The status of women in India has long been paradoxical. They have had access to professions such as medicine, teaching and politics and have the right to own property. Among some social classes, women are extremely powerful. Yet, there is a long history of women being oppressed by men – delegated to playing subordinate roles. India’s workforce is changing. Social values and mores, and the increased global focus on women’s issues have changed the woman’s role impacting the career progression of women. This paper examines the impact of social, organisational and personal biases on the progression of professional women in India. Women managers in India have been generally successful in rising to the executive suite in Indian organisations, despite a culture that might suggest otherwise. These women were successful because of the interplay of organisational and familial support, coupled with the individual drive for success each woman demonstrated.

Strategies at different levels need to be coherent to ensure competitive advantage (Hofer and Schendel, 1978). Strategy coherence is the consistency of strategic choices across business and functional levels of strategy. In this paper we focus on strategy coherence.Using patterns of strategy, we develop a measure of the extent of strategy coherence. The relationship between coherence and performance is used to validate the measure. We illustrate the application of the measurement and validation process, in the context of acute care hospitals. The results indicate that our measure of coherence is monotonically related to performance. We also find performance differences between more and less coherent hospitals on the industry specific performance indicator of occupancy. Implications for theory and practice are highlighted.

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