DISCUSSION ANSWER

How can organizations measure intangible variables in such a way as to provide construct validity?

RESPONSE 100-150 WORDS.

1. Donna

Trying to measure something that one cannot observe can prove to be tricky. We use past behaviors to predict future patterns and behaviors often in our personal lives, but is this even realistic in the business world? My answer would be, only if there were strong leading indicators (Fitz-enz, 2009). 

The leading indicators for business can be applied in a more intimate situation, such as measuring the love between two people. Indicators such as leadership, engagement, readiness, knowledge management, loyalty, and customer satisfaction all have diverse application. 

Leadership can be interpreted as the attitude one has for a particular leader. in the case of a loved one, this can predict can predict whether someone will stay or leave an organization. This is pretty important in a relationship. 

Engagement refers to commitment while readiness refers to the willingness to take the relationship to the next level. Knowledge management and loyalty go hand-in-hand as learning about the other person and then staying loyal when things get rough signal an ability to stay the course. 

Customer satisfaction can be interpreted in many ways but reflects that both parties in any relationship are getting their need met and hopefully more. 

One major way that these intangibles can be measured is through communication. In a personal setting, it's through actions, behaviors and verbal communication. In a professional setting, this info can be measured through surveys that serve as the communication conduit in which the organization can measure these behaviors in a useful way. What bring validity into the equation are the patterns of these indicators and the synergistic effect of them working in harmony (Morris, 2017).

In conclusion, just because these variables cannot be measured directly, does not mean that their impact is not significant and powerful. This feels a lot like trying to measure love between two people which we know is a real thing, and the stuff of life. 

2. N'Kosi 

According to Human Capital Analytics and Predictive Analytics, intangible variables can be measured indirectly, revealing validity, based on the performance records of the organization’s functional goals and objectives (National Louis University, 2019). This is where the variability of causation and correlation enter the picture. The interesting thing about these two phenomena is that they can tilt the balance of the scale in either direction. Simply put, the various actions, better known as the indicators, are what identify the measurements of the results.

Due to love being a feeling, it cannot be directly measured; therefore the measurements must be indirect and based manifested behaviors, which took form in the thought process. Identifying behaviors that began as what someone thought clearly shows some type of correlation, an indirect measurement, between love and people, such as referring an individual for a job with your current organization; working beyond the designated time of specified duties; willingly participating in any type of cross-training to become more knowledgeable of the organization; and/or refusing to entertain any competitive opposition. Each of these behaviors aid in measuring return on investments, because the human behavior shows that the organizational processes help predict its impact. “We've established in previous chapters that there is a connection, an interdependency, between and among human capital activities, between and among functional processes, and between human capital management outputs and functional process outcomes. Logically, we should expect to see correlations between and among some of the many variables inside those activities, processes, and outcomes. If we look for them, we will find them. Once these correlations have been established at any consistent rate of occurrence, we should be able to make tentative predictions” (Fitz-enz, 2000, pp. 161-162).