One of the significant challenges of teaching Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) courses lies in the dynamic nature of the programme itself where the only constant is the change. Hence, the main pedagogical aim in such a programme is teaching students how to continuously learn, unlearn and relearn in a lifelong fashion. There are multiple factors that hinder the learning outcomes of many offered courses in an MBA programme. At Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS) Pilani, the challenge is enhanced somewhat as the student population pursuing an MBA degree is mostly from an engineering background. Moreover, the institutional regulations do not disqualify students from appearing in any evaluation based on their attendance in the class. Thus, teachers have to incorporate an innovative approach to their teaching style for attracting students to the classrooms.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to document similarities and differences between management practices of different types of organizations in India’s IT sector through an empirical survey. The authors expected these differences to be significant enough for us to be able to group a priori this set of companies meaningfully through cluster analysis on the basis of the similarity of their management practices alone. Design/methodology/approach Using a mixed-methods approach, 73 senior-level executives of companies working in India’s IT sector were approached with a pretested questionnaire to find out differences on eighteen management practices in the areas of operations management, monitoring management, targets management and talent management. The different types of organizations surveyed were small and amp; medium global multinationals, large global multinationals, small and medium Indian multinationals, large Indian multinationals and small and medium local Indian companies. The differences and similarities found through statistical testing were further validated a priori through cluster analysis and qualitative interviews with senior-level executives. Findings The management practices of multinationals in India are moving toward Western management practices, indicating that management practices converge as the organizations grow in size. Though the practices of large Indian multinationals were not significantly different from those of global multinationals, the surprising finding was that large Indian multinationals scored better than global multinationals on a few practices. The practices of small and medium Indian companies differed significantly from those of other types of organizations and hence they formed a cluster. Practical implications The finding that large Indian IT multinationals have an edge over global multinationals in certain people management practices is a confirmation of the role of human resource practices in their current success and their continuing competitive advantage. Originality/value This is perhaps the first study of its kind to document state of specific management practices across different types of organizations in India’s IT sector and then use measures on these practices to group a priori these organizations for validation.

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