Qualitative paper

Qualitative Research

Several articles have been published on popular news and magazine websites, contending that managers and leaders are often the reason that employees are dissatisfied and leave organizations. Savage (2014), a writer for The Huffington Press, mentioned that people do not leave companies, they leave managers. This was supported by another article by Jackson (2014), a writer for Forbes Magazine, which stated that “People quit their bosses, not their jobs”. Both writers proposed that employees become frustrated and leave companies due to overload in responsibilities, lack of leader support, leader decisions, lack of vision and training, and poor direction as set by the leader (Jackson, 2014; Savage, 2014).

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) provided a variety of statistics to support a link between work related stress, management style, working conditions, and supervisor relationship with employees (1999). Many other studies have linked job stress and physical/psychological ailments such as “mood and sleep disturbances, upset stomach and headache, and disturbed relationships with family and friends” (The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1999). Due to the complexity of this phenomena, it is important to explore the topic using a flexible qualitative research method. This allows a researcher to explore the relationship between a variety of leader behaviors and employee stress levels without limitation of a survey method. The research questions for this study will include: What type of leadership behavior increases an employee’s stress level? What type of leader behavior reduces psychological wellbeing? Is there one leadership style that is most effective in creating an environment that is low stress? How do work demands impact employee stress level?

The demand-control theoretical framework will be used for this research. Previous research has discovered that a leader’s poor behavior increases work stress levels through the use of demand-control theory. Karasek (1979) developed the demand-control theory to understand how demands and ranges of freedom for workers impact strain outcomes. Sparks (1999) stated that “relationships at work can be both a source of stress and support” and “interactions with superiors, peers, and subordinates have been found to mediate perceives workplace stress” (p. 221). Since stress has also been linked to not only dissatisfaction, but also health problems, decreased well-being, low productivity, and turnover, it is essential to understand how a leader can impact these challenges with their positive or negative behavior (The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1999). With this knowledge, an organization will have a better understanding of areas for training and development initiatives for leadership.

A phenomenological study will be performed because the researcher is seeking to understand a phenomena and explore a lived experience of participants. The target population is non-administrative workers in the manufacturing industry. Workers would be randomly identified within two large organizations that have agreed to participate and employees have also agreed to participate. This qualitative research will perform face-to-face interviews to collect data of leader behavior and the stress level of employees. The researcher desires to collect data from the perspective of the participants and will focus their interview process on employee who do not hold a leadership position with the organization. The researcher and a peer will start with open ended questions. The questions will deduce into the psychological issues of stress as identified in the interview. Interviews will be semi-structured and the researcher will take notes from the interview to collect the data from the conversation. Data would be analyzed via a multiple step process, which first organizes and prepares the data for analysis including typing all of the notes from interviews and arranging data. Second, the researcher will read all of the data from the interviews, which will allow for a sense of what the data found. Third, the researcher will then use a coding process to organize data, which then proceeds to the process of interpretation.

Threats to validity and reliability include researcher bias and disorganized note taking. Following the interview the researcher will debrief with their peer to enhance the accuracy of the information collected. The researcher and peer will comment on the notes collected throughout the interview session to ensure accuracy of interpretation. Additionally, the researcher will take time to reflect on their personal bias and beliefs about this subject matter, as well as their time within the field and the impact that this has on the validity and reliability of the data they collect. Additional ethical concerns include anonymity for the participants, which would not be possible in a face-to-face research design. Providing a safe environment for the interviews and ensuring that participant data is not released using names, would be critical to ethics.

The method would be the most appropriate in answering the research questions because the researcher can ask specific questions while also asking additional questions to understand the situation to a deeper level. A face-to-face semi-structured interview will keep the researcher on track to ask the appropriate questions, but will also allow them the freedom to explore additional stress related points that present themselves during the interview. Quantitative research limits the researcher’s ability to understand deeper aspects of the phenomena due to the structure of a survey or experiment.

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