Proposal for a Business Research Project Exploring the Impact of Passion of Employees in the Banking Sector to their performance - Coursework Example

Proposal for a Business Research Project Exploring the Impact of Passion of Employees in the Banking Sector to their performance IntroductionThe project aims to explore the effects of passion of employees in the banking sector on their performance. It also aims to explore the effect of factors, like the level of the employee’s work, experience and gender, on the passion of employees, and the effect passion has in determining how employees execute their duties. It will also determine these effects on the performance of their co-workers and the overall running of the institutions. Several scholars have studied passion in different contexts, like philosophy, theology, political science, sociology, and psychology, for years. Parfitt (2007) says that it is important in making things happen and Adubato (2005) explains its importance when someone is making a presentation. Of late, there have been studies of passion in the context of work. Szenberg (1998) showed that it could make work as enjoyable as a play. It is also revealed that it is crucial in development of a strong team and continual self-improvement of an individual. Linley and Harrington (2010) show that it is important if we have to do something for a long time, and Cameron and Spreitzer (2011) say that it is vital as it helps employees to sustain the energy necessary for organizational excellence and managers to motivate and inspire other employees. In addition, some scholars, like Hansbury (2009), explain how it can be acquired and natured. There is no research of this kind that has been undertaken in relation to the banking sector. Very few have been undertaken in relation to work. Therefore, this research is very important to understand whether the findings of other scholars apply even to a growing and fast changing bank industry. It will also support the work of the few scholars who have undertaken research to test on passion with respect to work. This is necessary, since it will help us to understand how passion is affected by other factors, like work experience, level of employee and gender. In addition to this, it will help us to determine how customers of these banks feel when served by passionate employees and, thus, determine the role passion can play in promoting business in this sector. In undertaking the research, a group of banks from the same financial institution will be randomly selected as our sample for the research. A survey will be designed with the financial institutions senior management, other staffs and customers as the sample space. We will choose a sample size of 300 randomly selected respondents for the research. Data will be collected using two methods. Hand delivered questionnaires for employees and oral interviews for customers. Since our data include description data, coding will be done to the data. Then the collected data will be entered, analyzed, and interpreted to reach a conclusion. A report will be written at the end of the research to show the outcome of the research in simpler terms. Objectives 1. To identify the efforts of employers in this sector to build passion in their employees and what motivates them to do so. 2. To determine whether the passion of an employee is influenced by his level, experience and gender and whether it is naturally acquired or built by motivation and working conditions. 3. To determine how other employees feel working with their fellows who are passionate about what they do. 4. To find out how their clients feel when served by a passionate employee and to determine the criteria they use to judge whether an employee is passionate or not. Literature Review According to Cameron and Spreitzer (2011), passion has been studied for a long time in various contexts, like philosophy, theology, political science, psychology, and sociology. They also show that most of the writings in this field argue that passion is an intense emotion that interacts with cognition and motivates an individual’s behavior. Moreover, they argue that passion makes people to be heavily involved and invested in the activities they undertake. Linley and Harrington (2010) identify passion as the desires, thoughts, plans and behavior which persist over time. They also say that passion can lead to increased performance regardless of costs, external obstacles or moral objections. These scholars also reveal that the difference between passion and enjoyment is that passion is deeper and lasts for a longer time. Moreover, they indicate that in a team passion can play quite important role in motivating others and can help people to adhere to their goals despite the challenges of achieving them. Passion for work helps employees to sustain the energy necessary for organizational excellence and enables managers to motivate and inspire other employees (Cameron & Spreitzer 2011). This shows that passion in employees can actually make an organization to excel. Linley and Harrington (2010) show that people cannot raise passion, so the best thing to do is to identify the thing you are passionate about and pursue it in your life. They also show that passion is easily identified through the activities, such as telling people to talk about things they have enjoyed doing in the last few months or by watching some of the activities they claim they love. Another scholar, Parfit (2007), gives an account of how he found his passion and the steps he took to develop it. Hansbury (2009) believed that passion can help one become successful and, thus, he encourages young people to find something they enjoy doing and pursue it with passion. He also shows that a person who works for money and not for love of work, neither makes money nor finds fun in life. In addition, he suggests several steps one can take to nurture passion after recognizing it. These steps include taking responsibility, looking for the good part of what you do and looking for solutions and not just complaining, making plans of action, making decisions to act on your plans and monitoring your progress in what you do and learning from mistakes. Majority of research was done outside the work context. Cameron and Spreitzer (2011), show psychology and socio-psychology looking at passion as a unique interpersonal relationship in particular estimate relationships. These two scholars also show that it is only recently that the issue of passion was been incorporated in a work environment and thus the emergence of the concept of passion for work. They also reveal that in popular press several books have appeared encouraging people to work with passion or to find the work they love. Moreover, they reveal that this concept is not based on empirical research findings nor is it grounded in the rich academic literature that underpins what we are focusing here and therefore it is not that reliable. This reveals a need for more research in this area and that is why I am proposing to undertake the following research. Several research methods are available to undertake the research. These methods include experimental design, survey design, observation methods, qualitative method, and use of secondary data. One of the most important concepts of research is the concept of variables. According to Sekaran and Bougie (2010), a variable is anything, which can take a differing or varying value. There are four kinds of variables, namely, dependent variables, independent variables, moderating variables and mediating variables. These variables are either discrete or continuous (Sekaran & Bougie 2010). We can also categorize variable further to random and non-random variables. Random variables are those that change only by chance while non-random are those that do not happen by chance. Variables are also measured using different scales like nominal scale, ordinal scale, interval scale and ratio scale (Jackson 2010). We also have different types of measures like self-report measure, tests, behavior measures, and physical measures (Jackson 2010). Survey method is the most preferred descriptive method of research. This method as Jackson (2010) shows consists of survey construction, survey administering, and sampling techniques. Survey construction involves writing questions and arranging them to form a questionnaire, survey administering involves various ways of administering the questionnaire, and sampling techniques involves various ways of selecting our sample. Other descriptive methods are observational methods and qualitative methods. These ones are inappropriate in our research due to the kind of data they collect. In a questionnaire for undertaking a survey, one can use either open-ended questions or close-ended questions or both. An open-ended question is one in which the respondent is required to select his response from the ones given in a table or a list. For an open-ended question, the respondent is required to give his response to a question without having choices. In order to undertake a survey we need to identify a population or the sampling frame from which we will draw our sample. According to (Blaikie 2003) a population is an aggregate of all units or cases that conform to some designated sets of criteria and can include people, social actions, events, places, or time. If we count all population elements then we will be undertaking a census (Blaikie 2003) which can be used to describe the characteristics of a given population. Moreover, according to Bliekie (2003), a sample is a selection of elements from a population and is used to make inferences about the whole population. Bliekie (2003) extends this concept to explain the concept of a probability sample. He says that in a probability sample every population element should have a known non-zero chance of being selected to be included in a sample. He also explains that the ratio of the size of the sample and the size of the population is what makes up the sampling ratio or sampling fraction. Studying the whole population is slow, tedious, expensive, and sometimes impossible; it may also be unnecessary that is why we prefer using a sample (Bliekie 2003). Sampling complicates data analysis by introducing the aspect of estimation of population parameters and inferential statistics (Bliekie 2003). Another process that is undertaken in almost every kind of research is data collection. There are various data collection techniques. This includes different types of interview, questionnaires, observation, and documentary analysis (Connaway & Owell 2010). These are the most used techniques in survey research. The most preferred method is the use of questionnaires. According to Connaway and Owell (2010), the following steps should be undertaken before the data collection instrument is selected: Defining the problem and purpose Consider previous related research Hypothesize the solution to the problem Identify the information needed to test the hypothesis Identify the potential respondents or subjects Select the most appropriate technique of collecting the necessary data. Connaway and Owell (2010) also identified that a research finding is greatly affected by the technique used to collect the data. They also indicate that questionnaires, especially the mailed, emailed or web based questionnaires tends to encourage flank answers. Questionnaires also reduce interviewer’s biasness, eliminates variation in the process of questioning, and they can be designed in a way which makes analysis easier. They facilitate collection of large amounts of data in relatively short periods and are relatively inexpensive to administer. The use of questionnaires, especially the mailed ones however have some disadvantages too. One of them is that they eliminate the personal contact between the researcher and the respondent, they also might not be understandable to uneducated respondents, they have very low response rate and so on (Connaway & Owell 2010). There are two types of data analysis: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data analysis concentrates on quality property of data while the quantitative involves the quantity property of data. Due to complexity in the process of data analysis, statistical software has been created to assist with the process. The most popular ones are STATA, SPSS, Minitab, SAS and R. STATA and SPSS. They are user friendly and can be used even by those who have less statistical analysis experience. In our research case, our key variable is passion. Other variables are work experience, gender, motivation and so on. The survey method appears to be the most appropriate method of undertaking a research to understand the variability in these variables. This is due to its ability to cover a large area in a less period and to yield results that are more accurate. When designing the questionnaires I decided to use both open- ended and closed-ended questions so that I can benefit from the advantages of both and avoid some of the disadvantages of either. In terms of sampling I decided to use a simple random sampling. This is the most preferred method of sampling in statistics since it reduces biasness. In terms of data collection, I will use hand delivered questionnaires for the employees. This will help reduce some of the effects of using a mailed questionnaire and at the same time maintain some of their advantages. For the customers I will use oral interviews. I understand that among the customers there might be a chance of coming across uneducated person who might not understand the questionnaire very well. To control this effect, I decided to use interviewing method for these particular types of respondents. For the collected data, I will use a process called coding which is assigning numbers to the data that is collected in description form. For data analysis, I will use STATA, which is a user-friendly statistical package and yields desire results. Research Plan The research will be undertaken by conducting a survey on a sample of banks from the same banking institution e.g. a sample of all Standard Chartered banks in the city of Manchester. Either this survey will be done in form of anonymous questionnaires, which will be distributed and administered to respondents by hand delivery or by an interviewer depending on whether the respondent is an employee or a customer. For employees we will use hand delivery. This, like other self-administered form of survey the respondent is required to fill a hard copy of questionnaire delivered to them and later return them to the researcher (Babbie 2010). Although using a large sample will result to more accurate and unbiased estimators, due to limited resources we have decided to concentrate our sampling frame to one banking institution in a particular area. Previously I had the idea of letting the interviewers administer the questionnaire to all the respondents but I realized that this can consume time and banks are busy places. In addition, I also understood that due to one of its disadvantages being the influence the interviewers might have on the respondent, they might alter the truthfulness of the data collected. I have planned to design a simple questionnaire which will be easily understood by the employee thus have an interviewer administer it is unnecessary. This research might contain sensitive employee’s information that is why for the sake of privacy I have decided to use an anonymous questionnaire so that my interviewees should not fear any formal consequences or punishment. I believe the method I have chosen is the most appropriate as it will provide the most truthful data, ensure safety for all my respondents, will be cost effective and will not consume a lot of time. For the first two weeks, we will be reviewing the relevant literature. This will help us to identify various concepts of our variables that we need to include in the questionnaires. It will also help us to identify the much that other scholars have done in this field and thus realize the gap that requires to be filled. This will help us to design our research in a way that will ensure that it fills as much gap as possible. It will also help us to choose the most effective and most appropriate research method that will yield accurate results while requiring minimum resources. The knowledge we will obtain from literature will be used together with the information that will be gotten from a formal pilot and a focus group, which will be conducted to prepare for the actual research. We believe that this will ensure that the research will run smoothly and that the respondents do not have a hard time in handling the questionnaires. An informal pilot will be necessary to give an indication of the approximate time required to fill the questionnaire (Brace 2008). This will assist us to make the questionnaires as simple as possible while maintaining their efficiency in collecting all the data we need. A focus group will be conducted to gather some initial information that will help us in developing the questionnaire. According to Edmund (2000), a focus group is supposed to cover general issues on a topic and can help a researcher to identify relevant issues that might otherwise be left out of the survey. The focus group will cover several topics about passion in employees of banking institutions, how various other variables like work experience and gender affects it and it will be conducted on both employees and potential customers. One of the gains we expect from a focus group is that it will help to identify what we need to incorporate into our final questionnaire. All these activities will run in the first two weeks before the process of data collection starts and will be undertaken by me together with other professionals who I will employ to assist me in the research. Data will be obtained from customers and employees within ten randomly selected branches of the same banking institution. The respondent, who will be employee and customers of these banks, will be required to fill questionnaires that will have most of the questions requiring rating on a scale of one to five. The questionnaires will also include other question that will require description answers. Our results will contain both categorical data and description data. The institution that will make up our population will be chosen based on the one that will give us access first. The response given by our respondents will be our primary source of data. These data will then be analyzed and interpreted to answer our research problem. To conduct the survey we will use a hand delivered questionnaire for employees and person-to-person interview for customers. A hand delivered questionnaire will eliminate some of the low response rate disadvantage of a mailed questionnaire while maintaining the privacy advantage of the same. The hand delivery of questionnaire I believe will increase the response rate and the number of questionnaires which will be returned. In addition we will be able to maintain the truthfulness of the information as the interviewers will have a very little personal contacts with the respondents. To make sure that the respondent will have enough time to respond to the questionnaire, we will distribute them during morning hours and pick them in the evening. We will also work in conjunction with the bank management to encourage employees to participate in the survey and to fill the questionnaires truthfully. For the customer’s case, we will have interviewers trained to administer the questionnaire as effective as possible. In addition, as the questionnaire will not be long it will not be taking much of the customer’s time to fill it especially when a qualified interviewer is administering it. Other measures that will be taken to encourage participation are making the questionnaire to have an attractive appearance, making it simple, making it short, and giving a short description of the importance of the study at the top of the first page of the questionnaire. The reason why I have chosen hand delivered questionnaires is the advantages they have. Unlike mail delivery questionnaire, this type of questionnaires have high response rate and high returns (Brown 2008). They also collect truthful information since they have little person-to-person contact between the interviewer and the respondent. In addition, this is the best alternative since the mail delivery is not practical due to complication of monitoring returns and because personal interview will interfere with the privacy of the employees and the operational schedule of the bank (Leon et al. 2003). In addition, hand-delivering questionnaires give the researcher opportunity to explain the importance of the research to the management, which in return will encourage their employees to participate. It is also inexpensive and has a short response period (Connaway & Owell 2010). For feasibility, we will make our sampling frame to be bank branches from a certain banking institution in Manchester. This will reduce the expense of undertaking the research and the scale of operation since we have limited resources and time. In almost research exercises with the exception of a national census, it has been discovered that it is almost impossible to use the whole population. This is because, when the whole population is used, the research becomes slow, tedious, expensive, and sometimes impossible and unnecessary (Bliekie 2003). To avoid this scenario, I have chosen to use a small sample that will be manageable but provide credible results. To derive the sampling units a sample of 10 bank branches will be selected from the same bank depending on the bank that will give us access first. These branches will be randomly selected from the list that we will download from the internet. Random selection will reduce biasness in our data and give each bank branch equal chance of being included in the sample considered (Bliekie 2003). We will select 10 branches and we will have 20 employee and 10 customers interviewed in each branch. The sample size will consist of 300 respondents of which 100 respondents will be customers selected from selected bank branches while the remaining 200 will be employees. Since this is a statistical study, simple random sampling is the most applicable as it provides a fair representation of the population (Bliekie 2003). The problem with this type of sampling is that due to random selection of a sampling unit we might end up with an inaccessible sampling unit. In our case, we have avoided this by taking our population to consist of only the bank branches of a certain banking institution that are in Manchester. Although our results would have been more accurate and reliable if we had used all the bank branches in the UK as our sampling frame, the resources we have are limited and thus we cannot be able to conduct our research on these small population. It will also end up being so tedious hence affecting accuracy as the research assistants get tired along the way. The questionnaires will be designed in a way that will ease the process of coding and therefore the process analysis. We will use the concept of coding variables while designing our questionnaire. Therefore respondents will be required to rate a certain aspect of passion using a scale of one to five where one will mean they strongly disagree and five will mean they strongly agree. Our questionnaire will also involve some but very few description questions which will require coding. Coding is the assigning of numbers to description data in a research response. The data obtained will be analyzed using a software package called STATA. This software has the ability to undertake a number of different functions necessary for interpretation of the data as well as undertaking different tests and calculations. This software can also be used to draw tables, chats, and graph to represent our data. This will actually simplify the process of data analysis and interpretation. The software also has the ability to check whether our data satisfies various assumptions necessary for data analysis and an ability to transform the data for easier analysis and better results. I have plan to take the first two weeks to review various literature necessary for the study as well as preparing for other research activities. This period will also be used to design the survey, the sampling units identified and permission access from the sampling unit sought. This will be followed by a two weeks of data collection that I suppose will be enough while I work with such a small sample. After data collection, a week of coding and data entry will follow and lastly, we will do the analysis, interpretation and reporting. This is expected to consume another two week. As a result, the project is approximately going to take at least two months for the whole thing to be complete. As with other researches that have been previously undertaken, we will require several resources in order to successfully undertake the research within the approximated period. We will need some stationary like pencils, pens, envelops and folders. We will also require services like printing of questionnaires, transportation, and storage of materials. In addition, we will also require work force. This includes interviewers who will administer the questionnaires to customers and other professionals who will monitor the whole data collection process. I have tried to minimize my sample size as much as possible in order to reduce the amount of the resources that will be required in the research project. I decided to use the survey approach since I believe it is the most appropriate method for this kind of research. This method actually helps us to obtain data that is representative of the whole population, which in return increases accuracy of our research. The data that will obtain from customers will assist us to determine the percentage that is enthusiastic about being served by passionate employee. The data obtained will also reveal whether customer feels that the employees are passionate enough on their work. The data will also show whether the employee feel they are motivated enough by their senior to have passion in their work. The result will also help us to determine which percentage of employees is passionate about their work. This method will also help us to obtain most current information, which will reflect the situation of passion in the banking sector, and various causes that might have caused some of the employee of this sector to have passion in their work. Actually, the approach I have taken will reduce biasness and thus the results I obtained is reliable. Risks This research will contain sensitive information of the employees like whether they like undertaking the tasks assigned to them and the way they feel about their bosses. As we know, this information can easily lead to dismissal of a respondent. It is the responsibility of the researcher to ensure safety of his respondents (Jackson 2010). We are aware of this that is why we decided to use anonymous questionnaire in the case of employees. We believe that since one cannot be able to associate particular data with a certain individual, this will help a great deal in dealing with this risk. We will also advice our respondents to answer the questionnaire privately without consulting other employees. We also expect to have a problem in controlling the gender ratio. Currently we are not aware of the ratio of male to female employees in any of the financial institutions. Thus, it is very difficult to determine the number of women to interview and the number of gents to interview. To solve this, we will encourage our interviewers to make sure that among employee, for every three people of the same gender they give the questionnaire; they should make sure they give one of the opposite genders. Like for example, for every three employees interviewed, one should be a lady in a male dominated branch and vice versa for the female dominated branch. Ethical Issues When conducting a research, with any kind of respondents, the researcher is ultimately responsible for the welfare of the respondents and is therefore mandated to protect them from any harm (Jackson 2010). According to Jackson (2010), one of the most common ways of avoiding harm to the respondents is maintaining their privacy and confidentiality. Another way is seeking institutional approval and informed consent to research (Jackson 2010).We are aware that we will be doing our research during the normal working hours of the banks. We know that this might interfere with the normal running process of the bank. We have tried to solve this issue by distributing our questionnaires in the morning and then collecting them in the evening to avoid interference during the busiest times of the day. This will enable employees to deal with the questionnaire during their free time. We will also ensure our respondent are safe from any ethical issue by seeking permission from the senior management before proceeding with our research. Another ethical issue includes how research data is used. Concerning the issue, we promise our respondents that the data collected in this research will only be used for research purpose and will be destroyed ones conclusions have been arrived at and report has been written. We assure them that nothing will be used against them since this may raise a concern that might interfere with the research process. A copy of the research report will be given to the banking institution in which we will conduct our research to assist them in their decision-making. However, the data and the questionnaires remains a property of the researcher until when the researcher will decide to destroy them. References Adubato, S 2005, Make the Connection: Improve your Communication at Work and at Home, Ritgers University Press, Piscataway. Babbie, E R 2010, The Basics of Social Research, Wadsworth, Belmont. Blaikie, NWH 2003, Analyzing Quantitative Data: From Descriptive to Explanation, SAGE Publications, London. Brace, I 2008, Questionnaire Design: How to Plan, Structure and Write Survey Material for…, Kogan Page Publishers, London. Brown, EA 2008, .Dimension of Transformational Leadership and relationship with, Iowa State University press, New York. Cameron, SK & Spreitzer, GM 2011, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, Oxford University Press, New York. Connaway, SL & Owell, RR 2010, Basic Research Methods for Librarians, ABS-CLIO, LLC, Santa Barbara. Edmund, H 2000, The Focus Group Research Handbook, McGraw-Hill, Columbus. Hansbury, M 2009, The Law of Attraction, Epitome Books, New Delhi. Jackson, S L 2010, Research Methods: A Modular Approach, Cengage Learning: London. Leon, JJ et al. 2003, Survey Research: In-person, Mail, Telephone and Web Method, Kalaniwai Place, Honolulu. Linley, P A & Harrington, S 2010, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work. Oxford University Press, New York. Parfitt, J 2007, Find Your Passion, 2nd Ed, Bookshaker, Great Yarmouth. Sekaran, U & Bougie, R 2010, Research Methods for Business: A Skill Building Approach, John Wiley & Sons, London. Szenberg, M 1998, Passion and Craft: Economist at Work, University of Michigan Press, Greene Street. Read More