Questionnaire for Ph.D. in Management

 In his book  “The Third Wave”, Alvin Toffler warned – Things are going to happen much faster in the future and only those who will keep up with the fast pace will stay alive in the 21st century.  The question arises – how are we going to move with the fast pace? Is it through random fashion or through planned goal setting? . If we want to follow random fashion, social conflict will be high. Therefore, attention should be paid to planned goal setting and stringent control over our movement. Planned goal setting demands assessment of existing needs, values and attitudes (social cognition) of people in society initially so that planned intervention can be made. 
    Questionnaire development for Ph.D is goal oriented, systematic process. Therefore, use of available questionnaire may not fulfil the purpose of Ph.d.
    Another reason, each questionnaire development has specific purpose. For example, one used facet free job satisfaction questionnaire for Ph.D but this is not useful for change management where in satisfaction with different facets
(Satisfaction with pay, company policy,  peers, supervisor, promotion etc.) is more important. 
    What is the purpose of Ph.D. in management?  Is it for getting the degree ? As student of management, your purpose will be to contribute some theories to management. What is theory ? Theory is a set of propositions or the postulates that can explain change in the nature. Specifically for Ph.D., students are asked to contribute some new or innovative  theories or methods. Here new means original thinking as provided by Maslow in developing Need hierarchy theory. 

 New theory comes through inductive reasoning. And by deductive reasoning, another theory can be developed as suggested by Herzberg in describing two factor theory of motivation.

In theory development, researcher uses some constructs. The constructs may come from the research insight or from observation or through review of literature. Purpose of the questionnaire development is to assess the construct.

Definition

Questionnaire refers to device consisting of the questions in order to determine individual differences in the construct. Individual responds to same construct in different manners resulting variations among individuals. Difference in response occurs due to individual difference. 

Individual difference

Individual differences stand for the variation or deviations among individuals in regard to a single characteristic or number of characteristics. 

     These characteristics are due to hereditary, demographic (age, education, social status, income)

Organisational (hierarchy, job responsibility, department)

and psychological factors (personality, intelligence, aptitude, interest, value etc.). Individual difference occurs at different levels:

1. Intra individual

2. Inter individual

3. Individual and group

4. Intra group

5. Inter group

Observed and latent behaviour

The construct is made of both observed and unobserved behaviours. The unobserved is latent. And observed is manifestated. Usually, observed behaviours are collected for development of questionnaire. And the latent is  inherent  relationship among the characteristics that are imbibed within respondents. This latent phenomenon affects the change in criterion variable.

Item

It would be misnomer to assume that any statement is item. Item is the unit of behaviour and the construct is set of specific behaviour interrelated with each other. 

  Individual responds to the item in different manners. Therefore there will be individual difference in item selection. 

  Item should be related to the group of items in which it belongs to.

Item pool

Item pool is the reservoir of large number of items related to the construct. Number of item pool depends on the dimensionality of construct. One item pool is sufficient for assessing one-dimensional construct and more than one item pool is required for multidimensional construct. The dimensionality will be judged by the researcher based on well grounded theory. If the construct is new, it is necessary to write items based on strong intellectual reasoning. There are many techniques to collect items for the item pool. Some techniques are  observation, participant observation, interview, focus group, Analysis of construct

Observation : Observation refers to watching and listening to the behaviour of other persons over time without manipulating and controlling it and record findings in ways that allow some degree of analytical interpretation and discussion. In observation, researcher writes detailed description of observed overt and covert actions, communications along with background information, thoughts and emotions that encompass the phenomenon. Overt behaviour does not give actual meaning of certain behaviour, therefore attention should be paid to covert behaviour. The later helps to understand the meaning of camouflaged social behaviour. In recording of observation, attention should be paid to Inter-observer and intra observer consistency. Former refers to consistency between observers and later refers to consistency between observation of one observer across period of time. Cohen’s Kappa is a measure of the degrees of agreement over the coding of items by two people. One observes others in naturalistic, experimental or in simulated environment.

    Naturalistic observation refers  to observation in natural habitat where in observer acts as non-participant. In structured observation, observer designs some experimental condition where in he can observe specific behaviour of the subject. Structured observation is used to observe experimental data.

Participant observation:  Participant observation is a set of research strategies which aim to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or subcultural group, or a particular community) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, often though not always over an extended period of time.

Interview

Interview provides potentially valuable information that helps in exploring research variables. It ranges from informal to highly formal interactions through unstructured and semi structured interview. 

 Informal Interviewing

It is characterized by a total lack of structure or control. Researcher tries to remember conversations heard during the course of a day in the field.

 Unstructured Interviewing

In informal interviewing, respondent does not know that researcher collects data from the conversation. But in unstructured interviewing, both know purpose of interview. In this technique researcher has clear plan in mind, but he provides minimum control over the people’s responses. The idea is to get people to open up and let them express themselves in their own terms, and at their own pace.  In unstructured interview, questions can be changed or adapted to meet respondent’s intelligence, understanding, belief or values. Unlike structured interview where in respondent is asked to choose pre set answers, here interviewer gets chance to explore the meaning or reasons behind the answer of respondents.

 Semi-structured Interview

In situations, where in researcher does not get chance to interview respondent more than once, semi-structured interview is applicable. Like unstructured interview, semi structured interview is useful in exploring variables.

Focus group

A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.

Likert type

Likert-type scales are useful when you are measuring latent constructs - that is, characteristics of people such as attitudes, feelings, opinions, etc. Latent constructs are generally thought of as unobservable individual characteristics (meaning that there is no concrete, objective measurement) that are believed to exist and cause variations in behavior (e.g., answer questions on a scale).

Usually, Likert-type scales use statements ("Please rate the extent to which you agree/disagree with the following:") and use 5 or 7-point response scales (most commonly). The response scales use anchors such as 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree, etc.

The items should be phrased in a way that only poses one characteristic per item so that it is clear what the person is responding to. For example, "I think politicians are honest and helpful" is not a good item because you are asking about two separate issues (honesty and helpfulness). Also, try to avoid using the word "not" or other negatives directly in these items as it can become confusing about what it means to disagree with a negative.

Likert-type scales can be scored in a variety of ways. Typically, you would score each item so that higher scores always indicate "more" of some characteristic and then take the mean (average) of all of the items. Remember, the numbers will not have any inherent meaning (e.g., if you are measuring attitudes about politicians, scoring a 3.4 doesn't REALLY mean anything except that, on average, that individual was slightly favorable in his/her attitudes and can then be compared to the distribution of the remaining responses). 

Finally, you always want to check the reliability of Likert-type scales using Cronbach's Alpha (internal consistency). In general, you want values of .7 and up (the ceiling is 1.0) for good internal consistency. Mathematically, internal consistency is the average of all possible split-half correlations. Conceptually, it measures how welly the items function together (e.g., do people respond consistently with their standing on the construct of interest).

Likert type :http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/scallik.php

Observation : Researchers develop items from both overt and covert behaviour. 

Table 3.1 shows observation record of school going behaviour of two students and it’s associated items to assess both overt and covert behaviour. 

Definition

Questionnaire refers to device consisting of the questions in order to determine individual differences in the construct. Individual responds to same construct in different manners resulting variations among individuals

1. Individual differences stand for the variation or deviations among individuals in regard to a single characteristic or number of characteristics.

 due to several factors - heredity, demographic,social and psychological factors. This suggests that

1. Individual differences stand for the variation or deviations among individuals in regard to a single characteristic or number of characteristics.

Questions are in the form of interrogative and affirmative in nature. In case of affirmative modes, response categories will determine the question status. Table 1 and 2 present a set of interrogative and affirmative statements about awareness of safety rules by the employees in shop floor, 

And purpose of the questionnaire for Ph.D. is to contribute some construct in explaining some problems of management. 

In human resource management, one of the major problem is to make optimization between worker needs and organizational needs. Dutta Roy (1988) in the young scientist award competition of the Indian Science Congress Association has shown this optimization by highlighting relation between Organizational health and Quality of Working life. The paper was award

I think the topic  is very much challenging specially in the area of Organizational behaviour and Human Resource Management. With the rapid change in liberalization, privatization and globalization policies, Indian industries perceive lot of environmental uncertainties - workforce diversity (
comprises of people of different gender, age, social class, sexual orientation, values, personality characteristics, ethnicity, religion, education, language, physical appearance, martial status, lifestyle, beliefs, ideologies and background characteristics such as geographic origin, tenure with the organization, and economic status), continuous improvement initiatives (meeting up skill deficits by new training skill and development), re-engineering (modifying existing skills),  the contingent work force (temporary recruitment of well trained workers for changing attitude, skills etc. of old workers),decentralized work sites and employee involvement.






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RETROACTION

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The world of work is rapidly changing. As a part of organization, Human Resource Management (HRM) must be prepared to deal with effects of changing world of work. For the HR people it means understanding the implications of globalization, work-force diversity, changing skill requirements, corporate downsizing, continuous improvement initiatives, re-engineering, the contingent work force, decentralized work sites and employee involvement.  Let us consider each of them one by one.

1. Globalization and its implications

Business today doesn’t have national boundaries – it reaches around the world. The rise of multinational corporations places new requirements on human resource managers. The HR department needs to ensure  that the appropriate mix of employees in terms of knowledge, skills and cultural adaptability is available to handle global assignments.  In order to meet this goal, the organizations must train individuals to meet the challenges of globalization. The employees must have working knowledge of the language and culture ( in terms of values, morals, customs and laws) of the host country.

Human Resource Management (HRM) must also develop mechanisms that will help multicultural individuals work together. As background, language, custom or age differences become more prevalent, there are indications that employee conflict will increase. HRM would be required to train management to be more flexible in its practices. Because tomorrow’s workers will come in different colors, nationalities and so on, managers will be required to change their ways. This will necessitate managers being trained to recognize differences in workers and to appreciate and even celebrate these differences.

2. Work-force Diversity

In the past HRM was considerably simpler because our work force was strikingly homogeneous. Today’s work force comprises of people of different gender, age, social class sexual orientation, values, personality characteristics, ethnicity, religion, education, language, physical appearance, martial status, lifestyle, beliefs, ideologies and background characteristics such as geographic origin, tenure with the organization, and economic status and the list could go on. Diversity is critically linked to the organization’s strategic direction. Where diversity flourishes, the potential benefits from better creativity and decision making and greater innovation can be accrued to help increase organization’s competitiveness. One means of achieving that is through the organization’s benefits package. This includes HRM offerings  that fall under the heading of the family friendly organization. A family friendly organization is one that has flexible work schedules and provides such employee benefits such as child care. In addition to the diversity brought by gender and nationality, HRM must be aware of the age differences that exist in today’s work force. HRM must train people of different age groups to effectively mange and to deal with each other and to respect the diversity of views that each offers. In situations like these a participative approach seems to work better.

3. Changing skill requirements

Recruiting and developing skilled labor is important for any company concerned about competitiveness, productivity, quality and managing a diverse work force effectively. Skill  deficiencies translate into significant losses for the organization in terms of poor-quality work and lower productivity, increase in employee accidents and customer complaints. Since a growing number of jobs will require more education and higher levels of language than current ones , HRM practitioners and specialists will have to communicate this to educators and community leaders etc. Strategic human resource planning will have to carefully weigh the skill deficiencies and shortages. HRM department will 1 to devise suitable training and short term programmes to bridge the skill gaps & deficiencies.

4. Corporate downsizing

Whenever an organization attempts to delayer, it is attempting to create greater efficiency. The premise of downsizing is to reduce the number of workers employed by the organization. HRM department has a very important role to play in downsizing. HRM people must ensure that proper communication must take place during this time. They must minimize the negative effects of rumors and ensure that individuals are kept informed with factual data. HRM must also deal with actual layoff. HRM dept is key to the downsizing discussions that have to take place.

5. Continuous improvement programs

Continuous improvement programs focus on the long term well being of the organization.  It is a process whereby an organization focuses on quality and builds a better foundation to serve its customers. This often involves a company wide initiative to improve quality and productivity. The company changes its operations to focus on the customer and to involve workers in matters affecting them. Companies strive to improve everything that they do, from hiring quality people, to administrative paper processing, to meeting customer needs.

Unfortunately, such initiatives are not something that can be easily implemented, nor dictated down through the many levels in an organization. Rather, they are like an organization wide development process and the process must be accepted and supported by top management and driven by collaborative efforts, throughout each segment in the organization. HRM plays an important role in the implementation of continuous improvement programs.  Whenever an organization embarks on any improvement effort, it is introducing change into the organization. At this point organization development initiatives dominate. Specifically, HRM must prepare individuals for the change. This requires clear and extensive communications of why the change will occur, what is to be expected and what effect it will have on employees.

6. Re-engineering work processes for improved productivity

Although continuous improvement initiatives are positive starts in many of our organizations, they typically focus on ongoing incremental change. Such action is intuitively appealing – the constant and permanent search to make things better. Yet many companies function in an environment that is dynamic- facing rapid and constant change. As a result continuous improvement programs may not be in the best interest of the organization. The problem with them is that they may provide a false sense of security. Ongoing incremental change avoids facing up to the possibility that what the organization may really need is radical or quantum change. Such drastic change results in the re-engineering of the organization.

Re-engineering occurs when more than 70% of the work processes in an organization are evaluated and altered. It requires organizational members to rethink what work should be done, how it is to be done and how to best implement these decisions. Re-engineering changes how organizations do their business and directly affects the employees. Re-engineering may leave certain employees frustrated and angry and unsure of what to expect. Accordingly HRM must have mechanisms in place for employees to get appropriate direction of what to do and what to expect as well as assistance in dealing with the conflict that may permeate the organization. For re-engineering to generate its benefits HRM needs to offer skill training to its employees. Whether it’s a new process, a technology enhancement, working in teams, having more decision making authority, or the like , employees would need new skills as a result of the re-engineering process.

8. Contingent workforce

A very substantial part of the modern day workforce are the contingent workers. Contingent workers are individuals who are typically hired for shorter periods of time. They perform specific tasks that often require special job skills and are employed when an organization is experiencing significant deviations in its workflow. When an organization makes its strategic decision to employ a sizable portion of its workforce from the contingency ranks, several HRM issues come to the forefront. These include being able to have these virtual employees available when needed, providing scheduling options that meet their needs and making decisions about whether or not benefits will be offered to the contingent work force.

No organization can make the transition to a contingent workforce without sufficient planning. As such, when these strategic decisions are being made, HRM must be an active partner in these discussions. After all its HRM department’s responsibility to locate and bring into the organization these temporary workers. As temporary workers are brought in, HRM will also have the responsibility of quickly adapting them to the organization. HRM will also have to give some thought to how it will attract quality temporaries.

9. Decentralized work sites

Work sites are getting more and more decentralized. Telecommuting capabilities that exist today have made it possible for the employees to be located anywhere on the globe. With this potential, the employers no longer have to consider locating a business near its work force. Telecommuting also offers an opportunity for a business tin a high cost area  to have its work done in an area where lower wages prevail.

Decentralized work sites also offer opportunities that may meet the needs of the diversified workforce. Those who have family responsibilities like child care, or those who have disabilities may prefer to work in their homes rather than travel to the organization’s facility. For HRM, decentralized work sites present a challenge. Much of that challenge revolves around training managers in how to establish and ensure appropriate work quality and on-time completion. Work at home may also require HRM to rethink its compensation policy. Will it pay by the hour, on a salary basis, or by the job performed. Also, because employees in decentralized work sites are full time employees of the organization as opposed to contingent workers, it will be organization’s responsibility to ensure health and safety of the decentralized work force.

10. Employee involvement

For today’s organization’s to be successful, there are a number of employee involvement concepts that appear to be accepted. These are delegation, participative management, work teams, goal setting, employee training and empowering of employees.  HRM has a significant role to play in employee involvement. What is needed is demonstrated leadership as well as supportive management. Employees need to be trained and that’s where human resource management has a significant role to play. Employees expected to delegate, to have decisions participatively handled, to work in teams, or to set goals cannot do so unless they know and understand what it is that they are to do. Empowering employees requires extensive training in all aspects of the job. Workers may need to understand how new job design processes. They may need training in interpersonal skills to make participative  and work teams function properly.

Modern management is moving from non virtual to virtual reality. It is more guided by IT tools like SAP. Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing (SAP) was founded in June, 1972, it was centered to only A type or big businesses. However over a period of time, small and medium size companies adopted SAP towards achieving organizational goals. 



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is the central lifecycle management hub for SAP systems and SAP solutions: on premise, or in the cloud. It accelerates innovation, manages application lifecycles, and runs solutions, end-to-end, on ONE integrated business and IT platform.
Organization becomes microscopic as one man by using the Net can run the organization. Another issue is social media. Social media directly or indirectly influence the formal and infomal group decisions. Overall management is rapidly changing with time and with environmental uncertainty.