Preferred organizations: Perceptions of prospective managers

Abstract

Formal management education in india has come a long way since its inception in the early sixties. Starting with the setting up of the indian institute of management in calcutta in 1961 today there are more than sixty institutions/ universities offering post graduate programmes in management and business administration. This spread of management education has also raised a number of issues concerning the relevance, necessity, performance, utility, etc. of trained professional managers. The experience of organizations employing management graduates has, by and large, been mixed. There are a number of organizations where management graduates have risen to occupy important and senior positions and therefore, it can be assumed that these organizations have found management graduates to be usefull. On the other hand, there are organizations and threir number is not small by any means whose experience with management graduates has not been very happy. In addition to problems such as being too theoretical, over- confident, much too technique- oriented, not being able to get along with others; one problem which is mentioned very often is that of lack of loyalty to the organization and what has sometimes been called " job- hopping". Various explanations for this phenomenon have been offered, the most popular one out of which is that management graduates are much too selfish and ambitious and, therefore, do not or can not remain with one organization for any appreciable length of time. Most of these explanations have been derived from the prespective of organizations employing management graduates. The perspective of management graduates appears to have been overlooked. The management graduate is the decision maker and the central actor in any job- change and, therefore, his/ her perspective is of critical importance. An attempt was, therefore, made to explore the perspective of management graduates.