Institute of Rural Management Anand

Course Name: Human Resource Management Programme: PGDM-RM41

Date: 05 April, 2021 Term – III Roll No.______________________

End Term Examination (Open Book)

Duration of Exam: 02 Hrs 30 Min Weightage: 25 percent Total Marks: 25

Instructions:
• Please read the cases carefully before answering
• Be brief and to the point. Be clear on your logical argument.
• Frameworks/models presented, if any, needs to be properly labelled and explained
(Contextualize, instead of reproducing)
CASE 1
What happened to the women who graduated from IITs in the 90s?1
Last year, India passed a landmark legislation to fix the abysmal sex ratio in corporate
boardrooms—all publicly traded companies needed to put at least one woman on their
board. It was a radical law, given that about two-thirds of listed companies in the country had
no woman on their boards in June 2014.
The result was chaos. Even a year after the law was passed, one-third of the firms scrambled
in the final two weeks before the deadline to find woman directors. Some high-profile firms—
including Reliance Industries—simply added the wives of chairmen to the boardrooms. More
than 12% failed to find a woman at all. The whole exercise was another grim reminder of how
thoroughly men dominate the senior leadership in Asia’s third largest economy. But it’s not
as if there aren’t enough women in India with the education and career experience to hold
these positions.
Consider, for instance, the women graduates from the country’s finest engineering schools.
Since its inception in 1958, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay alone graduated
some 3000 women with degrees ranging from computer engineering to civil engineering, an
official told Quartz requesting anonymity. Several hundreds of women have presumably
enrolled at India’s other IITs in the past 20 years, although none of these schools keep records
of the gender of their students. Where did all these women go—and why aren’t they leaders
in Indian industry today?
Quartz spoke to more than a dozen women who graduated from the IITs and other top
engineering colleges in the 1990s about their career trajectories to try and answer that
question. The 1990s were, of course, a period when the Indian economy had just opened up,

1
Source: http://qz.com/424276/what‐happened‐to‐the‐women‐who‐graduated‐from‐iits‐in‐the‐
90s/
and the country’s technology sector finally found its feet. Hundreds of young women who
might have never considered joining India Inc. a few decade earlier were getting high-level
degrees, and then choosing corporate careers and quickly rising up the ranks. Yet, often after
a few years on the job, they pulled back, completely changed their personal career paths,
thereby stripping corporate India of a female presence. Here are their stories:
Work much harder than the boys.
This generation of women opted for engineering at a time when it was not considered a
suitable career option for females. Many of them aced the IIT entrance examination—one of
the toughest in the world—in order to gain entry to this rarefied world. Technology in India—
and most other parts of the world—remains a close-knit old boys’ club. But two decades ago,
the bias against women was much more blatant and institutional.
When Pooja Goyal, 41, was in high school in the early 1990s, her elite all girls’ convent school
in Jaipur did not even have a mathematics teacher. And therefore, it did not even offer the
subject to its students. “Now that I think about it, I am like ‘What discrimination.’ It was cruel,”
she told Quartz.
Goyal ultimately studied mathematics for the IIT entrance exam with the help of her brother-
in-law, who used to work with the Reserve Bank of India. She cleared the entrance exam in
1992, with an all-India rank of 484. She opted for chemical engineering, and was one of 13
women out of a student body of 300 at IIT Delhi. But studying at an IIT was anything but
welcoming.
“The boys did not know how to interact with girls. There were ten hostels for boys on one
side of the IIT Delhi campus, and there was one hostel for girls on the other end. And all the
cultural activities took place on the boys’ end,” she said. Other women IIT students from the
same era had similar experiences. “It was a completely male-dominated institution. I felt like
a complete outlier,” said Parul Mittal, class of 1995 at IIT Delhi. Studying at an IIT was Mittal’s
goal from her childhood as she was great in mathematics and a “very competitive student.”
“There was no same-sex company to discuss your college life with and it was not a very
friendly scenario, because there were very few friendships between boys and girls,” said
Mittal, who studied electrical engineering. “If I did not understand something in class, there
was nobody I could ask for help. In a way, we girls had to work much harder than the boys.”
After graduation, most of the women Quartz spoke to moved abroad for higher studies and
then took up consulting or technology jobs. For almost all of them, marriage was a minor blip
in their careers. But having a child was something different.
Post-pregnancy pause.
India’s IIT grads of the 1990s who Quartz spoke to kept working through marriages, and even
when they got pregnant. Many of them took the minimal maternity leave, devoting as much
attention as they could to their careers. “Your career starts seeing an upward trajectory
around your 30s, and this coincides with the time a woman has her babies,” explained Goyal.
She was working in the US with software company Adobe when she first got pregnant, and
took nine weeks off after her first daughter was born. She continued her steady rise up the
corporate ladder even after her second child was born. But when she made the decision to
move back to India in 2007, Goyal found that she had to drastically rethink her career goals.
“When I moved back to India, I did not find good childcare at all,” she said. “I was ready to
compromise on anything from cooking to cleaning, but with childcare, you have to be 100%
sure.” Even though domestic help is much more affordable in India than in the US, Goyal said
she struggled to find a trained and reliable nanny. On top of that, there were hardly any decent
daycare centres near her home. While a section of corporate India has now started opening
creches for working mothers, the trend is still in its nascent stages.At Adobe’s India office, she
found the work environment way less flexible and accommodating of working mothers than
it had been in the US.
“The boundary between work and personal life is not well-defined in India,” said Goyal, who
often had to take work home and put in long hours. Just one year after moving to India, she
quit her job and started her own company instead. “When I had a full-time job here, and a
young child, I was sleeping just four hours a day.”
Options such as work-from-home are still not common in India. Bosses prefer to see their
employees in office everyday and believe that logging in from home will decrease their
productivity. “In India, face time is still so much more important. And it is still impossible to
tell your boss that you have to leave early to pick up your kids from school,” said Shruti
Kahlon, who graduated from IIT Delhi in 1998 and worked as a consultant with Deloitte in
the US for several years.
Meeta Sharma Gupta, another IIT Delhi alumna who is three years Goyal’s junior, also decided
to distance herself from her first career after her kids were born. With a master’s from
University of South California and a PhD from Harvard University, Gupta worked at Bell
Laboratories and IBM Research in both India and the US. But after spending more than a
decade in research, Gupta decided to start her own venture last year.
“I think the major deviation in career trajectory comes after having kids… I could spend the
day at work but not put in additional evenings and nights or weekend hours to continue a
steep growth trajectory that some of the men who chose to could do,” said the 37-year-old
mother of two sons.
Indian husbands are part of the problem
Indian fathers still leave most of the childcare to their wives, these women also told Quartz.
“Some fathers can completely dissociate (from home) while the mother has to stay more
connected whether it is events at school or sick leave for the child,” Gupta said. “Our culture
does not see fathers going to schools to pick up children. That burden always falls on the
woman,” said Mittal, who married her senior from IIT Delhi.
Most IIT women interviewed by Quartz are married to men who are not only IIT graduates
but also hold high-ranking positions in the finance or technology sector, and the presence of
a financially-successful spouse often gave them the flexibility to step back in their own
careers. “Our culture does not see fathers going to schools to pick up children. That burden
always falls on the woman.”
“An Indian man’s self-identity is determined by his career. They feel insecure about
digressing,” said Goyal, who is married to a venture capitalist. Indian society still does not
accept stay-at-home fathers, and men who have been brave enough to choose that option in
life often have to face uncomfortable questions and sometimes disdain. “Some of my women
friends have had to make compromises such as staying single or staying abroad in order to
advance in their careers. These are compromises a man would not have to make,” Goyal said.
India’s corporate women are falling behind
In India’s technology sector, high-potential men and women start out at an equal footing, with
equal pay, according to Catalyst, a not-for-profit research organisation that promotes gender
equality in business.
Over time, however, a significant pay gap emerges. Women also get fewer international
assignments or other career-enhancement opportunities in the middle level. “Women [in
their 30s] reported earning Rs3,79,570 (approximately $6,000) less than men in their current
jobs,” the report said. “Women’s aspirations and overall career advancement are affected by
the pressure they face to fulfill multiple (and often competing) commitments at home and at
work.”
Sangita Singh, the chief executive of healthcare life sciences and services at Wipro, is one of
the most senior women in Indian IT industry. After years of hiring and nurturing countless
young women, she agrees with this assessment.
There are three crossroads in a working woman’s life: When she joins an organisation, when
she has kids and when she wants to transition to a senior leadership role, Singh told Quartz.
Firms will continue to lose talented women, if they do not support, mentor and motivate them
during these stages, she said.
Choosing another path, with no regrets
Some of these IIT-educated women simply do not want to measure success in terms of
professional life alone. Kahlon, 39, had ample help from her parents and in-laws in raising
children. But working at Deloitte meant she was always on the move. “For me, work was being
away from home three days a week,” Kahlon said, who also holds an MBA degree from the
Wharton School. “I chose to step away from consulting because being with my children was
far more important to me than professional success.” She now works with Firmenich, a
fragrance and flavour company, in Princeton. “Now, my office is ten minutes from my home.”
While Kahlon found a senior role in a mid-sized company, some IIT women decided to
drastically change their careers, and remain completely unapologetic about their decisions.
Mittal, for instance, left her IT career after 12 years and two children, and found success as a
writer of love stories. Some IIT women decided to drastically change their careers, and
remain completely unapologetic about their decisions.
Goyal and Gupta, on the other hand, founded startups that were inspired by their early years
as a mother. “When I moved back to India, I realised there are no good pre-schools. So I
decided to get into this field,” said Goyal, who now runs a daycare centre in Gurgaon. “My new
field has given me a flexible lifestyle and fulfilled my entrepreneurial dream.” Gupta started
a wooden toy business in Bengaluru, and does not regret leaving research.
“I don’t feel bitter about it (leaving research). I think given a woman’s emotional attachment
to kids and vice-versa, I feel that the balancing act is required and desired from a woman,”
she said. “ Of course, an equally qualified man would not have had the same trajectory.” “As a
woman,” Gupta concluded, “you either make a conscious choice not to have a family, or take
your career slowly.”
Younger women make different choices
While Goyal and Gupta took more than a decade to quit their high-profile jobs, Sirisha
Gadepalli, 34, did so with much more ease.
After graduation in 2002 from IIT, Gadepalli moved to the US. Incidentally, her batch at IIT
Delhi had 40 women students—the highest number ever for the college. Gadepalli later did
an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a consultant at the Boston
Consulting Group (BCG). After two years at the consultancy, she joined an India startup,
Freecharge, in 2014.
“Salary has never been an important criterion in my life. I want satisfaction from what I do,”
said Gadepalli, who has also worked for the Akansha Foundation, an education non-profit, for
two years. “I could have risen in BCG, but growth comes from doing the kind of work you
want to do.” Gadepalli is married to another IIT graduate who now works for a private equity
firm.
Even though she is going to have a baby this month, Gadepalli said she does not imagine
motherhood being a major impediment in her career. “My startup gives me the flexibility to
work from home, as long as I deliver.”
Q1 - “Career is something that an individual experiences but is not solely of his/her
own making”. Given this statement, what are Institutional, Organizational, and
Individual factors/variables that have influenced the “career paths” of IIT women
graduates in this case? - 7 Marks
Q2 - What were the career anchors for women taking up engineering positions in
companies. - 4 Marks
CASE 2
The Case of Variable Pay
Nitin Arora was wrapping up for the day, when his phone rang. "Hi, Nitin, Anil here. Can I pop
in for a few minutes?" "Yes, if you can be here in two minutes flat" Arora said.
"You got it," the other man said and hung up.
Anil Mathur was a Brand Manager at Care Soft, a large fast-moving consumer products
company. In fact, it was Arora who had, as the Chief of HR at Care Soft, recruited Mathur from
a medium-sized company in Mumbai. Over the years, they had built up a good rapport. In any
case, Arora was known to be one of the more friendly top executives in the company.

Arora had a vague idea of what Mathur might want to discuss, but he decided to frame his
replies as he went along.

As promised, the 36-year-old brand manager was in Arora's room in less than two minutes.

"When was the last time we had a semi-formal meeting like this one?" Arora asked his guest.
"I don't remember, may be six months ago," Mathur replied.
"8:30 on a Friday evening, you've made me stay back. So this had better be important," Arora
pretended to threaten his colleague. "You are darn right, this is important," said Mathur. "I
am unhappy with my pay hike for last fiscal."

"But you got your letter a month ago, why are you bringing it up only now?" Arora asked.

"I have been thinking about it, and trying to find out if I am the only one feeling let down by
the new variable pay scheme," said Mathur.

A little over a year ago, Care Soft had decided to replace its fixed compensation system with
variable pay. In fact, the whole exercise was done in three months flat, and implemented with
little advance notice to the employees, who were not altogether surprised since the word had
gotten around as soon as the HR consultancy was hired to draw up the new compensation
structure. An article in the in-house magazine and an e-mail from the CEO announced the
scheme.

The company, which had a turnover of Rs 1,200 crore the previous fiscal, hadn't yet moved
to stock options, but it had introduced a profit-sharing plan. The variable component, usually
paid out annually, was linked to the performance of both the individual and his team.
Understandably, individual performance had a higher weightage than team performance.
That apart, there were peer incentives for team and individual performances. These
rewarded performance in kind-a paid holiday, gift vouchers, or gifts.

Since the concept of variable pay was new to Care Soft, it had decided to implement it at only
the senior and middle management levels, apart from shopfloor workers-leaving out the
junior management. The senior management-starting from a general manager to the CEO-
had a variable component ranging from 15-40 per cent. Those below had just 5-15 per cent
in variable pay.

Mathur, as a brand manager, came in at the general manager level. And last year had been
particularly bad for the toothbrush division he headed. Volume sales had dropped by 5 per
cent, and rupee sales by 15 per cent because of price cuts, promotions, and discounts. Besides,
a new toothbrush that had been slated for launch in the second half of last year hadn't been
launched. This was a low-end brush that was expected to rake in Rs 1 crore in sales.

Fiscal 2001-02 was the first full year of variable pay, and Arora could tell that the executives
weren't happy with it. Already, a VP and another general manager had made their displeasure
known to Arora. Mathur leaving would not only encourage the other two to follow suit, but
also impact the new pay plan. "My performance targets were unreal," continued Mathur.
''Show me one company that has increased its toothbrush sales and I'll walk out of this room
and never complain."

"True," said Arora. "But look at it from the organisation's point of view. There are other units
that have taken a hit, with the result that our sales for last year were down. We've tried to do
the best under the circumstances."

"Probably, but why penalise me for somebody else's fault," Mathur complained. "I don't
understand."

"I am referring to the new toothbrush that my team was supposed to launch in the second
half of last year," Mathur explained. "We couldn't introduce it because the design team sat on
it for a long time, and then the engineering team took its own sweet time bringing it into
production. By the time we were ready to go, we realised that the launch expense wouldn't
be worth it. The variable component in my compensation is 20 per cent and it's been a
double-whammy for me. The fact that we didn't meet our targets ensured zero-increase in
my incentives, and the increase in base pay doesn't even beat the rate of inflation."

"Anil, don't forget that most of us in Care Soft are in the same boat. That said, I do think we
have an issue here. Here's what I can promise: I'll put forth these issues to the compensation
committee. I cannot promise anything else."

Both men looked at the clock on Arora's table. It was well past 10.

"I have to pick up medicines for my son," said Arora. "If I don't find a chemist open now, I'll
be signing my divorce papers tomorrow." Both men laughed and parted.

On Monday, the first thing Arora did was to call his CEO, Rishab Patel, and advise him to
convene a compensation committee meeting.

"This week I have a diary so full that a knife wouldn't go through it," the CEO told Arora. "Do
me a favour, Nitin. I'll send out the meeting request, but could you handle it?"

"But how can we decide on anything without you being there?" Arora asked.

"Don't. Flesh out the issues and keep them ready for me. Let me finish with our foreign
partners' visit this week."

"Should we have the meeting next week in that case?"

"No, go ahead. We can have a second meet next week."

One thing that had irked Arora all along was the fact that Patel seemed inadequately
concerned with HR problems. He was more concerned about what he called "strategic issues".

By afternoon, Arora had got a confirmation to the meeting request sent out by Patel. The
committee would meet on Wednesday pre-lunch. (''Can't tackle HR post lunch,'' somebody
had wise-cracked in acknowledgement.)

Care Soft's compensation committee comprised, apart from Patel and Arora, the CFO Narayan
Shastri, COO Niranjan Roy, Director (Marketing) Utpal Sinha, a principal from the consulting
company that had drawn up the new compensation structure Anurag Kesaria, and an
independent director, who was a chartered accountant by profession, and widely regarded
for his management wisdom Raman Behl.

The agenda for the meeting had already been circulated the previous day. Therefore, all the
men were aware of the issues at hand.

"How widespread is the discontent, Nitin?" COO Roy set the ball rolling.

"I have reason to believe that it is quite widespread," said Arora, "although only a handful of
people have taken it up with me so far."
"In that case, may be we are over-reacting," said Shastri. "We need to give the new system
more time. After all, it's just a year old."

"I don't think one can possibly over-react to such an issue," noted Behl. "The worst thing that
we can do now is to let the morale take a hit."

"I agree," said Arora. "I couldn't agree more," added Sinha, Director of marketing. "I just can't
afford to lose any of my men. And certainly not good men like Anil Mathur. I don't care if we
have to pay him more."

"That's not a good idea," pointed out Arora. "We cannot be seen as being selective in our
rewards. The whole idea behind variable pay was to motivate people across the board with
the promise of greater rewards for better performance. We cannot make changes arbitrarily."

"Then, may be we didn't implement the new structure properly," bristled Sinha. "Or may be
we should simply revert to the old fixed system, which according to me worked just fine."

"You are right about poor implementation," consultant Kesaria said. "But it would be a
strategic mistake to bring back the old system. After all, the reasons why we introduced
variable pay still hold. The business environment is changing, and we cannot afford to reward
people based on the quaint notion of entitlement. Executives have to justify what they earn."

"Besides," the Chief Financial Officer, Shastri, intervened, "variable pay is a great way to
control costs and improve productivity. Not to mention that such a system automatically
attracts high-calibre people."

"Yes, when the going is good in the market, there is no problem with variable pay," noted
Sinha. "But when the markets crash, like they have now, your profits shrink. Do you then ask
people to forget all the hard work they've done, and say 'sorry, can't give you any increments
because we've had a bad year'. Believe me, it will take less than six months to clean out talent
from this company. Don't forget that the next year is going to be equally bad for FMCG
companies."

"The IT industry is not only benching people, but asking them to take pay cuts," pointed out
Shastri.

"May be," retorted Sinha. "But how many code-jocks can join insurance, banking, pharma, or
any other industry as marketing heads or even CEOs? And asking people to deliver 15 per
cent growth in a market that is shrinking is the surest way of losing them."

''Actually it is worth looking at what is going wrong with the system," said Behl. "As I
understand it, even shop-floor workers-whose variable pay is linked to productivity-are
affected since the company has cut back on production to liquidate dealer inventory.''

"As far as I can see," said Kesaria, "it seems to be a problem of implementation. May be we
didn't communicate adequately, perhaps we need to tweak our measurement systems,
review them more frequently and reward people closer to the date of their achievements."

"That is a good idea," said Behl. "Money may not be the only reason why people work, but it
is one of the biggest reasons. Besides, a change like this needs significant lead time. It's a
cultural change and people must be prepared for it."
"I would have loved to do this over a period of one year," defended Arora. "But I was asked to
implement it within three months of the board deciding on it. Besides, where is the top
management commitment to this initiative? Who is the champion of this variable pay? I could
be, but it will have more credibility if the CEO also showed that he was committed to it."

"Meanwhile," Behl refocused the discussion, "we need to figure out a few things. One, how to
convince people like Mathur that variable pay will actually help them in the long run. Two,
how to achieve a buy-in across the organisation. And three, how to rectify some of the errors
we may have made in its implementation. Finally, here's the worst-case option, whether we
really want to scrap variable pay and return to the fixed system." What should Care Soft do?

Q3 – Is there a problem with the design or implementation of the Variable Pay? Justify
your answer. - 7 Marks

Q4 – Care Soft evaluates three possible alternatives- a) Withdraw the System

Completely b) Reintroduce a different flavour of Variable Pay c) Retaining the System
as it is.
Evaluate these alternatives and suggest which of these three should Care Soft pursue.
- 7 Marks
***