Understand the different types of OB research methods
used.
OB Research Methods
OB researchers have many tools they use to discover how
individuals, groups, and organizations behave. Researchers have
working hypotheses based on their own observations,
readings on the subject, and information from individuals within
organizations. Based on these ideas, they set out to understand the
relationships among different variables. There are a number of different
research methods that researchers use, and we will discuss a few of
these below. Imagine that your manager has asked you to find out if
setting goals will help to make the employees at your company more
productive. We will cover the different ways you could use research
methods to answer this question, impress your boss, and hopefully
get a promotion.
Surveys
Surveys are one of the primary methods
management researchers use to learn about OB. A basic survey
involves asking individuals to respond to a number of questions.
The questions can be open-ended or close-ended. An example of an
open-ended question that could be used to address your manager’s
question would be to ask employees how they feel about goal setting
in relation to productivity, then summarize your findings. This
might work if you have a small organization, but open-ended surveys
can be time consuming to summarize and hard to interpret at a
glance. You could get more specific by asking employees a series of
close-ended questions in which you supply the response key, such as
a rating of 1 to 5. Today it is easy to create online surveys that
quickly compile the results automatically. There are even several
free survey tools available online such as http://freeonlinesurveys.com/ and http://www.surveygizmo.com/, or you can use
paper-and-pencil surveys.
Sample Survey About the Effectiveness of Goal
Setting
Instructions: We would like to gather
your opinions about different aspects of work. Please answer the
following three questions using the scale below:
Response Scale:
1=Strongly disagree
2=Disagree
3=Neither agree nor disagree
4=Agree
5=Strongly agree
Setting goals at work helps me to focus
1
2
3
4
5
Goal setting is effective in improving performance
1
2
3
4
5
I get more done when I use goal setting
1
2
3
4
5
Regardless of the method you choose to collect your information,
the next step is to look at the average of the responses to the
questions and see how the responses stack up. But this still
wouldn’t really answer the question your boss asked, which is
whether using goal setting would help employees be more effective
on the job. To do this, you would want to conduct a field
study.
Field Studies
Field
studies are also effective ways to learn about what is
truly going on within organizations. There are survey field studies
like the one above, but more compelling evidence comes from field
studies that employ an experimental design. Here you would assign
half the employees at your company to the goal setting condition
and the other half to the control group condition. The control group
wouldn’t get any information on goal setting but the treatment group
would. If you found that the treatment group was more effective
than the control group, you could tell your boss that goal setting
works.
Laboratory Studies
OB researchers are often interested in basic research questions
such as “Can we show that goal setting increases performance on a
simple task?” This is how research on goal setting started, and it
is also how we can establish the conditions under which it works
more or less effectively. Again, to address this, researchers may
conduct a lab
study in which one group is assigned one condition and
the other group is assigned the control condition (generally the
control condition involves no change at all). You may even have
been involved in a lab study during your time at your university.
One of the most important concepts to understand with lab studies
is that they give the researcher a great deal of control over the
environment they are studying but do so in a less “realistic” way,
since they are not studying real employees in real work settings.
For example, in a lab study, a researcher could simulate hiring and
firing employees to see if firing some employees affected the
goal-setting behavior of the remaining employees. While this
wouldn’t be legal or ethical to do in a real organization, it could
be a compelling lab study. At the same time, however, firing
someone in a lab setting does not necessarily carry the same
consequences as it would in real life.
Case Studies
Case
studies are in-depth descriptions of a single industry
or company. Case writers typically employ a systematic approach to
gathering data and explaining an event or situation in great
detail. The benefits of case studies are that they provide rich
information for drawing conclusions about the circumstances and
people involved in the topics studied. The downside is that it is
sometimes difficult to generalize what worked in a single situation
at a single organization to other situations and organizations.
Meta-Analysis
Meta-analysis is a technique used by
researchers to summarize what other researchers have found on a
given topic. This analysis is based on taking observed correlations
from multiple studies, weighting them by the number of observations
in each study, and finding out if, overall, the effect holds or
not. For example, what is the average relationship between job
satisfaction and performance? Research shows that, looking across
300 studies, the relationship is moderately strong (Judge et al.,
2001). This is useful information because for years people had
thought that the relationship did not exist, but when all the
studies to date were examined together, the original beliefs about
the satisfaction–performance relationship deteriorated. The
advantage of meta-analysis is that it gives a more definitive
answer to a question than a single study ever could. The downside
is that meta-analysis is only possible if sufficient research has
been done on the topic in question.
Measurement Issues in OB
Another important thing to understand is the difference between
reliability and validity. Imagine you
own a trucking company. A major component in trucking is managing
the weight of different cargo. If you had a scale that gave you the
same weight three times, we would say that was a very reliable
scale. But, if it turns out the weights given are in kilograms
instead of pounds, it would not be a valid measure if you charge
for delivery by the pound.
Finally, much of management research addresses correlations between
two concepts rather than actual causation. Correlation simply means that two
things co-vary. For example, it would be inaccurate to assume that
because 99% of the people who died this year also drank water,
consuming water kills people. Yet many people claim their product
caused a positive outcome when, in fact, the data do not support
their claim any more than the water example. This brings up
something that confuses even seasoned researchers. When you have
only one observation it is called a datum. When you use
the word data, it refers to multiple observations, so
it is always plural.
Key Takeaways
OB researchers test hypotheses using different methods such as
surveys, field studies, case studies, and meta-analyses.
Reliability refers to consistency of the measurement while validity
refers to the underlying truth of the measurement. It is important
to recognize the difference between correlation and causation.
Exercises
Create a hypothesis about people at work. Now that you have one
in mind, which method do you think would be most effective in
helping you test your hypothesis?
Have you used any of the OB research methods before? If not,
what can you do to become more familiar with them?
Give an example of a reliable measure.
Give an example of a valid measure.
How can you know if a relationship is causal or
correlational?
References
Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E., & Patton, G. K.
(2001). The job satisfaction-job performance relationship: A
qualitative and quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 376–407.