A Study on Flexible Work Organization in India Using the Micro-data

Abstract

The article made an attempt to investigate the “flexible work organization” in India using the micro-data from a survey on the human resource management (HRM) practices in the business organizations in Bangalore, India. The survey, covering all the establishments in the city with 50 and above employees in the secondary and the tertiary sectors, had been conducted by the author in the first half of 2000 following the analytical framework in Osterman (1994). The issues investigated in the article are: 1. the diffusion of flexible work organization practices such as self-directed (autonomous) work teams (“Work Team”), quality circles (QC) and Total Quality Management (TQM) in India; 2. the association between the adoption of these practices and that of the HRM practices (whether these practices are introduced in “bundle”); and 3. the correlation between the performance of the establishment and these practices.

It is found that the flexible work organization practices are prevalent today in India as have been observed in the limited earlier studies on large companies. There are also the indications that the flexible work organization and HRM practices are adopted in “bundle” in India, though the effectiveness of the “bundle” in terms of the financial performance of the establishment is not investigated in the study. Finally, the adoption of flexible work organization practices is found to have no significant relevance to the trends perceived of the profit and the labor productivity of the establishment of the past 5 years. Instead, the analysis has revealed the poor performance of the public sector units as well as the possibility that the information sharing between the employees and the employers would contribute to the improvement of the labor productivity