The Success of an Organization: Master of Business Administration - Research Proposal Example

?Running Head: Principles of Management Principles of Management [Institute’s What did Dr Wang mean by ‘your job as a management Master’s degree student is to use theory to help to explain and even solve management problems’? Answer 1: Master of Business Administration is a degree that allows its graduates to take up leadership roles after the completion of their study. The courses in MBA equip an individual with all the core functions of any business, whether automobile industry, healthcare, or even government. Therefore, one sees professionals including physicians, engineers, and architects pursuing their MBA degree. This is because it enables an individual to conduct any business and make business related decisions effectively (Stralser, 2004). In other words, the role of an MBA is to seek a leadership position and make decisions that are critical for the success of an organization. An MBA working at a leadership position plays a supervisory role in the organization and makes major decisions relating to management style, communication, downsizing or upsizing, geographical expanding, and the like. The problems faced by management can be broadly divided into four categories. First category consists of dealing with people, management, and policies. This includes problems and decisions relating to human resources, organizational behavior, leadership and team building, ethics and negotiation. The other category deals with decisions and problems relating to economics, finance and accounting, including accounting and finance, and international, national, and local economics. The problems can also belong to market and strategy, making an executive to deal with problems relating to marketing, strategy, competitive analysis, advertising, promotions, and communications. Finally, another set of management problems belongs to decisions relating to project management, management information systems, E-commerce, and quality management systems (Stralser, 2004). Decisions relating to any of the above core business functions have to be taken with extreme care and after a cautious analysis and understanding of the problem and its repercussions in detail. Therefore, research is necessary in order to make any management related decision effectively. Hence, the purpose of this research is to solve a management problem that would affect the organization and not conduct a research just for the sake of it. Therefore, it is important that the research so conducted is exhaustive and makes use of as much information as possible in order to present useful findings that would facilitate in making an effective decision. These major decisions are made on the basis of data that is collected by employees in the organization working at different levels. However, all this data that is collected is useless if the CEO or other leader of an organization cannot make a valued decision on the basis of that data. Furthermore, Dr. Wang told Amina to leave the storytelling to the business journalists. This is because business journalists are the people who find information, interpret it, and then analyze it. On the other hand, an MBA’s job is to find the problem and solve it with the help of data and information gathered by researchers and on the basis of his or her own knowledge and experience. Therefore, an MBA should possess great analytical, decision making, and problem solving skills. In Amina’s case, she did not approach her report from an MBA’s perspective, but rather from a researcher’s perspective or a journalist’s perspective, as Dr. Wang put it. This is because she went too deep in detailing about the industry that she had chosen for her report, which was not a requirement of the report. In other words, research was done in a way that it could not aid in making any useful decision. Furthermore, her conclusion was restating the findings. However, this is not how an MBA’s report should look like. An MBA’s report, or a report prepared for an executive, should be organized, clear, and exactly state the recommendations to the company. A successful report required a brief introduction of any industry and then a research on its marketing strategies in unexpected competition. Therefore, the focus of the report was the marketing strategies and a company’s decision about selection of its marketing strategies when faced with unexpected competition. Hence, Amina should have focused more on the various types of marketing strategies and finding out which one proves to be the most effective or relatively more effective in unexpected competition. This should have made Amina to select a research design that consists of both qualitative and quantitative research strategies including survey, case study analysis, action research, etc. (Saunders, 2003). 2. How might Amina improve her findings section? Answer 2: Her findings section should be very comprehensive. For that, she should present findings of all the methodologies she used to conduct the research with a clear analysis. This analysis, in turn, would help her to come to a conclusion that is detailed and decisive at the same time. Her findings section should be detailed enough to help her base her conclusion on it. One thing that lacked in Amina’s report was triangulation. She relied only on one data collection method’s findings. However, in order to make any report comprehensive, one should use multiple data collection methods. In other words, Amina should have made use of both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies including survey questionnaires, observations, interviews, etc. This way she would have been able to verify the results of the findings from one data collection source with another one (Jankowicz, 2005). Every researcher should be aware that every data collection method has some pros and cons. Therefore, the main advantage of using multiple data collection methods is that the cons of one method can be covered with the help of pros of another method. For example, survey questionnaires are a good measure of quantitative data; however, they lack flexibility as respondents have to stick religiously to the questions asked. On the other hand, interviews are a source of rich information, especially if they are unstructured. Hence, a potential drawback of questionnaires, i.e. lack of additional information, can be very well compensated with interviews’ implied advantage. Another advantage is that various data collection methods can be used at different levels of the research like focus group interviews and are always associated with the initial phase of the research when the researcher is still trying to find out his research questions, and the result of the focus group interview helps in making a questionnaire, etc. Therefore, the results of one collection method leads to the execution of others, and the findings so obtained become as close to accurate as possible (Thody, 2006). Therefore, Amina can improve her findings section significantly by reshaping her research design and adding other data collection methodologies in order to make her findings more accurate and valid. Moreover, the purpose of findings section of any report is to present a crisp analysis of the situation based on the data gathered. In this section, a researcher links the research objectives and research questions with the secondary and primary data and tries to make a sense out of it. In this section, the researcher discusses the implications of each variable and its consequences, along with other issues raised during the process of gathering the data. Presenting findings is one of the most important sections of any report, as the conclusion is clearly based on the findings of the research. Therefore, Amina should spend more time on this section in order to make her findings more influential. Analyzing data in this section also includes linking your current data with the data collected in previous researches conducted on this topic, that are also mentioned in the literature review section of the report (Neville, 2007). There is an important distinction between findings and conclusion sections. In findings, a researcher writes down the results as they are without giving any opinions or judgments on them. However, this is the stage when the researcher links his or her primary data with his literature review of the report presented earlier. Amina should also make use of graphs, charts, tables, and the like to make this section as understandable and straight forward as possible. It is important to include these graphs and tables in this section only and not in appendices. Graphs and charts help in summarizing the data collected through qualitative methods, but what about the data and information found through quantitative tools? Here, Amina can use direct quotes of the respondents, as these quotes make the reader realize the richness of the data found. Similarly, Amina can come up with such other creative ways to present her findings of the research. One more important thing to bear in mind when preparing the findings section of the report is to put the findings of the research in a logical sequence so that it looks organized to the reader. This sequence can be achieved by revealing the findings in the order in which research questions are asked. Similarly, Amina can come up with such other sequencing orders in order to make her findings section look clear and organized (Saunders, 2003). 3. What do you think Amina has to do to get Dr Wang’s full approval for submission of her MBA project for assessment? Amina needs to work in the following four areas in order to receive Dr Wang’s approval for submission of her MBA project. Firstly, she should limit the description about UK car dealerships that she has chosen. This is because the report should focus on marketing strategies and not on the background information and history about the industry that she has selected. Next, she should add a detailed literature review on different marketing strategies available and pros and cons of each strategy. She should also tell which marketing strategy proves useful in which stage of a company’s lifecycle and also the difference in the use of marketing strategies across industries. Then she should tell a little about different threats available to a company, describe a little about threats of rivalry and unexpected competition, and discuss whether this threat is high or not in the industry that she has chosen. Amina should present this secondary data research with the help of tables and graphs to add value to the matter. Thirdly, she should restructure her research design and should add more data collection methods and should use multiple strategies, i.e. she can do case study analysis and survey together. In case study analysis, she can take cases of two to three companies in the industry and should analyze the different marketing strategies that these companies use in the wake of a competition. Furthermore, she should undertake survey in which she can make questionnaires, take interviews, or can use other data collection methods. Thirdly, she should make her conclusion more detailed. This is because conclusion is the most important part of any research. This conclusion should be based on the findings of the research that she has done. It should list out the marketing strategies that are effective in dealing with unexpected competition as per her findings and should describe each of those strategies. Moreover, she should rationalize her selection of those marketing strategies. Furthermore, Amina should realize that conclusion is the most important and most difficult part of any report as it shows to the reader a researcher’s capabilities and skills to derive useful outcomes. The points made in the conclusion should be addressed in the same order as they are presented in the findings section of the report. At this point, she should rationalize each of the finding and should link it with her research questions and hypothesis/hypotheses. A creative way of presenting conclusions is using mid maps and linking each variable with the research questions and research hypotheses and telling diagrammatically how these issues can be addressed (Bryman, 2007). Amina should not include anything in this section that is not mentioned in the findings sections. In other words, conclusions section of the report should be roughly as long as the findings section. However, if she wishes to add any additional details, she should add another heading of ‘discussions.’ In this heading, she can include future researches, limitations of her research, practical implications, and the like. Future research part includes a mention of areas where further research can be done but was not done due to limitations. However, future researchers, who take this research as secondary data, can take up those issues and can work on them. Limitations to her research would include time constraints, budget constraints, limited knowledge, various biases, and other such limitations that are bound to be associated with all kinds of research. If the limitations are mentioned, it gives the reader an idea as to the truthfulness of the data. In other words, it gives an idea about the accuracy of the report. Practical implications or recommendations are not required in academic reports, but they are required in consultant report. However, it is a good idea that Amina asks Dr Wang whether recommendations are needed or not (Saunders, 2003). If she rewrites her report in the above mentioned ways, then Dr Wang would accept it and would also like it. 4. How would you suggest Amina now approaches the rewriting of her report? There are two approaches to write a report, i.e. inductive or deductive. In Amina’s case, her approach to writing report should be inductive, as she is looking for a marketing strategy or strategies that would prove effective in unexpected competition. Inductive approach refers to finding solutions to a problem. In this, a researcher aims to find out why something is happening. For example, if an employer is interested to find out what causes stressful situations in his organization, he or she has to interview the employees and try to get to know what factors cause stress in the organization. On the other hand, deductive approach to conducting a research refers to testing a hypothesis. For example, a researcher is interested in testing whether there is a relationship between employee age and absenteeism, so he or she has to conduct a research to test this relationship. Therefore, he would make questionnaires and design interviews to test that relationship in question. Amina was too much focused on the problem faced by UK retail dealerships and did not focus on the marketing strategies that they use and strategies that they can use. Furthermore, she was writing the report as a story and was not approaching it as an MBA should. An MBA’s job is to analyze data in order to make useful decisions. However, Amina focused on the parts of the reports where there was not much detail needed like introduction and description of UK car dealership; on the other hand, she did not focus on the parts of the report that needed more explanation like findings and conclusion. Moreover, her conclusion was mere repetition of her findings. Similarly, Amina focused too much on the description of the research methodology that she used and detailed about the interviewing procedure at length. Details of the research methodology is important, but this way Amina spent so much time on detailing and writing out procedures that she deviated from the heart of writing a report, i.e. presenting useful conclusions. Therefore, Amina should now approach the report as a way of solving a problem and as a means to making useful recommendations and conclusions. As an MBA, she should have strong analytical skills to help her view the severity of the problem, see pros and cons of all the marketing strategies available, do a cost benefit analysis of each marketing strategy, and, in the end, should suggest some marketing strategies that would be effective for UK car dealerships in dealing with the unexpected competition from continental Europe. Hence, she would not do research for the purpose of doing research, but for the purpose of solving a problem. This way she would not be acting like a business journalist, but like a business executive trying to solve a business related problem. Amina should work on all the areas notified by Dr. Wang. To sum it all, Amina now needs to restructure her research design to include a combination of research strategies, she needs to add more literature review and secondary data on marketing strategies in the wake of unexpected competition of various industries, and, lastly, she needs to work on her findings and conclusions sections. Moreover, she should try to come up with creative ways of presenting her data and presenting a conclusion like making mind map and the like. Amina needs to approach the research as a means of finding solutions. The outcome of the research should provide her with marketing strategies that are useful and can prove effective in helping UK car dealerships deal with unexpected competition. Briefly, her report should just not present the findings and tell stories, but it should tell concrete conclusions that are based on the data collected. References Bryman, A. (2007). Business Research Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jankowicz, A. D. (2005). Business Research Projects. New York: Cengage Learning EMEA. Neville, Colin. (2007). Writing Your Management Dissertation or Project Report. Bradford: Bradford Press. Saunders. (2003). Research Methods for Business Students. New Delhi: Pearson Education India. Stralser, S. (2004). MBA In A Day. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Thody, A. (2006). Writing And Presenting Research. New York: SAGE. Read More