Indian Cultural Context
Indian Cultural Context
THIS CHAPTER AIMS TO
One. Highlight the Indian cultural perspective on organizational behaviour.
Two. Trace the evolving Indian mindset
Three. Profile the composite Indian mindset.
Four. Show the impact of shifting mindset on organizational behaviour.
Indian Cultural Context
Indian Cultural Context
INDIAN CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
The need to examine organizational behaviour from an Indian cultural perspective arose out of the failure to validate Western theories, concepts, and methods in Indian organizations. Initially, the failure was attributed either to Indians' authoritarian behaviour or to the ineptitude of Indian scholars to replicate well-established Western theories and concepts. Subsequently, however, three developments led to a fresh look at and recognition of the salience of the Indian cultural perspective:
One. A number of studies that tried to prove Western theories and concepts in the Indian context failed despite the best efforts to replicate them.
Two. A surge of self-reliance in the country in the nineteen seventies stimulated a search for ancient psycho-spiritual and contemporary indigenous concepts and ideas that seemed to have the potential to explain Indian organizational behaviour more appropriately.
Three. International cross-cultural research confirmed the limitations of Western theories and concepts in explaining human behaviour in non-Western cultures, and thereby opened up the possibility of developing indigenous perspectives on human, including organizational behaviour in different cultures.
As the preceding chapter showed, Indian research on organizational behaviour did not totally reject Western contributions. Rather, it identified a trend towards the integration of Western and Indian concepts and methods. Further research of the sources of this integrative trend revealed three cardinal features of Indian culture having a bearing on how individuals, groups, and organizations behave in India:
One. Pluralistic world view is willingly receptive to new ideas and influences, and thereby collects diverse values, beliefs, norms, and practices from other cultures.
Two. Synthesizing mindset tends to integrate diverse cultural influences, but does not reject those that cannot be integrated. They are allowed to coexist resulting in an inclusive cultural frame of consistent, inconsistent, as well as opposite components.
Three. High context sensitivity enables Indians to selectively retrieve components and organize them in different combinations for responding effectively to different organizational contexts.