M.J. Arul's Home Page

I'm M. Joseph Arul, known often only as M.J. Arul. I hail from Tamilnad, a southern state of India.

If you want to hear a discussion of some basic concepts in the domain of human behaviour, play the following video:

For those of you who have known me from the 1990s, 1980s or before:
After taking voluntary retirement in 1998 from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), I joined the then DD Institute of Technology, Nadiad, as "Professor & Head" of its Centre for Management Studies. I gave up the job in April 2000 and took to freelancing for a year. Then I was with S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai (Bombay) for about three years, before moving down south.

I moved to Bangalore in December 2003 and was Dean of Management Studies at Presidency College there. I relinquished the position in June 2005 and joined SDM Institute of Management Development (SDM-IMD) in Mysore. I returned to Presidency, at the instance of its Chairman, as Director of their B-School in February 2006 and retired from there in February 2011. The Chairman asked me to "come back", so I rejoined Presidency as Director of their MBA Programme in August 2012 and relinquished the position on 31 March 2017. I continue to live in Bangalore.

I hold a Master's degree in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Organisational Behaviour. My dissertation at the Master's was on Self Concept Related to Adjustment and Achievement.

My doctoral dissertation was on Interpersonal Needs of Managers and Management Students: An Exploratory Study, based on Schutz' revised theory of FIRO and its Element-B instrument. (Dr. Will Schutz found his earlier (1958) FIRO-B instrument conceptually defective and hence replaced it with Element-B in 1982.)

Those interested can read my Ph.D. dissertation by clicking on Title, below.

I would appreciate getting to read any empirical study, related to the revised version of the theory. By the way, FIRO stands for Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation, a three-dimensional theory of interpersonal relations. Dr. Will Schutz originated the theory in 1958 and revised it in 1982. Based on the revised version of the theory, Dr. Schutz developed a full-fledged training programme, called The Human Element (THE) for managers. I took the first phase of this training in October-November 1995 and the advanced Phase-II, conducted by Dr. Will Schutz himself, in June-July 1998. I attended an update on the subject during October-November 2000. All these events were in California, USA. T H E workshop is now available in India.