A management journal that should engage the SL business sector
View(s):NSBM Journal of Management, Volume 1, No. 1 January – June, 2015
Editor: Prof Mangala Fonseka
Business Management continues to grow and expand as an academic discipline and there is a growing body of literature on the subject –text books, research studies, journals, newspaper articles and the like. The Sri Lanka Journal of Management published by the Postgraduate Institute of Management has been in publication for nearly 20 years as the only such local journal. And now the inauguration of a second journal of its kind titled NSBM Journal of Management by the National School of Business Management (NSBM), an affiliate of the National Institute of Business Management (NIBM), is a significant Sri Lankan addition to the global pool of knowledge.
The new journal offers the reader a sumptuous spread of six learned articles on various aspects of management. J. A. S. K. Jayakody, Associate Professor of the University of Colombo, writes on charismatic leadership based on in-depth data collected from senior managers of Sri Lankan business operations. He argues that charisma is a constellation of leader prototypes, leader archetypes, leader extraordinariness and leader group prototypes.
Randi Kailashini Thiranagama, Senior Finance Manager at NSBM, reports a qualitative study of local entrepreneurship in the SME sector in which she identifies personal and environmental factors that contribute to engineers and accountants becoming entrepreneurs. The third article is by Nadira Ahangama, Senior Lecturer at NSBM, and Raj Prasana, Senior Lecturer at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research, Massey University, New Zealand, who write on disaster management and resilience –a subject of tropical relevance in the context of the increasing incidence of natural disasters in the world.
Dinushi Wijesinghe and Dileepa Samudrage, Lecturers at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, examine how technically oriented top managers use Management Accounting Systems (MASs) for implementing organizational strategy. The study is based on a survey of Sri Lankan manufacturing firms and the Upper EchelonTheory.
Ownership Concentration and Degree of Compliance with Corporate Governance Best Practices of Public Listed Companies in Sri Lanka is a quantitative study based on annual reports. Compliance with corporate best practices is significantly lower in closely held companies than in widely held companies according to the Corporate Governance Index developed by the three authors, who are also Sri Jayewardenepura University academics – G. S. Mapitiya, A.R. Ajward and Samanti Senaratne.
The final article is a research note titled Validating INDSERV in Business to Business, a study based on the Sri Lankan hotel industry by Nilakshi W. K. Galahitiyawe and Ghazali Musa, who propose INDSERV (Industrial Service Quality) as an alternative to the more popularly used SERVQUAL (Service Quality) for measuring business to business (B2B) service quality.
All in all, this is a management journal that should engage the attention of the Sri Lankan business sector and the academic world. One hopes the journal will be published regularly –twice a year as promised. - C. N. S.