The Impact of Employee Involvement in Hiring and Promotions Process of Public Administration Agencies - Assignment Example

Assignment al Review Board (IRB) The dissertation topic is in the area of labor and specifically on the of employee involvement. In some quarters of discussion, this phenomenon of employee involvement is also referred to as employee engagement (Schein, 2004). But it is important to stress the fact that there are actually two schools of thought and that the other differentiates employee involvement from employee engagement (Web Finace, 2011). For the sake of the present dissertation, employee involvement and employee engagement shall not be argued on the lines of whether or not the two are the same but from the perspective that the two could be aimed towards the same goal. The dissertation looks at the goal of how beneficial employee involvement could be among public administration agencies if it is practiced during hiring and promotions processes. To this end, the topic of the dissertations is stated as: “the impact of employee involvement in hiring and promotions process of public administration agencies.” Considering the nature of the topic, which touches directly on an identified institution, it would be true to say that there will be a lot of institutional review needed on the research. Institutional review on the research would come in two major forms and formats. In the first place, there ought to be an institutional review that looks at the ethics and rules of engagement in the identified institution in the conduct of research of this nature. Even though this may generally be an academic exercise, it is important that some basic rules of research including the need to ensuring confidentiality and anonymity of data are reserved. As much as these standards are adhered to, the institutional reviews needed on the part of the awarding institution, which is the university will also be catered for to a very large extent (Schein, 2004). REFERENCE LIST Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Franciso: Jossey-Bass. Web Finace, I. (2011). Organizational Change defined. Retrieved from Business Dictionary: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/organization-change.html Schein, E. H. (2004b). Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Franciso: Jossey-Bass. Assignment 2: Dissertation Committee For a higher academic level dissertation preparation of this nature, it is always important for the researcher to appreciate the fact that all knowledge cannot rest with him alone (Schein, 2004). What this means is that the researcher would always, and at one point in time or the other need the inputs of other people in making highly informed choices on the dissertation. Considering the fact that the dissertation preparation goes through many different stages, it would be more than true to say that at every point or stage in the preparation of the dissertation, the input of some people will be needed. In order that the contributions and involvement of these people are well synchronized to fulfill a given purpose, a dissertation committee is set up by the researcher. This is going to be a semi-institutionalized body from who the researcher shall fall upon from time to time to collect needed information and to deliberate on the progress of the dissertation. The personnel of the dissertation committee are proposed to be made up of the following personalities and for reasons explained below. Project supervisor: This is going to be an assigned supervisor to the researcher by the university. The inputs and contributions of the project supervisor is perhaps the most important as he shall be responsible for vetting all drafted chapters of the dissertation. He shall give approval for final drafts to be constructed and he shall also be responsible for editing various portions of the dissertation. As a matter of fact, the inputs and suggestions of the project supervisor cannot be ignored in any way and they shall be considered as authoritative commands rather than suggestions. University librarian: The librarian has been very instrumental and helpful in the collection of both primary and secondary data so far. It is therefore very necessary to have him on the dissertation committee to continue to being in useful inputs on the data collection process, especially those that pertain to secondary data, found in literature (Yukl, 2009). Secondary data will be used extensively and so it is important to have a person to have a professional and academic idea as to the best forms of literature to use and those to ignore. Dean of student affairs: The dean of student affairs shall play a welfare role where the researcher is seeking to depend on him for guidance when it comes to issues of institutional reviews and other ethical issues that concern the dissertation. As it has been indicated earlier, this is a higher level educational research and demands so much decorum in the practice and use of data. It is against this background and the need to avoid any forms of ethical breaches that he dean shall be included to offer useful scholastic and institutional advice to the researcher. Group study leader: This group study is going to be a peer review agent on the dissertation committee. The researcher finds it very useful to have a peer on the team so that much of process of sharing of ideas can be done at the peer level even before it gets to the supervisor. Draft E-Mail I deem it a great privilege to have this opportunity in sending you this mail. I am ………………………….., a final year student with the ………………………….. department, preparing a dissertation on the topic, “the impact of employee involvement in hiring and promotions process of public administration agencies.” Having considered the roles that you have already played for me at the preparatory stages of the dissertation, I find your presence in my dissertation committee to be very useful to me. I am therefore humbled to gladly request for your inclusion on the dissertation committee. Hoping to hearing from you soon. Sincerely. REFERENCE LIST Yukl, G. (2009). Influencing organization culture. In G. Robinson Hickman (Ed.), Leading organizations: Perspectives for a new era (2nd ed.) (pp. 326-330). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Schein, E. H. (2004). The learning culture and the learning leader. In G. Robinson Hickman (Ed.), Leading organizations: Perspectives for a new era (2nd ed.) (pp. 510-524). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Assignment 3 Evidence of Quality in Qualitative Research One of the best ways to ensure credibility on interviewing and in the qualitative research plan is undoubtedly the use of a sampling procedure that can guarantee validity and reliability from the onset (Grootaert and Bastelaer, 2002). To this end, the random sampling technique, which is generally known to be suitable in avoiding all forms of bias and prejudice in the selection of respondents, shall be used. Once this is used, the temptation of influencing the selection process so as to have only respondents whose responses will favor the variables set by the researcher shall be avoided (Klonoff and Landrine, 1996). Next, because of the use of qualitative research, which shall bring out the need to rely on secondary data, credibility in the sources of data, particularly secondary data shall be a useful means of ensuring quality of the research. Indeed, the more inferior the sources of data, the less quality the finished product would become (Web Finace, 2011). To this end, the researcher shall be highly circumspect in the selection of sources. As much as possible, a secondary data collection procedure that ensures the inclusion of only credible sources of information shall be designed. This shall include the use of a literature log to define an inclusion and exclusion criteria for the sources of data (Greer, 2010). Finally, data analysis holds a lot of key in ensuring the credibility of the study. In fact, even if the data collection process is credible and valid and there is an invalid and unreliable analysis on the data, the results will be affected negative (Yukl, 2009). To avoid all of such problems, the researcher is going to employ the use of software in the analysis of both primary and secondary data. This means that even in the use of qualitative method, a suitable software for analysis of data shall be used. REFERENCE LIST Greer, T. M. (2010). A Structural Validation of the Schedule of Racist Events.Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling Development, 91-107.doi:10.1177/0272989X10373455 Grootaert, C., &Bastelaer, T. V. (2002). Understanding and Measuring Social Captial: A multidiciplinary tool for Practitioners. Washington D.C.: The World Bank. Klonoff, E. A., &Landrine, H. (1996). The Schedule of Racist Events: A Measure of Racial Discrimination and a Study of Its Negative Physical and Mental Health Consequences. Journal of Black Psychology, 144-168. doi:10.1177/00957984960222002 Web Finace, I. (2011). Organizational Change defined. Retrieved from Business Dictionary: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/organization-change.html Yukl, G. (2009). Influencing organization culture. In G. Robinson Hickman (Ed.), Leading organizations: Perspectives for a new era (2nd ed.) (pp. 326-330). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. 4 Mini-Project: Themes and the Write-Up For the mini-project, qualitative research method was used exclusively. It will be noted that in qualitative research, researchers are often at the centre of data collection and data analysis. This is because the method allows them to use much discretion in the collection and analysis of data (Greer, 2010). It is worth adding however that this does not mean that the researcher should have his own way of manipulating the data collection and analysis processes to favor his pre-conceived ideologies. It is also not appropriate to manipulate the data collection and analysis processes to favor the hypothesis set ahead of the research. In other to achieve such a well conducted and comprehensive qualitative research however, a lot of tasks and duties are demanded. One of such has to do with the selection of a research design, which would ensure that data collection is based on researcher’s discretion and yet, can be trusted for reliability and validity (Rudestam and Newton, 2007). One of such research designs that have been used over the years for qualitative research of this nature is the use of interview. In using interview, the researcher identifies a group of respondents from whom data will be collected in the form of face-to-face or telephone question and answer section (Greer, 2010). Often, conducting the interview can be informal but it is still important that the interview is well monitored for accuracy and precision. To this end, it is common to use an interview guide in the conduct of the interview. For the mini-project that took place, the interview guide used gives itself up to categorizing data that were collected into three major themes. These themes are presented and briefly analyzed with results for trends, findings and conclusions below. Why employee involvement is especially unique for hiring and promotion Interview questions were posed to respondents on hiring and promotion desire much levels of attention when it comes to employee involvement. In this, most of the respondents pointed out that hiring and promotion are two aspects of any business, and particularly the public administration agencies that really determines the long term fortunes of the companies involved. Literature could be used to support this assertion as much of a company’s strategic plan revolves round the human personnel who are hired and promoted to various positions (Ryan and Bernard, 2003). In the course of hiring and promoting therefore, it is always important to have a unique way of ensuring that the right persons are put at the right places so that the right and most desiring results can be got. Meanwhile, employee involvement is a process, which gets employees, who are always the major focus in hiring and promotion included in the processes. Subsequently, it is possible to get the most vital information from the very people who are concerned. A scenario was cited as a company that needs to hire a chief finance officer, involving existing employees at the finance department in the process. What happens is that because the employees at the finance section have had some working experience with the company, they will be the best person to know the kind of qualities that need to be possessed by a person who wants to take up such a sensitive and important position. This may be a single case with the finance but when replicated across the company, brings out the need of facilitating employment involvement in hiring and promotion. Empirical results on impact of employee involvement on hiring and promotion The interviewing process also gave rise to the need to ask for empirical evidence of the results on the impact of employee involvement on hiring and promotion. This question was posed to human resource managers who were previously not practicing employee involvement but have started practicing it. After coding the results and putting the data together, it was discovered that 80% of respondents indicated that they had seen visible benefits in practicing employee involvement in the field of hiring and promotion. 16% percentage said there has not been any significant changes as results are almost the same while 4% said there have been negative impacts on hiring and promotion. Reviewing the results critically, it can be realized that indeed it is more than impressive to practice employee involvement if positive results are expected on hiring and promotion. This is because according to respondents, the efficiency of the whole process became improved as much work on hiring and promotion were done within very short time frames. There was also diversity in the whole process because the human resource personnel and managers had the luxury of involving as many employees as possible, all of whom had some unique and different ideas to bring on board. With reference to those who indicated negative results on employee involvement in hiring and promotion, their major concerns were on how time consuming it was to have several people involved in a single project as hiring and promotion. They also touched on the levels of resources needed to be spent on all of these employees who were supposed to be involved. Challenges associated with implementing employee involvement Even though there had been much evidence to support the notion that it is a good thing to involvement employees in hiring and promotion, this was not a reason to think that it was no longer necessary to look into any forms of challenges that the implementation process could bring. To this end, interviewees were asked to outline some of the difficulties or challenges they faced in implementing their employee involvement models in their companies. Availability of time, staff training, logistical constraints, and bureaucracy were some of the challenges mentioned. Indeed, most companies found it challenging to combine the official roles and duties of employees with the task of engraining them in hiring and promotion. This problem was particularly evident when the employees were not directly part of the human resource team (Creswell, 2013). There was also a challenge with staff training as the need to involve employees meant that those to be involved needed to have some level of skill and knowledge in hiring and promotion (QSR International, 2012). In most cases, the need to identify the most appropriate training packages needed by these employees was a problem. Logistics and budgetary constraints were also highlighted by a number of respondents. This is because most cases of employee turnover, which gives rise to vacancies and subsequently hiring and promotion happens unannounced (Hudson and Chapman, 2002). Because of this, there is often no budgetary allocation for hiring and promotion. Therefore, if a complex process such as employee involvement is made to accompany the process, it increases the budgetary deficit of the companies. Finally, it was realized that employee involvement increases the rate of bureaucracy and thus gets things done in a slower pace. REFERENCE LIST Creswell, J. (2013). Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc. Patton, M. (2002). Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Greer, T. M. (2010). A Structural Validation of the Schedule of Racist Events.Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling Development, 91-107.doi:10.1177/0272989X10373455 Hudson, L., & Chapman, C. (2002).Measuring Social Capital.International Conference on the measurement of Social Captial. London. QSR International, (2012). Qualitative Research. Accessed January 21, 2013 from http://www.qsrinternational.com/what-is-qualitative-research.aspx Rudestam, K. E., & Newton, R. R. (2007).Surviving your dissertation: A comprehensive guide to content and process (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ryan, G.W. and Bernard, H.R. (2003) Techniques to Identify Themes, Field Methods, 15(1): 85-109. Read More