A treatise on the upper echelons women empowerment and its influence on the operational excellence of women cooperatives in Kerala

Abstract

In the era of Women Empowerment backed by the growth through Cooperation notion, further identifying the support of many scholars and even the Top Management Teams (TMT) of the organizations towards the Women In Management (WIM) Concept, the present study was plotted in the context of Women Cooperative Societies (WCS) for testing the main ideology behind the Upper Echelon’s Theory (UET) that the strategic choices and the resulting performances of an organization is greatly affected by the cognitive level and values and depends on how the decision-makers perceive the situation. Since the researcher tries to test the UET theory in the context of Women Cooperative Societies, the personality characteristics selected for the study are the Women Empowerment Indicators, which touches all the dimensions of the mental capability of a woman in the dimensions of Personal Empowerment, Social empowerment and Workplace Empowerment. The Operational Excellence factors identified through systematic review of the past literatures were- Leadership, Human Resource Management, Operations Strategy and Involvement Culture. For the same, the researcher derived 265 sample responses through structured interview schedule, which was found apt for the study during the pre-test phase of the study. Data were analysed using percentages, descriptive statistics, ANOVA, CFA and CB-SEM. The study stands out as it put-forth a full model for analyzing the impact of Women empowerment indicators on the Operational Excellence factors which may be further used by for future researches to further develop the model or test it in a different context. The study found that salary had an influence on the self- esteem of the secretaries, and that work-experience had an influence on the Leadership, Decision making capability and the Psychological Empowerment of the respondents. SEM results showed that all the Empowerment indicators had impact on atleast one of the OPEX factors except the operations strategy of the firm. On the same vein, Decision-making capability of the was the only empowerment indicators that was found to have an impact on the operations Strategy in WCS. The originality of the study can be presented as a new approach to the UET theory using the variables, other than that are already experimented by the past scholars of the theory. The researcher provides implications of the study and recommendations to the Cooperative Department and the Policy makers in general so that the WCS can be improved by raising the empowerment indicators.