Submitted by group 8 Ankita Goyal, Rahul D V, Sanjukta Bhattacharjee, Sravanthi B, Srotaswati Panda

Group -8 Business Dynamics Project Progress report

Initially we started out with the hypothesis to find out whether attrition of women in IT
industry affected the productivity of an IT organization. But the above hypothesis was
difficult to prove because it is not easy to find the exact reasons behind the dip in productivity
because the reason can be due to not finding a suitable replacement rather than the productive
work done by the person leaving the organization. So it is difficult to separate the dip in
productivity caused due to general attrition and the dip caused by women attrition.
Again, an employee may be evaluated in a number of parameters other than those that
directly influence the work done, namely, stability in an organization, learning orientation
skills, languages, domain knowledge; flexibility ability to work in multicultural workplaces,
to work across different time zones and modules. All of these factors were likely to be
constant when the problem statement was changed to identify the Influence of women in a
team setting in an IT organization and what positive factors they bring with, may contribute
to increase in productivity of teams.
In this context, there is the problem of women having to manage their family responsibilities
along with their professional responsibilities as compared to men and so they may leave the
organization temporarily or permanently. But this problem arises when the employees have
spent a considerable time in the organization and have many work related responsibilities
because of their position. We have factored this in with the bifurcation of work and family
responsibility with age being taken as proxy for both variables. We have also considered the
effect of favourable HR policies in this regard as improving the work life balance and thus
decreasing attrition. Further, as with any attrition there could be a dip in productivity and we
have tried to see how IT organizations are able to reduce this attrition with Friendly HR
practises and thus plug in the productivity decline. Female attrition can be taken to be a major
influence for putting in place such policies, and the former being influenced by work life
balance among other factors.
We have also included the presumption that the presence of female employees has a positive
effect on the team environment, cohesiveness and adaptability of the team. All of these
factors improve the motivation level and thus increase the effort put in the completion of the
team project. This sets off a reinforcing loop with better project outcomes contributing to the
inflow of new projects and further improving the team morale and performance. But there is
also a balancing loop to consider team burnout with the increasing number of projects. The
proportion of women that influences the positive factors determining the productivity in a
team would be affected by the female attrition and thus the link from attrition to productivity
is established.
As the team performance is determined by the additive effect of both the male and female
employees, the two effects are segregated and later combined to result in two measurable
variables team attrition and relevant experience that would affect team performance.
Thus the causal loop diagram and the stock flow diagram are drawn mirroring all the above
observations and assumptions.