Employee engagement: Let's once again (mis)understand an already (mis)understood concept

“Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.” – Carl Jung (the founder of analytical psychology, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst)

The disengaged employee! It is a global norm!! Its implications are huge!!! It is estimated that merely thirteen percent of employees are engaged at work worldwide.[i] It is argued that employee engagement leads to employee productivity; one study argues that employee engagement can reduce absenteeism by forty-one percent and turnover by fifty-nine percent.[ii] Studies also reveal that employee engagement can be translated into customer satisfaction; for example, it is found that the correlation coefficient (r)[iii] between employee engagement and customer satisfaction is +0.43.[iv] Alarmingly, it has been reported that employee disengagement approximately costs companies US$7 trillion globally.[v] With this backdrop, it is unsurprising that there is a growing interest among academics, consultants, and business journalists to study employee engagement.

Let us first understand what employee engagement is. Some define it as “a distinct and unique construct consisting of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that are associated with individual role performance.”[vi] According to others, “[W]hen employees are engaged at work ... they tend to stay longer on the job and are more productive, self-motivated and happier coming to office.”[vii] Yet, according to some others, “engaged employees … [are] those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.”[viii] Employee engagement is a concept from organizational psychology entailing human resource (HR) factors like job satisfaction, work meaningfulness, positive organizational behavior (organizational commitment, extra-role efforts or discretionary efforts to go beyond the job description), and so on. This implies that there are emotional and rational engagement factors. Notwithstanding these definitional aspects of employee engagement, for better understanding, let us discuss its etymological aspects.

An employee is a “person employed.”[ix] In business lexicon, the person is called the agent who work for her/his principal/employer based on an employment contract (written or unwritten) between them. The person’s work is usually overseen by a manager (the immediate supervisor, the CEO, or even the owner-manager), who assesses the employee’s actual/potential contributions. The assessment primarily for remuneration purposes is done to calculate employee’s efficiency on the basis of the contractual clauses using measurable factors like work hours, job quality, extra efforts, salary and perks, etc. Employment therefore thrives on reasoning. And, an employee has instrumental ties with the manager/employer and s/he cooperates merely in order to achieve some limited and immediate goals, namely money for work and recognition for competence. Engagement is a “formal promise”[x] between two persons in which they act based on a pledge known to each other. This action is mutually beneficial. It may also refer to a prescribed appointment or arrangement that one intends to do something at a particular time for the other like getting married, having dinner, being employed, and so on. Engagement entails emotional involvement and commitment. In other words, one of the precursors of engagement is the feeling to get engaged. That is, the ‘I’ gets engaged with the ‘You.’ Thus, in contrast to an employee in an employment relationship, engagement entails expressive ties, namely a commitment to or an involvement with the other person, arising perhaps out of kinship or feelings of love. Combining etymological and definitional aspects of employee engagement, it is safe to say that employee engagement refers to an engaged employee who is employed with an intention of ‘doing good’ to an organization.

Employees decide if they want to be engaged with and do ‘good’ to the organization. It can be manifested in several ways. From an employment prospective, based on its definitional and etymological underpinnings, employee engagement can be seen as the 5Cs, namely:

1.           Commitment to serve longer,

2.           Conformity of conduct to the organizational culture,

3.           Compliance with meeting the target,

4.           Carefulness about creating profit, and

5.           Conscientiousness toward building value.

Value in economic terms is a measure of the benefit provided by something to someone.[xi]It can mean different things to different people. Is it shareholder or stakeholder value? Is value created to meet instantaneous gratification or long-term sustainability? Who is a stakeholder, for that matter? These are probing questions and the answers are not always straightforward. Shareholder value is the main value creation pursuit of most of the companies.[xii] Everyone provides their own interpretation of what that long term value is. Who is a stakeholder is equally debatable. What is long-term in our present world? It is imperative here to mention Paul Polman’s decision on first day as the chief executive (CEO) of Unilever in 2009: he scrapped the FTSE 100 quarterly earnings reporting. He argued that a hundred years old company like Unilever would survive for several hundreds more by being sentient to the planet and to the communities in which it operated, and added, “So if you buy into this long-term value-creation model, which is equitable, which is shared, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being, but don’t put your money in our company.”[xiii] Shareholders who stayed with Unilever during Polman’s 10 years as the CEO have enjoyed a total return vastly superior to the FTSE index and that of rivals such as Nestlé.[xiv] Critiquing the current emphasis on quarterly earnings, Curt Custard, chief investment officer at Newton Investment Management, the ￡49.8bn BNY Mellon subsidiary, opines that it creates “damage to our industry and society as a whole…. [Value] does not manifest itself on a quarterly basis. You have to lay seeds and let them grow.”[xv] And, who are interested in such kind of valuations. The shareholders interested in quarterly returns are like migratory birds, investing one day here, and the other day there![xvi] But, the main issue is: How many CEOs move away from quarterly valuations and pledge the formal promise that they intend to create organizations as perpetual entities, for that matter survive at least a couple of decades more.[xvii] As regard who is a stakeholder, there are never-ending debates. The outright criminal instances witnessed in Volkswagen Diesel-gate scandal, Boeing’s apathy toward 737 Max crashes, Amazon’s brutal workplace culture, etc. raises questions apropos whether companies really care about creating stakeholder value. With this backdrop, a recent study finds that the median tenure for CEOs in S&P 500 companies at the end of 2017 was 5 years, which was 6 years in 2013.[xviii] Low tenure is not only a point of concern with respect to the decision-making sphere. One study finds that sixty percent of millennial employees think that seven months of tenure corresponds to loyalty.[xix] In this regard, many employers lament, “What can we do to improve employee engagement if 90% of our employees stay less than 6 months?”[xx] When the corporate life span of employees including the CEOs is getting shorter and shorter, is value creation is really the precursor in order to be called an engaged employee?

The main purpose of doing business nowadays has become meeting or beating the analyst expectations in terms of net profit; in other words, to satisfy the sentiments of the stock markets. In his famous speech, Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC, U.S., calls this tendency as the “Numbers Game,” and goes on to say, ‘[O]ne major U.S. company, that failed to meet its so-called “numbers” by one penny, and lost more than six percent of its stock value in one day.’[xxi] He argues that managers are increasingly under pressure to manage earnings by manipulating the company’s accounting practices to inflate profits, meet/beat market expectations, and in the process augment the company’s stock prices.[xxii]John Bennett, director of European equities at Janus Henderson Investors, the ￡265bn fund manager, decries these quarterly earnings, as “just noise for a day … [which are] meaningless.”[xxiii] Digging deeper into the illegality of these earnings figures, Lawrence Revsine, the much respected Kellogg School accounting professor, finds that these often are outcomes of a “selective financial misrepresentation” mindset whereby the management has come to practice how to manipulate the market’s perceptions about their firm’s financial position.[xxiv] Infamous accounting scandals like AIG in 2005, Enron in 2001, Lehman Brothers in 2008, Parmalat in 2003, Satyam in 2009, Tyco in 2002, WorldCom in 2002, and likewise have done irreparable damages to corporations and its stakeholders like shareholders and employees. Enron closed down, Lehman Brothers was bailed out, and the recent US$7.4 billion accounting fraud at Steinhoff has wiped out Rand216 billion from the company’s market value since December 2017.[xxv] People often meet targets employing unethical strategies.[xxvi] For example, a study finds that middle managers do inflate their subordinates’ performance using unethical means and deceive top management when performance targets are unrealizable.[xxvii] And if tenure is the talking point, one study finds that sixty percent of millennial employees think that seven months of tenure corresponds to loyalty.[xxviii] In this regard, many employers lament, “What can we do to improve employee engagement if 90% of our employees stay less than 6 months?”[xxix]Not to forget, people often meet targets employing unethical strategies.[xxx] For example, a study finds that middle managers do inflate their subordinates’ performance using unethical means and deceive top management when performance targets are unrealizable.[xxxi] Wells Fargo was slapped with a $3 billion fine today by federal authorities of the U.S. for the millions of fake accounts created at the Bank over many years, which might have been done to meet targets. These nuances abound worldwide and are growing every single day. If standard practice of meeting targets and creating profits on many occasions are achieved through cheating, stealing, and lying, does engagement mean creating ‘good’ profit, any longer?

Every now and then, we hear about awards and accolades like Europe’s Most Attractive Employers, 100 Best Companies to Work,[xxxii] Global 2000,[xxxiii] India’s Best Companies to Work For, Top Employers Institute’s nation-wise rankings, and so on. These are attempts to classify companies based on job satisfaction levels of employees. However, job satisfaction is not an open and shut concept. On many occasions, employees accept risky work schedules beyond the mandate of their job description without complaining in order not to antagonize their reporting authorities. The famous case of Miwa Sado, a political reporter, who worked at the Japanese public broadcaster NHK’s headquarters in Tokyo, is another case worth mentioning here. It is reported that she covered the Tokyo metropolitan assembly elections and national upper house elections in June and July 2013, when she logged 159 hours of overtime and took only two days off in July 2013. She died three days in her bed after the upper house elections, still holding her cell-phone. Though she died in July 2013, her case was only made public by her former employer in October 2017.[xxxiv]In a study in the U.S., thirty-nine percent of employees “want to be seen as a work martyr” to their boss.[xxxv] Instances of “extreme jobs”[xxxvi] are rising at the workplace, wherein employees clock in 100-hour workweeks, i.e., Monday through Fridays call for 16 to 18 hour days (9 a.m. start time and 3 a.m. finish time) and on Saturdays and Sundays work time amounts to anywhere from 5 to 10 hours.[xxxvii] It is found that HR mismanagement causes more than 120,000 deaths a year in U.S. (higher than Alzheimer’s and kidney diseases), more than a million in China, and many more millions in the rest of the world.[xxxviii] Are not there many engaged employees like Miwa Sados around us, who keep clocking in hours and more hours without knowing why, when, and how to say no?

Critically analysing the aforementioned findings and facts concerning the 5Cs of employee engagement, it is safe to infer that academics, practitioners, and business journalists may not have really understood what ‘good’ they intend to achieve from the ‘goodness’ of the engaged employee. This is because employee engagement by its definitional and etymological aspects may not be enough to realize the commitment to serve longer, conformity of conduct to the organizational culture, compliance with meeting the target, carefulness about creating profit, and conscientiousness toward building value. Serving longer is fast becoming an outdated phenomenon, aligning oneself to the organizational culture is risky, meeting targets mean cutting corners, creating profit is an outcome of bending and breaking rules, and building value is a misnomer. One may here argue that employees could be sensitized about the virtues of the 5Cs of employee engagement; but this argument could be self-contradictory. For, one, managers are mainly created in the B-schools where curricula are heavily influenced by the neoclassical economics. The neoclassical paradigm formalizes business models based on the assumption that people are self-interested and utility maximizing hedonists. Many behavioral economics studies reveal that people are not always self-interested, benefits maximizing, and costs minimizing individuals but also other centric, sacrificing, and do contribute to public good. However, the management curricula hardly take cognizance of these new empirical findings about the human agency. In an article entitled: Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, posits, “Experimental evidence [from behavioral economics] suggests that the teaching of economics does have an effect on students’ behaviour: It makes them more selfish and less concerned about the common good … [which] is not intentional … [because m]ost teachers are not aware of what they are doing.”[xxxix] This brings us to the second point: the content and delivery of management education that can help employees engaged.

Adam Smith is accorded as the father of modern economics. His writings have immensely influenced management sciences. One of his teachings from the magnum opus: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (published in the year 1776, popularly known as: The Wealth of Nations) that is considered as the cornerstone of management curricula worldwide is: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”[xl] Taking cover under Smith’s teachings, many professors blatantly celebrate self-interest as the very spirit of corporate life and encourage the learners to become brazenly hedonists. Yet, they often forget to mention about the 1759 magnum opus from Smith entitled: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings to his later works like The Wealth of Nations. One of Smith’s teachings worth mentioning here is: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” That people are altruistic along with being selfish resonates with many findings about human nature. However, in the pursuit of building narrow models of the human agency, many are not aware (as Zingales points out) or deliberately ignore these facets of organizational life and in the process render a lopsided (sic) knowledge to the future managers in the B-schools. If that is not all, the administrators of B-schools do everything possible to make learners job-market-ready that often needs quantabilities[xli] of students to play the “Number Games” (as Arthur Levitt has pointed out). All they want to achieve in the process is to brand their B-schools as job-making factories than career-facilitating vantage points. Do they care about the long-term prospects of the students who pay a fortune only to get a piece of paper, i.e., the diploma, which may open the first door to success but will not be enough to locate the next door. This brings us to the third and final point in the context of the 5Cs of employee engagement.

It is generally assumed that economic agents are selfish as well as perfectly rational. This assumption is grossly absurd that caricatures the human spirit. For example, I meet on a street a stranger who is searching for the railway station. I know that both of us are selfish and perfectly rational. Then our conversation may turn out to be the following: ‘“Where is the railway station?” he asks me. “There,” I say, pointing at the post office, “and would you please post this letter for me on the way?” “Yes,” he says, determined to open the envelope and check whether it contains something valuable.’[xlii] These types of rational agents are called the homo economicus or colloquially the “rational fools.”[xliii] What is the way forward? Here, Nobel laureates like Amartya Sen’s ethics driven economic activities,[xliv]industry tycoons like Unilever’s ex CEO Polman’s emphasis on doing ‘good’ to the extended stakeholders in addition to the shareholders, and the veteran Wall Street Journaleditor Ronald Alsop’s call for “being a model citizen”[xlv] are critical to zero in on. Industry enthusiasts like them call for one thing: be ethical to protect the future of business. We call it: ethicompetencies[xlvi] that can be accomplished by imbibing ethics alongside economics in B-school programs. The commitment to serve longer ‘ethically,’ conformity of conduct to the ‘right’ organizational culture, compliance with meeting the ‘3Ps oriented’ target, carefulness about creating ‘good’ profit, and conscientiousness toward building ‘long-term’ value are achievable thereof. However, the ground realities are not encouraging if we take the seriousness with which business ethics courses are treated in the management school ecosystems. B-school administrators either make the subject optional or cut down its teaching hours;[xlvii] students get more obsessed with obtaining grades than gaining knowledge; and campus interviewers treat it as an externality than a core part of the business profession. If that is not all, on the Convocation Day, many passing out students keep winking and smiling at each other while taking the MBA Oath[xlviii] halfheartedly. This is understandable because much of what they pledge through it does not resonate with or get valued in the real world of business. One of the authors has asked his past students about the MBA Oath. Some responses are: “Prof, you’re the first one asking me about it after my graduation;” “Oh really! So it was an oath, Prof;” “All that my company needs is achieving immediate targets, Prof; they don’t care if I took an oath or not;” and so forth. Do the proponents of the MBA Oath (including those school administrators who administer the Oath to the graduating students) take time to heed to these ground realities?

The premise on which employee engagement is based on is a formal promise by the employee to do ‘good’ to an organization (in line with the 5Cs). There is no doubt that engagement from the employee is needed for organizational effectiveness. But, we have discussed that doing ‘good’ to one’s employer amidst the current business realities is difficult. Thence, it is unsurprising that employee engagement programs are not meeting the intended outcomes. For example, while companies spend over US$720 million each year on employee engagement that is projected to cross US$1.5 billion, yet employee engagement levels according to Gallup surveys are not showing signs of improvement.[xlix] According to Gallup, the world leader of the employee engagement programs, “Employee engagement doesn't stop at a survey with Gallup Access. We know employee engagement is effective only when it’s part of your organization’s culture and business strategy.”[l] Culture cannot be shaped quarterly nor strategy during a weekend survey! They need serious understanding about what ‘good’ we want to achieve through the 5Cs of employee engagement programs. Is it employing individuals and ‘somehow’ making them Gallupially engaged? In the process, getting a formal promise from employees somehow that they would do ‘good’ to an organization! That doesn't sound doable because it is a common knowledge that we live in a neoclassical world order!! Others may not keep their promises!!! Would the neoclassical formalization propagated by B-schools, industry insiders, and business journals help us to make employees engaged? Shouldn't we go beyond management fads like employee engagement and start understanding the workplace realities anew and think: Isn't it better to engage employees in something else that is not employee engagement per se? What could this something be that would be effective in the neoclassical business world order? 

Hmm! 

Before keying off, we leave you with the following real stories about real professionals from real organizations; these professionals never heard about employee engagement nor attended any such programs but kept engaging with that ‘something!’

The first one happened during my tenure in a captive power plant as a production engineer. I had a colleague (name withheld for privacy reasons) who was working in the instrumentation maintenance department. He used to start his day by simply sitting near the weighbridge (on which the weight of coal in the trucks was measured) and ended his day in the same spot. He just observed loaded coal trucks entering the plant premises, driving on to the weighbridge and stood on it till the load was recorded (W1), unloading coal in the coal yard, driving on to the weighbridge so that the weight of the empty truck was recorded (W2) and actual quantity of the coal was estimated (W1 – W2), and exiting. His work comprised just that for over a month—watching all by himself, trucks entering and exiting the plant premises, at the weighbridge near the coal yard! Many employees were first surprised at his demeanor, bewildered after some days, and started discussing among themselves later, “What the heck is this guy doing?” “Has he lost all his senses?” “Isn’t he paid to work, and not merely sit?” And so on. Then some of them went to the plant manager to raise that issue. The plant manager heard them, smiled, and replied, “Even if he sits at some corner of the plant, let him!” For others, he was sitting, doing nothing, and was just idling his time; but the plant manager was aware about the underlying fact was that he was on to a project to estimate the ‘zero error’[li] of the weighbridge. This was important because coal comprises nearly sixty-five percent of the operating cost of a coal-based thermal power plant. And that instrumentation engineer was aware about it.

The second one happened in a management institution where I was a faculty. I had a colleague (name withheld again for privacy reasons) who was working in my department. She was very dedicated toward her job, not only teaching, doing research, and undertaking administrative jobs that she was expected to do as per her job description, but more. She mentored students even on the telephone on holidays and Sundays too, arranged internships and jobs for students who were struggling to find one, guiding students when they has personal and professional issues even years after their passing out, and more importantly she was very careful about the students’ time and did almost everything to value their time. One noteworthy incident that I still remember about her concerning positive attitude towards the institutional primary stakeholders is the following. It was the last working day before the Diwali (a famous Indian festival) vacation. I was in the dean’s office, discussing with him about some official matters. She entered. She greeted us, I greeted her back. She was looking really sick. She handed over a leave form. The dean went through it and asked, “You’d a class in the morning, right?” She replied, “Yes. I’m done with the class, having fever since last night, not feeling well; hence I want to go home.” The dean was perplexed, and asked, “Why in the first place you’ve come, today, if you weren’t well? You could have informed the HR over the telephone and taken leave. After the vacation, you could have regularized your leave. No!” With a pale smile on her face, she said something that really struck my professional self, “It’s not about regularizing the leave that’s important for me…. Despite being the last day before the Diwali vacation, students instead of leaving for their hometowns did turn up to take the class because it was an important lecture. How couldn’t I taken the class?”

The third incident is about a mental health specialist nurse. She was only in her second year in the nursing profession. One morning, she reported at the hospital ward. She was informed by the night staff that the morning shift in-charge was sick and was on leave. There was no replacement. She looked around the office. She was the senior-most nurse in the ward. All in all, there were one staff nurse and three nursing students—one was a striper (having some nursing experience under the direct supervision of nurses) and two non-stripers (completely new nursing students). Just as she was about to check the work-roster for the day, the phone rang and on the other side was the matron who said to her, “Take charge of the ward for the next two days. If you need help, check with the in-charge of the next ward.” And, the matron hung up. “Managing the shift independently; oh my God!” She was instantly jittery; she after all was in a profession of caring and saving lives. Still in shock and all eyes on her, she calmly informed all about the status quo, planned the shift, took with her the two non-stripers, and let the staff nurse and the one striper team up. This was an act of optimum utilization of resources! It was a twenty bed female ward. As she entered the large ward, all the eighteen indoor patients who were admitted for various ailments looked at her with bemusement. One of them yelled, “Where’s the in-charge?” She started shaking, regained her composure after a while, and calmly yet firmly said, “I’m the in-charge for the next two days.” Knowing the attitude of a woman, a thought passed inside her, “Hey, hold on! Isn’t it that these patients could be thinking how the heck is this skinny little girl gonna take care of em? How am I gonna attend to their needs?” Nevertheless, she didn’t let that situation distract her. Instead, she went on, making the beds, washing the patients, administering medicine, and going around enquiring about them. However, she could feel that they did not trust her medical expertise and also noticed that they were trying to ensure if the medicines she had given to them to drink were right or not! But, she kept on doing her professional chores, undeterred. The morning was event-free. Afterwards, three doctors (one was the chief registrar of the hospital) came in for checking the patients. As they went around the ward, from one bed to the next, the nurse needed to accompany them. By then, she was really disturbed because she had never accompanied a team of doctors before. She mustered courage and went to the chief registrar and said to him, “The in-charge is sick. In her absence, I’m managing in the ward for today and tomorrow.” After examining all the patients, while leaving, he ensured to thank her for being brave to take care of the ward, while those females looking on, some smiling, others grunting. She kept her calmness, discharging the duties till the ward in-charge reported after two days.

And, there is a fourth, fifth, and …

* * *

Authors

Miranda D Obi, MHS; & Siddharth Mohapatra, PhD

Directors at MiraSid Pty Ltd.

www.mirasid.com

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Notes

[i] Crabtree & Gallup (2013); Mann, Harter, & Gallup (2016)

[ii] Beheshti & Forbes (2019)

[iii] Correlation coefficient r measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two factors.

[iv] Winkler, K?nig, & Kleinmann (2012)

[v] Mann, Harter, & Gallup (2016)

[vi] Saks (2006, p. 602)

[vii] Dizik & The Wall Street Journal (2019)

[viii] Gallup (n.d.)

[ix] Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.a)

[x] Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.b)

[xi] Value of something is classified as: intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsic value is valued for its own sake, desirable in and of something. Instrumental value is valued for the end results gained from it if they help one achieve a particular end. A cell-phone has instrumental value because it helps us to communicate with others; whereas happiness has intrinsic value because it is desirable in and of itself.

[xii] Creating shared value is a new form of stakeholder value creation pursuit. This is about creating new strategies and procedures that enable a company to maximize its revenues, whilst also offering benefits to other stakeholders like the local community. However, this is at best at its infancy and more work is needed to operationalize it.

[xiii] Skapinker & Financial Times (2018)

[xiv] Skapinker & Financial Times (2018)

[xv] Skapinker & Financial Times (2018)

[xvi] Walker & Financial Times (2018)

[xvii] Many FTSE 100 listed companies find it difficult to move away from quarterly reporting because they are listed in the US, where they are required by the SEC to report quarterly, and others may not do so because they are totally global companies and would be at a disadvantage to their international peers (Skapinker & Financial Times, 2018).

[xviii] Marcec, Equilar, & Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2018)

[xix] Bersin & Deloitte (2017)

[xx] Wride & DecisionWise (2018)

[xxi] Levitt (1998)

[xxii] Loomis, Folpe, Woods, Neering, & Fortune Magazine (1999)

[xxiii] Skapinker & Financial Times (2018)

[xxiv] Revsine (1991)

[xxv] Motsoeneng, Rumney, & Reuters (2019)

[xxvi] Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (2017)

[xxvii] den Nieuwenboer, da Cunha, & Trevi?o (2017)

[xxviii] Bersin & Deloitte (2017)

[xxix] Wride & DecisionWise (2018)

[xxx] Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (2017)

[xxxi] den Nieuwenboer, da Cunha, & Trevi?o (2017)

[xxxii] The 100 Best Companies to Work For is an annual list published by the Fortune magazine that ranks U.S. companies based on employee happiness and perks.

[xxxiii] Forbes and Statista’s Global 2000 is a ranking system to create the world’s best employers list.

[xxxiv] Darmody (2018)

[xxxv] Deloitte (2017)

[xxxvi] Hewlett and Luce (2006, p. 51) define extreme jobs as jobs with: (a) unpredictable work flow, (b) fast-paced work with pressing deadlines, (c) inordinate scope of responsibility amounting to more than one job, (d) work-related events outside work hours, (e) availability to clients 24 hours per day, (f) responsibility for profits and losses, (g) responsibility for recruitment and mentoring, (h) large amounts of travels, (i) large numbers of employees to supervise, and (j) physical presence at work at least 10 hours per day.

[xxxvii] Denning & Forbes (2018)

[xxxviii] See, for example: Pfeffer (2018)

[xxxix] Zingales (2012)

[xl] Buchanan (2002)

[xli] By quantabilities, we mean: quantitative abilities. This is akin to the embedding the organizational goings on in a MS Excel-sheet and present them to shareholders through MS PowerPoint slides. It is the predominant approach to impart management education to the future managers. In this approach, management is essentially treated as a decision-making endeavor to create organizational efficiency based on numbers and figures with many footnotes on the MS Word reports that attempts to hide the ground realities using micro fonts barely visible to the naked eye.

[xlii] Sen (1977, p. 332)

[xliii] Sen (1977)

[xliv] Sen (1987)

[xlv] Alsop (2013)

[xlvi] By ethicompetencies, we mean: ethical competencies. This facet of creating the manager of the future is an attempt to impart the competencies that are needed to foresee the long-term implications of the decisions taken at present. They do not ask the people to be committed to their organizations or managers but to themselves through their actions. They compel managers to ponder over their own decisions, undertake self-appraisals based on their own conscience, and to be themselves rather than to become what their organizations and managers want them to be.

[xlvii] One of the authors worked in a prestigious B-school where students pay millions to get admission. He taught business ethics there. Before he joined the school, it had a business ethics curriculum that was primarily based of movie screening. After joining, he approached world renowned ethicists like Denis Collins to create a curriculum that was in line with an MBA program. However, the administrators and other senior faculty members had problems with that. They not only deployed other instructors to teach the course who did not have formal qualification nor training/experience in business ethics; but also trimmed the duration of the curriculum from 20 hours to 10 hours with the same course load.

[xlviii] In line with other professional careers like medical and legal practices, MBA Oath is taken by graduating students voluntarily in order to do ‘good’ to the business ecosystems. It is created in line with Khurana and Nohria's (2008) call to make management a true profession.

[xlix] Hollonaugust (2012)

[l] Gallup (n.d.b)

[li] Zero error is useful to know if an instrument reading is actual or erroneous. In simple terms, it means how far away from zero is the reading of an instrument when the real value is zero.