Please help with my Research Part 3 paper
lonele1
research_part_2_outsourcing_research.docxRunning head: OUTSOURCING RESEARCH
OUTSOURCING RESEARCH 2
Research Part 2
Outsourcing Research
August 2, 2014
Outsourcing is a situation where there is an agreement between the organization and one or more suppliers to offer services which the company is currently performing internally (Mol, 2007). As indicated before, major reasons for companies to outsource include cost reduction, search for quality, improvement of organizational focus, raising its flexibility and change facilitation. There has been a dramatic increase in outsourcing in the past few years. From different surveys, it is evident that despite the high number of outsourcing advantages most companies that had gone to outsourcing ventures had not met the organization’s needs or expectations (Mol, 2007).
The Research
The research will be conducted to find out the company’s view on outsourcing, activities being outsourced, drivers for an advantage from the outsourcing process and the decision process. The major aim of research will be to investigate the major areas in the outsourcing process which are the pre-outsourcing decision process and post-outsourcing supplier management. The instrument to be employed will be the questionnaire and interviews (National Research Council, 2010). The data will be collected and the number of respondent on a given driver converted into percentage of the total respondents.
My research will take place in two phases. The first will involve the use of conventional survey by use of postal questionnaires. This method will be selected due to its possible confidentiality, which in turn enables ethical considerations to be implemented. Next, ethical consideration in my study will be obtaining consent and avoiding deception. This will clearly be asked of the participants during their responses, so their views on the survey procedure will be clearly understood. The results from this survey will then be analyzed, and suitable participants will be selected randomly who will be involved in the second phase. The second phase will involve face to face interviews (National Research Council, 2010). Within this research, the target population of my respondents will be managing directors, senior managers or purchasing managers, due to the fact that they have a major degree of influence on the outsourcing decisions. Also, within this research, my sample companies will involve 14 companies with a sales volume of approximately $ 4.5 million to $30 billion, and who are involved in diverse industrial sectors.
|
Number of organizations mailed |
22 |
|
Number of returned questionnaires |
14 |
|
Response rate |
64% |
|
Breakdown by industry |
Service 5 Electronics 6 Financial Services 2 Retailer 1 |
|
Agreed to be interviewed |
10 |
Despite getting access to my participants through standard postal mail, there will still be a possibility of threats to getting reliable data. For example, the respondent could be completely uneducated of what outsourcing entails and therefore give unreliable answers. Additionally, some of the executives may provide biased information, which will end up negatively affecting my end results. Both the respondents and I have a role to play; as a respondent, one should be honest and therefore give relevant information asked, while on the other hand, as a researcher, I have a role to implement ethics into the research process (Luppicini & Adell, 2009).
References
Luppicini, R., & Adell, R. (2009). Handbook of research on technoethics. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.
Mol, M. J. (2007). Outsourcing: Design, process and performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
National Research Council (U.S.). (2010). Research and education, 2010. Washington, D.C: Transportation Research Board.
