© 2007 National Academy of Psychology, India Vol. 52, No. 1, 1-13 Indians’ Mindsets and the Conditions That Evoke Them Jai B.P. Sinha ASSERT Institute of Management Studies, Patna Ashish Pandey Management Development Institute, Gurgaon Two studies were conducted to explore the dominant mindsets of Indians and the conditions that evoke them. In the first, 47 social scientists from 17 cities in India identified four mindsets: Materialistic, dependence prone, holistic, and collectivistic. In the second study, 176 Indian managers from a variety of organizations rated the factors that evoked different mindsets and Indians’ modal behaviour associated with the mindsets. The findings disclosed that while Indians manifested a materialistic mindset in multinational organizations, they showed either dependence prone or collectivistic mindset in family owned, bureaucratic, and or traditional organizations depending on whether they valued either easygoing life or stable relationships respectively. They were holistic in combining excellence in work, personalized relationships, abstract thinking, emotionality, rationality, and spirituality in those organizations that valued both performance and people. Materialistic mindset was associated with manipulative behaviour and the holistic mindset with a proactive stance that manifested in innovative and extra-ordinary performance under inspiring superiors; both materialistic and holistic mindsets were instrumental to success at work, of course in different organizational contexts. KEY WORDS: Collectivistic, Dependence Prone, Holistic, Manipulative, Materialistic, Mindsets. M indsets are defined as the constellations of beliefs, preferences, and practices that the people possess for maintaining continuity in the ways they react and adapt to the changing environment. People’s beliefs, preferences, and practices are in active and continuous interactions with contemporary events and emerging challenges. As the new events are acted upon and the emerging challenges are addressed to, people’s beliefs, preferences, and practices are reinterpreted, their components are rearranged, and new once are incorporated into new frames of mind in order to enable them to function effectively. While this process of evolution in mindsets is universal, the extent to which the people of a given society shift the frames of their mind depends on, among other Address correspondence to Jai B.P. Sinha, ASSERT Institute of Management Studies, 143-D, S.K. Puri, Patna–800001. E-mail: assert@sancharnet.in Ashish Pandey, Management Development Institute, Mehrauli Road, Sukhraili,Gurgaon–122001. E-mail: fpm04ashish_p@mdi.ac.in factors, how open is the culture to incoming influences and the potency of the incoming influences in confronting and prevailing upon the existing beliefs, preferences, and practices. Indian cultural receptivity to new experiences has its origin in the oldest of the scriptures and philosophical texts, Rig Veda, that prescribed, “Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions” (1.89.9). Diverse new experiences arising out of invasions and immigrations, alien rules, and more recent Western and global cultural influences, combined with a rich spiritual-philosophical heritage, created a complex plurality in Indian thoughts and behaviour, which was subjected to a “synthesizing tendency” of the Indian mind (Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1954, p. xxv). Not all of them, however, could be integrated. They were enfolded and encompassed (Dumont, 1970), and were allowed to coexist as inconsistent and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and action orientations within an overarching hierarchical mindset. The trend still continues. The new does not replace the old, nor does it cause an inevitable dissonance or discomfort in the minds of Indians (Bharati, 1985). Indians, according to Carl Jung, “do not mind seemingly intolerable contradictions” (quoted by D. Sinha & Tripathi, 1994, p. 125). Further, “When Indians learn, quite expertly, modern science, business, or technology, they ‘compartmentalize’ these interests… the new ways of thought and behaviour do not replace, but live along with the old ‘religious’ ways” (Ramanujan, 1989, p. 57). Indians are “capable of living simultaneously and effortlessly on two mutually opposed planes” and “can make quantum leap from one epoch to another without showing any strain” (Varma, 2004, p. 43). TARGET ARTICLE January 2007 l Psychological Studies 1