Assembling the Qualitative Research Proposal

1 Capella Proprietary and Confidential Last updated: 4/7/2019 6:56 PM

Qualitative Study Example Project

For this project, imagine that you are a consultant to a hospitality company, which we will call “Royalty Hotels,” that owns and operates hotels, resorts and residential properties under multiple brands. They are headquartered in the Midwest U.S. and operate in the U.S., Europe and Asia, primarily in urban and suburban areas. They have more than 40,000 employees. Imagine that you have been approached by top management to conduct a study for them to help them understand an issue that they are concerned about. They have received feedback from customer ratings of their services that their employees are not as responsive as some of their competitors in helping these customers solve problems and resolve complaints. They want you to investigate in an exploratory fashion to gain insights into what factors affect employees’ willingness and ability to help customers solve problems. They are aware of initiatives by competitors to empower employees to be more effective about this, and they want to develop a competitive advantage in this area if possible. Assume that you consider this issue from the lens of an area of research into behavior labelled “take-charge behavior,” which is voluntary behavior on the part of employees to exert effort to influence change in the organization as it affects their jobs. You think that an exploratory study would be useful, looking at the factors that influence employees of Royalty Hotels to act independently to solve guest problems. You begin with the idea that the theory of self-efficacy may be a useful theoretical framework for examining the issue; and you recognize that factors in the situation, factors in the leadership of the organization, and factors in the individual employees could all be important in influencing whether the individual employee will take charge in a constructive way in a particular situation. In particular, how employees see management’s openness to employee initiatives, how employees’ peers view change in the organization, and how much conscientiousness and/or expert power the individual possesses relative may be important factors to consider in setting up the study.