Delhi · India · 28.6°N
Scholar-in-Residence

Sahil Tayal

Studying why people don't do what they intend to — at the intersection of identity, friction, and the gap between knowing and doing.

Currently · Identity–Action Gap (Working Paper)
About

Built at the edge of field and framework

I work at the intersection of ground-level economic behaviour and organisational theory — a position assembled across Big Four consulting, management education at JBIMS, and an ongoing immersion in the microeconomics of a family retail operation in South Delhi.

My intellectual instinct is to watch how systems actually behave, not how they're supposed to, and then ask what that gap reveals about identity, motivation, and friction.

Currently embedded as Scholar-in-Residence at a family retail field site in Mehrauli — operator and researcher simultaneously, building the empirical substrate for doctoral work in organisational behaviour.

Work

A nonlinear arc — by design

2024 – Present

Scholar-in-Residence

Family Retail · Mehrauli, South Delhi

Operator and researcher inside a family retail field site. Field notes on price formation, dispute management, verbal authority, and the lived microeconomics of a kirana operation. The empirical substrate for doctoral research on identity and execution.

Field Research
2023 – 2024

Compliance Associate

Agriculture Insurance Company · Ministry of Finance

Regulatory compliance work inside a public-sector insurer. Closer view of how institutional behaviour is shaped by reporting structures, statutory pressure, and the slow architecture of state-adjacent organisations.

Regulation · PSU
2021 – 2022

Associate Consultant

HappyPlus Consulting

HR analytics, OKRs and KPI design, competency mapping, and 360-degree feedback systems for client organisations. First sustained encounter with the identity–action gap in real organisational settings.

OB · Consulting
2019 – 2021

MBA · Human Resources Development

Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies · Mumbai

CGPA 8.4. Specialisation in HRD. Developed the theoretical grounding now driving doctoral research — motivation, identity, and the architecture of human behaviour in organisations. Summer internships at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and HappyPlus Consulting.

CGPA 8.4 · MHRD
2016 – 2018

Lead Associate · Audit

Ernst & Young · Big Four

Statutory and internal audit across financial services and manufacturing clients. Learned to read organisations as systems — tracing where process design, human behaviour, and institutional incentives quietly diverge from one another.

EY · Audit
2013 – 2016

B.Com (Honors)

Sri Venkateswara College · University of Delhi

83.38%. Three years of accounting, economics, statistics, and corporate law inside one of Delhi University's strongest commerce departments. Quantitative and analytical foundation for everything that followed.

DU · 83.38%
Research

The gap between knowing and doing

My doctoral research centres on why people systematically fail to act in alignment with their own stated values and intentions — not from lack of awareness, but from friction embedded in identity, environment, and execution architecture.

Working Paper · 2026

The Identity–Action Gap: A Friction-Based Model of Behavioural Execution

A working paper proposing a logistic functional model of behavioural execution, treating self-concept strength, environmental affordances, friction variables, and execution architecture as predictors of the gap between stated intention and observable action. Draws on post-traumatic growth theory (Tedeschi & Calhoun, Jayawickreme), identity-based motivation frameworks, and field observation data from a microeconomic retail context.

Domain
Organisational Behaviour
Method
Theoretical · Logistic Model
Status
Working Paper · v6
Field Site
Mehrauli, South Delhi
Connect

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