1.4 Organizational Behavior Research Methods

Case studiesIn-depth descriptions of a single industry or company. 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 with what might work in other situations and organizations.

Field studiesResearch conducted in actual organizations. They may include observation, interviews, surveys, or experiments. are those conducted in actual organizational settings with a population of workers. Most field studies involve surveying employees and managers working in organizations. At the same time, compelling evidence comes from field studies that employ an experimental designA study having a group that receives a treatment and a comparison group that receives no treatment.. Here you would assign half the employees at your company to the goal-setting condition and the other half to the control groupA group that does not receive any experimental manipulation so it can be compared to a treatment group. condition. The control group wouldn’t get any information about goal setting, but the treatment groupA group that receives experimental manipulation. would. If you found that the treatment group was more effective than the control group, you could tell your boss that goal setting works.

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 studyResearch conducted under controlled conditions and may include observation, interviews, surveys, or experiments., which is a study conducted in artificial situations outside of actual organizations. Lab studies usually follow an experimental design. 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 might create an artificial job in which “employees” are paid for each T-shirt folded. Then the researcher can examine the effects of goal setting by setting a goal for the experimental group, and not setting goals in the control group, comparing the resulting performance levels. While such a study would be interesting for examining the effects of goal setting, it is a study on students acting as employees for a short period of time and therefore would give us limited information about whether goal setting would work in actual organizations. 

You may have heard about machine learning lately. The idea behind machine learning is that as large amounts of data (Big Data) have become more readily available, traditional approaches to data analysis are not feasible. Machine learning algorithms generate models based on the available data and continue to update and adjust as new information is available. Machine learning may also be used to simulate what respondents might say or do. “It’s not magic,” Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google, has said of machine learning. “It’s just a tool, but it’s a really important tool.” If you've ever used Netflix and noticed that it is suggesting things you might enjoy watching, you’ve experienced an example of machine learning applying an algorithm based on your viewing history and those of other viewers.

Meta-analysisThe process of summarizing research findings from studies on related topics. 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. 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 already been done on the topic in question.

SurveysResearch tools used to elicit respondents’ reactions to specific questions. 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 for which you supply a response key, such as a rating on a scale of one to five. Today it is easy to create online surveys that quickly compile the results automatically. There are even several free survey tools available online or you can use paper-and-pencil surveys. Both approaches have pros and cons, but the key is to match your survey technique to the particular sample and research questions involved.

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.

In addition to research methods and measurement, it is important to understand the different analytics approaches to answering key OB questions. There are three approaches to analytics: descriptive analyticsApproaches focused on understanding what has already happened. , which refer to approaches focused on understanding what has already happened, such as the average job satisfaction rating for employees from last year’s opinion survey; predictive analyticsWhat is likely to happen based on what we already know. , which refer to what is likely to happen based on what we know already, such as guesses regarding this year’s upcoming opinion survey ratings for job satisfaction; and prescriptive analyticsA focus on what should be done in the future based on what we know. , which refer to focus on what should be done in the future based on what we know, such as specific evidence-based actions that might be taken to increase job satisfaction.