ABSTRACT
Modernisers in Indian organisations have a major job on their hands to change traditional workplace culture in which rank and seniority continue to define status and identity. Indian workplaces are evidently experiencing a period of transition. Many Indian employees think about their workplace contribution in terms of their inputs and not the resulting output. Vodafone India has reached the point where more than half its employees are millennials. Engagement is in that sense a millennial-era construct, a way of responding to the expectations of a new wave of employees. Little if anything in Indian millennial’s family lives, education, or work experience will have prepared them to operate in such an environment. Generations of Indians have benefitted moving steadily up the ranks and building social capital as they did so. Shoba Purushothaman describes the prevailing culture in many traditional Indian companies based on an assumption of ‘guilty ’til proven innocent’.
