New Advance in business
hi These are the case studies that need answering
Session 3 Case study: A Student’s Literature Review
Topic: Analysis on Importance and Effectiveness of Talent Retention Methods in Singapore
Literature Review:
Talent retention has been one of the topics attracted attentions from managers and researchers for many years. However, not all companies practiced Talent retention. Even if some of those companies do have a scheme, they may have not been practiced (Financial Express, 2007).
Taleo believe that key to talent retention was to firstly recruit the right candidate for the job and that once the candidate had been on-boarded the primary role of retention had been moved from HR to Line Managers (Taleo, 2009). As line managers will then have to guide and evaluate the candidate (Taleo, 2009).
Current trend of talent retention process includes constant feedback, planning of career path, talent mobility, and continuous measurement as well as improving line managers’ capability. (Taleo, 2009).
Constant feedback and guidance will be able to guide employees to the right tracks which in turn assist to retain them. This will allow managers to share with employees the development path that managers had in mind for this employee and also allow the employees to capture regular feedback (Taleo, 2009 and Kaye and Evans, 2005).
The Financial Express (2007) also believed that even though monetary terms had been given to employees, intangibles benefits like career path planning will also help to determine whether talent retention will be successful.
For internal mobility, it means availability of job rotation within the company. Companies such as Shell and Singtel supported internal job rotation and believed that these are great ways to retain talents (Andrea, 2007, Job portal, Singtel, 2009). As mentioned by Andrea (2007), job rotation had enabled him to put his skills and capability that he had learn in school or previous experience into practice and continuously develop them (Andrea, 2007).
Lastly, line managers had to be even better trained in training and identifying talents as well as grooming talented employees as possible future successors.
References:
Andrea, 2007, Graduate Profile, Shell, May 2007.
Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, 2005, Love’em or Lose’em, Getting good people to stay.
Singtel, 2009, Job Portal.
The Financial Express, May 2007, Talent retention is the name of the game.
Taleo, 2009, Talent Retention: Six Technology-Enabled Best Practices.
Discuss:
1. Are the research objectives compatible with the research topic? Why? How would you modify the research objectives?
2. Is the literature critically presented by this student? Why? Comment on the sufficiency, coherence and cohesiveness of the literature review. How would you improve the literature review?
3. Is the referencing done by this student appropriate? Why?
Session 4 Case study: A Student’s Sampling Exercise
Topic: Demographic factors and their influences on the purchasing intention of counterfeit luxury brands apparels among Orchard road shoppers
Research Objective:
To determine if gender, age, and educational level of shoppers in Singapore Orchard Road has any influence towards purchase intention of counterfeit luxury brands apparels
Brief Literature Review (a fraction of actual literature review to set the context of this research):
Luxury brands or goods are products which could bring the status and prestige of a person apart from the functionality (Grossman and Shapiro, 1988b, as cited by Arghavan Nia & Zaichkowsky, 2000). This category of product is often expensive, such as Frank Mugler, Cartier and Rolex watches, Louise Vuitton and Hermes handbags, Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani suits. People who consume these products are publicly self-conscious, concerned about their physical appearance and fashions (Bushman, 1993, as cited by Arghavan Nia & Zaichkowsky, 2000).
Luxury brands are often affected by counterfeiting due to their positive global images and recognizable well established brand names. Some individuals purchase counterfeit luxury brands apparel on purpose as their revenge to the manufacturers of the brand for charging such unfair high prices (Kau, 1990, as cited by Joshle Juggessur et al., 2009). But from a marketer point of view, high price exhibit vital role in portraying the brand image and exclusivity, to differentiate from the mass market brands (Suraj, 2009). Consumers may choose to buy counterfeit products because they can not afford the high prices.
There are various factors which determine whether the consumers would buy counterfeit products or the genuine one. The influence factors could classified into 3 major groups, psychographic variables (attitude of the consumers, brand status of product, materialism, novelty seeking and risk taking), product attribute variables (durability, image, perceived fashion content, physical appearance, purpose and quality) and demographic variables (age, household income, educational background, and family economic background) (Wee et al., 1995). This research looks particularly at the role of three demographic variables: gender, age, and educational background.
Sampling Procedure
The interview-based survey was conducted along Orchard road to have a pool of shoppers. To be considered as an Orchard shopper, the respondent has to be at least to shop along Orchard road at least once a week. The respondents were selected randomly from the Orchard area so that a reasonably representative sample in terms of demographic background could be achieved. Then the questionnaire was administered by the researcher together with an interviewer to ensure the respondent understands the question. Another purpose of having interviewer to assist the respondents is to eliminate the possibility of having missing information during the interview process. 62 respondents were interviewed and included in the final sample. Table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of the respondents.
Table 1: Demographic Profile
Demographics Frequency (N) Percent (%)
Gender Male 28 45.2
Female 34 54.8
Educational Level A’ Level 8 12.9
Diploma/Advanced Diploma 23 37.1
Bachelor Degree 24 38.7
Master Degree 7 11.3
Age <20 9 14.5
21-30 15 24.2
31-40 20 32.3
41-50 11 17.7
51-60 7 11.3
Discuss:
1. What is the research population in consideration of the research objectives?
2. What is the sampling technique this student used? Is the sampling procedure compatible with the research objective? Why?
3. Is the sample representative of the research population? Why?
4. Any other alternative sampling techniques you could follow to improve the sampling procedure of this research?
Case 9b
Customer satisfaction on a long-haul tour holiday
Expeditions is a successful, specialist, long-haul tour operator based in London. Set up in the early 1980s it offers a portfolio of worldwide, small group, long-haul, activity-based holidays.
As a result of end-of-tour questionnaires the three senior managers of Expeditions considered that they had a good knowledge of their clients and their satisfaction with various aspects of the long-haul tour holidays they had taken with the company.
Sometimes the company’s senior managers attended trade association meetings and also presentations attended by academics. In such a meeting Ric Melody, one of the senior managers,
was intrigued by, although highly sceptical of, an academic presentation by a Dr Suzanne Martin. In this she argued that observation provided a powerful research tool, especially
for research that sought to understand and explain customer satisfaction (see Bowen,
2001).
Ric arranged a meeting with Suzanne, urged on by the knowledge that a key competitor had just started to consider an ad hoc programme of tourist observation. After the meeting, Ric began to wonder whether he might have only a superficial knowledge of his customers’ behaviours and, in particular, of what satisfied them. He began to think about what role the tour
leader, other employees, tourists and other factors played in his customers’ satisfaction. Over a few hours he developed two questions to which he wanted to know the answers:
1 What factors contribute to Expeditions’ customers’ satisfaction?
2 Through what processes do these factors become evident during the customers’ holiday
experiences?
A study of the Expeditions client base suggested that Suzanne matched the profile of the
company’s clients. This meant she could be a suitable observer of one or more chosen tours.
Suzanne insisted that, although she would tell other people on the tour she was a university lecturer, the actual observing itself would be covert. After negotiating ethical approval from her university, she was booked as a tour member onto a 12-day tour of Malaysia.
On the first day, Suzanne approached her observations from a wide focus. Subsequently she narrowed down to the two research questions. Her initial observations allowed her to become
familiar with the workings of the tour group; the emergent patterns of everyday life in terms
of activities, transport and accommodation; characteristics of individuals within the group and
the initial relationships between them. It also allowed her to become familiar with Malaysia.
Suzanne’s informal conversations and casual questioning resembled those of ordinary everyday
life. From the first day, there were many listening opportunities. Of course, little could be accomplished without trusting relationships between Suzanne and the other tour members.
This required her to act fully as one of the tour party and become fully engaged in events and conversations across the range of subgroups. Despite introducing herself as a lecturer, Suzanne had anticipated that the covert nature of her research would be both physically and psychologically demanding. In reality, the physical burden of recording observations was heavier than expected, and on many occasions this process lasted late into the night. However, the psychological
burden was less than expected, probably because Suzanne’s actual and assumed identities were very similar.
The main method of recording was through field notes compiled either during the day when
opportunities arose or at the end of each day. These were recorded in a field notebook or on
other unobtrusive materials such as writing paper or postcard letters. Photographs were also
taken providing some documentary evidence and as an aide-mémoire. These activities, along
with the collecting of tourist documents such as guides, brochures and maps, were seen by the
other members of the party as perfectly normal tourist behaviour.
Suzanne used her notes, in the first instance, to write a narrative account of her experiences
in the form of a chronological story. An extract from this follows – it describes part of an afternoon
in a local market:
. . . Asif (the tour leader) suggested a rearrangement of the taxi groups. . . and six group members. . .
continued on with the taxis a short distance across country roads to where there were reputed to be
numerous good local traders selling batik, silverware workers and a renowned kite-maker called Ismail (a craft particular to the East Coast and especially Kota Bahru). Although contact with locals, even buyer–seller contact, was not pronounced on theEMtour, this was an exception. Jane, Susi and Sinead, stirred on by the stories told by Robbi, attempted some elementary haggling over prices in a number of batik places, and Donald also attempted to do the same at Ismail the kite-maker’s place.
This was perhaps inappropriate . . .
Ismail’s pride in his handicraft was such that he spent close on 30 minutes sewing up two kites. . . in cardboard outer containers. The taxi drivers also entered into the spirit of the visit and bought miniature kites for themselves – Donald noticed this and believed that it rather suggested the specialness of their trip. So, a part of the pleasure from the afternoon was derived not only from the familiarity with the people within theEMgroup but also from the tentative, transient relationships with the local seller-people and taxi drivers.
Based on the narrative account, Suzanne drew out generalisations and attempted to identify
and evaluate the role of factors either highlighted by the academic literature or suggested by
interviews with tour managers as influencing customer satisfaction. The extract above illustrates
one of her findings, namely the importance of others, including the host population, in
creating customer satisfaction. This generalisation was supported by over 30 similar incidents
in her narrative. Based upon her participation and observation Suzanne was therefore able to
describe, analyse and interpret tour group experience and relate this to customer satisfaction.
After Suzanne presented her report, Ric and the other senior managers were convinced that
she had discovered what their clients really thought, felt and did rather than what they said they
thought, felt and did. Although Ric was not prepared to abandon the existing tourist questionnaires,
he was keen to ensure that future customer research incorporated other approaches such
as observation.
Reference
Bowen, D. (2001) Research of tourist satisfaction and dissatisfaction: overcoming the limitations of a positivist
and quantitative approach, Journal of Vacation Marketing, 7:1, 31–40.
Questions
1 Why do you think Suzanne used participant observation to answer the research
questions suggested by Ric?
2 How do you think Suzanne would have justified adopting the role of complete participant and undertaking covert observation to her university’s ethic committee?
3 Why are businesses often reluctant to use a research method such as participant
observation?
Saunders, Lewis amd Thornhill: Research Methods for Business Students, 5th edition, Additional Case Studies
© Pearson
Case 10c
Equal opportunities in the publishing industry
Mary was a part-time postgraduate student who was undertaking a research project about equal opportunities in the publishing industry. Mary had worked in the publishing industry for 10 years, and her interest in the area of equal opportunities had arisen partly from her own experiences of work, and partly through her reading some of the literature on women in management as part of the Organisational Behaviour module of her course. Mary knew that many of the skilled women she worked with had given up high-profile jobs in the publishing
industry after periods of maternity leave. Anecdotally these women had suggested to her that it was very difficult to combine the demands of a successful career in publishing with the those of having a family. Mary had read some of the literature on gender in management, and
particularly the work on gendered organisational cultures (e.g. Maddock and Parkin, 1993;
Mills, 2002; Wilson, 2000; Liff and Ward, 2001) and was keen to explore these issues in relation to her own industry. She was hoping at some stage in the future to move out of her Editorial Assistant role and take on a post in Human Resource Management in order to progress her career. She had therefore chosen a subject for her research project in which she
was wholeheartedly interested and that also tied in with her career plans.
Mary decided to conduct in-depth qualitative interviews as part of her data collection process. She had read about how to analyse qualitative data, and decided that template analysis was the most useful method (King, 2004).
Mary designed a fairly structured interview schedule with 15 questions that asked about the interviewee’s experience of their work, and whether they felt advantaged or disadvantaged as a result of their gender. She considered that it was important to interview both men and women, to examine the extent to which they may have differences in perspective. Mary was well networked within the publishing industry and had planned to conduct interviews with 10 men and women in her own company, a large one within the trade publishing sector, and 10 men and women in a similar sized company in the educational publishing sector.
She had also arranged to interview the Human Resource (HR) Directors of both companies at the end of her research project, after she had undertaken her
initial analysis of the data and had some of the findings.
This, she felt, would enable her to see whether the HR managers were aware of some of the gendered cultural processes at work in their companies.
When Mary started to conduct the fieldwork for her project she encountered some difficulties that she hadn’t previously anticipated. Given that she was interviewing in her own organisation, Mary had initially selected interviewees that she didn’t know very well, for fear of biasing her findings. In the other organisation, the educational publisher, Mary had asked a friend who worked there to suggest the names of people who would be interesting to interview.
However, with regard to both organisations, when trying to organise suitable interview times,
Mary found that it was very difficult to pin people down. Although she had emailed them to tell them the title of her research project, and had guaranteed confidentiality, when following
up to actually arrange appointments, potential interviewees often declined, explaining that they were far too busy.
As time was moving on swiftly, Mary decided she would ask her super-efficient secretary Marlene to telephone the potential interviewees, persuade them to agree to be interviewed, and then agree an interview time. Marlene successfully managed to arrange all the interviews in both organisations, much to Mary’s relief. However, things still not did progress smoothly.
Saunders, Lewis amd Thornhill: Research Methods for Business Students, 5th edition, Additional Case Studies
© Pearson Education Limited 2009 1
Mary found that in numerous cases, interviewees rearranged their appointments with her.
Indeed in a couple of cases, Mary actually turned up for an interview to find a message for her to say that the interviewee had been cancelled due to the interviewee having to attend a more important meeting. When interviews did go ahead, Mary noticed that there was some hostility from the interviewees, especially the men. She described this to her project tutor: ‘They seem a bit defensive, and clearly think I am not on their side.’
Mary also had concerns about the data she was gathering. Although her questions were
structured, she found that the interviewees talked all around the issues and would not keep
to the point in question. She had no idea how she would fit all this unstructured data into her
nicely structured template, and was concerned that their digression from her questions might somehow taint the outcomes of her research. These concerns were heightened when Mary went to interview the HR Director of her own organisation. The Director expressed some concerns about the research that Mary was doing. She said that she had heard from some of
the interviewees that Mary had a specific agenda, and that the publishing company had an excellent record in equal opportunities that she did not want to see sullied. She was also clearly unhappy that Mary had not initially discussed the research with her before commencing data collection. She was equally dismissive about Mary’s data collection approach, suggesting that her research wasn’t objective and that she was uncertain about what use it would have beyond that of enabling Mary to get yet another qualification. Although Mary then progressed with asking the Director the questions on her interview schedule, she felt very uncomfortable throughout the interview. At the end she felt quite miserable about how her research had gone, and wondered whether conducting it in this way might have actually jeopardised her chances of a career move to the HR Department.
References
King, N. (2004) ‘Using templates in the thematic analysis of text’, in Cassell, C.M. and Symon, G. (eds), Essential
Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research, London, Sage Publications.
Liff, S. and Ward, K. (2001) ‘Distorted views through the glass ceiling: the construction of women’s understandings
of promotion and senior management positions’, Gender, Work and Organization 8: 1, 19–35.
Maddock, S. and Parkin, D. (1993) ‘Gender cultures, women’s choices and strategies at work’, Women in
Management Review 8: 2, 3–9.
Mills, A.J. (2002) ‘Studying the gendering of organizational culture over time: concerns, issues and strategies’,
Gender, Work and Organization 9: 3, 286–307.
Wilson, E. (2000) ‘Inclusion, exclusion and ambiguity – the role of organizational culture’, Personnel Review 29:
3, 274–303.
Questions
1 What advice would you give to Mary about addressing the issue of people shifting
interview appointments, and the hostility she faced from some of the interviewees?
2 Mary thought that interviewees’ not keeping to the questions asked during the interview
was a problem in her research. What advice would you give her about this?
3 How do you think Mary could have addressed the following issues about the research
presented to her by the HR Director?
■ The research isn’t objective.
■ The research won’t provide anything of use to the firm.
Saunders, Lewis amd Thornhill: Research Methods for Business Students, 5th edition, Additional Case Studies
© Pearson Education Limited 2009
Case 12a
The marketing of arts festivals
Jemma was interested in utilising secondary data from her placement organisation as part of her undergraduate research project on the marketing of Arts festivals. In particular she was
interested in:
● the extent to which audiences associated events with their sponsors;
● the socio-economic status of those attending;
● the importance of different media for finding out about events.
Her placement organisation had undertaken a questionnaire survey with attendees at the local Arts festival and agreed that Jemma could use the data for her research project. The data had already been entered into a spreadsheet. A copy of a completed questionnaire is included
below:
The Anyshire Echo ANYTOWN
FESTIVAL OF ARTS
AUDIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE
Please help us to continue to improve the Arts Festival by completing the questionnaire below.
When you have completed it, please hand it to the Box Office or the Friends Information Desk or send
it back to us by 10th September and you can enter a free prize draw for one of four £30 record tokens. It takes just five minutes to answer the questions, and your opinions will help us plan next year’s festival.
Please return your completed questionnaire to the address below (N.B. no stamp is needed)
FREEPOST 12345
Town Hall
Town Square
Anytown
AN50 2BD
To enter the free prize draw please write your name and address below:
Name: M….r..s.. .L..i.l.y.. .A…n..n..e..r..s………………………………………………………………..
Address: .1.5..,. ..A..n..y..t..o..w…n.. .R…o..a..d……………………………………………………………..
.A..n..y..t..o..w…n……………………………………………………………………………
Postcode: .A..N…3…4.. .7..M….S………………………………………………………………………..
(N.B. this information will not be passed on to any other organisation)
PART 1: Please answer these questions by putting a circle around the appropriate number:
1 Which Festival event have you attended?
Ruskin’s Poetry Reading and Arias by Candlelight.
2 Where do you live?
In Anytown 1 30 to less than 50 miles away 2
under 10 miles away 3 50 to less than 100 miles away 4
10 to less than 20 miles away 5 over 100 miles away 6
20 to less than 30 miles away 7
3 What age are you?
Under 18 1 35 to 44 3 over 60 5
19 to 30 2 45 to 60 4
4 Are you… Female ? 1 Male?
5 Are you currently… Unemployed? 1 In full time paid professional employment? 5
Retired? 2 In full time non professional employment? 6
A housewife? 3 In part-time paid employment? 7
A student? 4 Other? (please say) ……………………………… 8
6 Which of the following organisations do you associate with this festival?
The Anytown Bank 1 Murial’s Bookstores 6
Anytown Borough Council 2 Good Deal Records 7
The Anyshire Echo 3 Midshire Bank 8
Steven’s Computers Ltd 4 Other (please say) ………………………. 9
VHT Record Stores 5
7 Did you take advantage of any of the following discounts when booking?
Early booking 1 Poetry pass 4
Friends discount 2 Anyshire Echo pass 5
Group discount 3 Student discount 6
PART 2: Please read the statements below; decide whether you agree, strongly agree,
disagree or strongly disagree; then circle the number below your choice:
8 I found it easy to book/buy tickets for the Festival strongly disagree disagree agree strongly agree
1 2 3 4
9 The event(s) I came to was/were good value for money
1 2 3 4
PART 3: Please comment on the following:
10 Is there anything you would like to change to improve the Festival (i.e. the times,
the programme, etc.)?
11 What did you think of the event you came to?
12 How did you find out about the Festival
The battle for the best seats nearest the speakers. The middle classes are seen
at their most devious here – sneaking in and laying coats on seats etc!!
Saunders, Lewis amd Thornhill: Research Methods for Business Students, 5th edition, Additional Case Studies
© Pearson Education Limited 2007
answers for the audience questionainire
1. which festival event have you attended?
Ruskin’s poetry reading and arias by candlelight
2.where do you live? in anytown
3. what age are you? 45-60
4. are you….female
5. are you currently? retired…in part time paid employment
6. which of the following organisations do you associate with this festival? the anyshire echo
7. did you take advantage of any of the following discounts when booking?….Answer None of these
part 2
8 i found it easy to book/buy tickets for the festival
9. the events i came to was were good value for money
1 2 3 4
one other
part 3
10. is there anything you would like to change to improve the festival 9i.e. the times, the programme, etc?
The battle for the best seats nearest to the speakers. the middle classes are seen at thier most devious here – sneaking in and laying coats and seats etc!!
11. what did you think of the event you came to? good
12. how did you find out about the festival?
programes available in book shop
Questions
1 On looking at the questionnaire, Jemma noticed some problems with the way in which
some questions had been coded.
a. What were these problems?
b. How might these have been overcome at the survey design stage?
2 a. Which of the questions were likely to be most useful to Jemma for her research
project?
b. How could Jemma have minimised the impact on her analysis of any coding problems
with these questions?
3 Which diagrams, tables and statistics would you recommend Jemma to use to analyse
those questions which were useful to her research project?
(You should state precisely what your recommended diagrams, tables and statistics will
enable Jemma to find out.)
