggest effect on employee commitment. Other culture dimensions show varying degree of positive and negative influence on employee commitment. Second, this paper contributes to the cross‐cultural generalizability discussion of employee commitment. The data analysis unveils a stronger correlation between affective and normative commitment in the Indian context as compared to other North American studies. Third, it supports suggestions put forward in other research that continuance commitment should be split into the two subfactors c/alternative and c/sacrifice.

It is proposed that the Indian IT services sourcing industry should be adept at thinking about employee commitment from an organizational culture point of view.

The proposed model of this research posits and proves that employee commitment in an Indian IT services offshoring context is influenced by organizational culture.

Most intercultural frameworks assess intercultural competencies, but global businesses lack instruments to support the feedback loop, that is help project managers answer the question if an effective global team has been formed. The purpose of this paper is to develop and assess a new indicator for measuring the actual effectiveness of intercultural communication and collaboration at the individual and team level, the Mysore InterCultural Effectiveness (MICE) indicator.

Based on a needs analysis in global businesses, international projects, and review of existing literature, a low-touch self-report indicator was developed. A test run in several international companies with live data obtained from 154 employees helped to validate the indicator using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

The MICE indicator is based on two scales: first, the effectiveness in interacting and collaborating with foreign counterparts by providing an answer to the question “how I think I am with them;” and second, the satisfaction with appropriateness of communication received from foreign interlocutors and the outcome of the collaboration by answering the question “how I think they are with me.”

Empirical results indicate that the two scale/six factor model provides a good fit to the data. Using the MICE Indicator, it is now possible for project managers to effectively address shortcomings of intercultural communication skills in their international teams with the right type of intercultural training.

The cultural dimensions of the Hofstede and Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) studies are often used to capture cultural differences and operationalize them in academic research, corporate business, and teaching. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if this context is appropriate for the Indian information technology (IT) offshore services industry; that is, if Indian culture can be measured with group-referenced items, averaged, and explained by discrete dimensions.

The authors devised items based on the GLOBE study, and conducted empirical research with 291 employees of two services sourcing providers in Pune and Bangalore, India. The authors then scrutinized the data set on item and dimension level using statistical methods, such as interrater agreement, t-test, arithmetic mean, and standard deviation.

An interpretation of the analysis posits that cultural assumptions based on dimensions and means are problematic in the context of the Indian IT offshore services industry. The two digit exact values of the GLOBE study (and similarly the ordinal scale by Hofstede) suggest a level of accuracy and absoluteness which could not be replicated in the empirical research. Therefore, one authors should be very careful referring to Indian national culture when conducting intercultural awareness programs and coaching international teams who are engaging with India.

The GLOBE study omits to report basic statistics of questionnaire development. Through this replication study in India, the authors provide empirical evidence that the construct validity of cultural dimensions and the concept of national/group averages may be flawed.

The paper aims to describe the drivers of offshoring to India and how savings and value can be generated by understanding and structuring the offshore journey as a lifecycle.

While offshoring is a contentious topic, more than 50 per cent of companies across the industries already offshore some of their functions. However, focussing on cost cutting alone can only lead to short‐term benefits while potentially putting at risk the mid‐ and long‐term position. Instead, successful offshoring is a multifaceted transformation, which includes industrialised approaches to service delivery. Levers for the business case not only comprise factor‐cost and effort savings, but also flexibility options and risk normalisation. An offshore delivery strategy can best be implemented by following a lifecycle approach ensuring stringent and informed governance decisions.

The paper finds that cost savings through offshoring are not only generated through factor cost savings, but increasingly through industrialisation and innovation engineering. To capture savings and value, corporations should actively manage the offshore lifecycle.

Value creation through offshoring is neither inherent to the offshoring process nor to India as a target destination. Instead, a series of governance decisions in the offshore lifecycle lead to the desired result.

Statistical indicators, such as human health, are important for designing government policies, as well as for influencing the functioning of economic markets. However, there is often a discrepancy between statistical measures and the citizens’ prevalent feelings. In order to produce more relevant indicators of social progress, governments are currently shifting their measurement emphasis from objective to subjective measures. While the philosophical tradition of hedonic psychology views individuals as the best judges of their own conditions, little empirical evidence shows that individually reported health scores provide accurate information about a population’s health status. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if subjective health questions contain genuine information about the status of human health, and are meaningful at an aggregated level.

Subjective health data are extracted from the 2012/2013 European Social Survey (28 European countries plus Israel, n=54,427). Objective health data are based on the 2012 World Bank statistics for life expectancy at birth. The author check if aggregated subjective health correlates with life expectancy at country level, and can reliably be compared across countries.

The findings support the idea of including subjective data into country statistics of social progress. Because of substantial between-country differences, social development programs should be devised individually for each country.

By showing that subjective health measures can reliably contribute to the quantification of social progress, the author offer a bridge between objective neoclassical economics and subjective hedonic psychology.

Although typologies of violence have become more common, relatively little attention has been given to Donald Black’s (1983) distinction between moralistic and predatory violence. Moralistic violence is rooted in conflict; predatory violence is rooted in exploitation. We elaborate Black’s typology and show how it is similar to, but distinct from, other typologies of violence. We also address the criteria by which typologies of any kind might be judged. Borrowing from the literatures on typologies and on standards of scientific theory, we argue that explanatory typologies should be evaluated according to four criteria: the degree to which they are powerful, theoretical, general, and parsimonious. Applying the criteria to Black’s typology, we argue that the distinction between moralistic and predatory violence is an important contribution to the arsenal of the student of violence.

Purpose – The overall purpose of this chapter is to discuss what is known about serious forms of bias violence, obstacles to studying bias violence, and how alternative theoretical and methodological approaches can advance our understanding of bias violence in the twenty-first century.

Design/methodology/approach – Following a review of the literature, the applicability of identity fusion theory for explaining bias violence is considered and applied to the anti-racial mass shooting at an historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Data come from an innovative open-source project known as the United States Extremist Crime Database.

Findings – Drawing from identity fusion theory, information from open-source data on the Charleston church shooting suggests that the perpetrator was a highly fused individual who perceived African Americans as a threat toward his social identity group and committed an act of extreme behavior (i.e., bias homicide) as a means for stabilizing his self-views.

Originality/value – This chapter builds upon prior studies of bias violence by demonstrating how (1) publicly available open sources (e.g., court documents and media reports) may be systematically compiled and used as reliable data for studying serious forms of bias violence, and (2) the use of social psychological theories, specifically identity fusion theory, can help to explain the role of personal and group identities in discriminatory violence.