Participative Management – Workers Participation in Management

Human Resource Management

Case Study on Entrepreneurship: Larry Page

Business Analysis

The Boundaryless Career: Modern Contemperory Perspective on Career

Human Resource Management

How to Meet Costa Rica’s 2026 VASP Requirements Without Expanding Headcount

General Business Articles

Concepts of Throughput Accounting and Theory of Constraints

Financial Management

Cultural Influence on Communication Processes

A country may be classified as either a high-context culture or a low-context Culture. The context of a culture is either high or low in terms of in-depth background information. This classification provides an understanding of various cultural orientations and explains how Process of communication is conveyed and perceived. North America and northern Europe (e.g. Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries) are examples of low-context cultures. In these types of society, messages are explicit and clear in the sense that actual words are used to convey the main part of information in communication. The words and their meanings, being independent entities, can be separated from the context in which they occur. What are important, then, are what is said, not how it is said and not the environment within which it is said. Japan, France, Spain, Italy, Asia, Africa and the Middle Eastern Arab nations in contrast, are high-context culture. In Continue reading

Abey Francis

The rationale for introducing currency futures

Futures markets were designed to solve the problems that exist in forward markets. A futures contract is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a certain time in the future at a certain price. But unlike forward contracts, the futures contracts are standardized and exchange traded. To facilitate liquidity in the futures contracts, the exchange specifies certain standard features of the contract. A futures contract is standardized contract with standard underlying instrument, a standard quantity and quality of the underlying instrument that can be delivered, (or which can be used for reference purposes in settlement) and a standard timing of such settlement. A futures contract may be offset prior to maturity by entering into an equal and opposite transaction. The standardized items in a futures contract are: Quantity of the underlying Quality of the underlying The date and the month of delivery The units of Continue reading

Abey Francis

Agile Project Management – Concept and Stages

What is Agile Project Management? Agile project management has been defined as short cycles of product development that deliver incremental updates of the product rapidly based on the changing needs of the customer. This methodology is the opposite of waterfall project management, which values extensive planning and pre-production. The agile approach consists of a number of stages including rapid iterative planning and development cycles allowing a project team to constantly evaluate the project and obtain immediate feedback from users or stakeholders allowing the team to learn from their experiences after each cycle. After the streamlined planning requirements, definition and solution design phase is completed to get the project underway iterations or more detailed planning requirements are created. This allows for immediate modifications of the product as customer views change. Agile project management requires a dedicated full time team including a customer or end users. Agile project management differs to traditional Continue reading

Abey Francis

The Business Applications and Benefits of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence or BI is a computer-based system which is used by organizations for decision making purpose. It consist of huge data warehouse or data marts of business data, from which it performs mining, spotting, digging or analyzing operations to produce appropriate results or reports. BI applications include a wide range of activities for statistical analysis, Data mining, querying and reporting, business performance analysis, benchmarking, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Decision Support System (DSS), forecasting and predictive analysis. It provides organizations with meaningful information regarding employees, customers, suppliers and other business associates, which can be used in effective decision making. Applications of  Business Intelligence The implementation of business intelligence helps organizations to achieve their goals in an effective way. Its application is not restricted to limited segments. It has a wide-spread use. It has now become mandatory for organizations to implement BI to sustain and maintain their market share in the Continue reading

Abey Francis

Selecting Managers for Foreign Assignments

International assignments are the heart of international HR, and it is therefore disconcerting to see how often such assignments fail. U.S. expatriates assignments that end early (the failure rate) range from 16% to 50%, and the direct costs of each failure can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. The exact number of failure is hard to quantify, in part because “failure” means different things to different people. An early return rate is perhaps the most obvious indicator. However, some expatriates may fail less conspicuously, quietly running up the hidden costs of reduced productivity and poisoned customer and staff relations. The processes firms use to select managers for their foreign assignments and domestic operations obviously have many similarities. For either assignment, the candidate should have the technical knowledge and skills to do the job, and the intelligence and skills to be a successful manager. However, it is seen that Continue reading

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Evolution of Performance Management

Traditionally, performance appraisal  has been used as the guide for employee performance. Performance appraisal also known as ‘performance evaluation’, ‘merit rating’, and ‘performance assessment’ is a process of recording assessment of employees’ performance, potential and development needs. According to Wayne F Cascio (1995) performance appraisal is defined as “the systematic description of job related strengths and weaknesses of an individual or a group”. Performance appraisal is a system of review and evaluation of an individual’s (or team’s) performance. Lately it has been supplanted in more and more companies with performance management (PM), a more comprehensive human resource management process. Within the recent past there has been a shift from traditional annual performance appraisal to continuous performance management. The obvious reasons behind this have been the inadequacy of Performance appraisal in serving as a performance enhancement tool. Performance appraisal is known to be a contentious and unpopular activity of Human Resource Continue reading

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