Conducting Organizational Research

Conducting organizational research takes some planning to implement and integrate successfully. The process, instruments and methods are aligned around organizational needs. Therefore, one would start with the objectives or goals that need to be accomplished and then move onto other facets. These could include customer retention, value of a product on the market, improving innovation, training new recruits, or whatever else the organization needs.

Once you have the objectives it is beneficial to review the organizations processes to determine if there are current metrics that can be used to accomplish data collection. Many organizations have mounds of data right under their nose and they don't know it. Talking to organizational players can help determine what metrics are available and solidify a functional research question. 

Sometimes you can tweak existing metrics and sometimes you may need to create new ones. Existing metrics may be close but not close enough to be of decision making value. One might alternatively consider a battery of metrics. Some level of literature research is helpful in ensuring that constructs are valid and they are measuring what they say they are measuring.

Before engaging in large scale metric analysis one would want to ensure there is a level of validity to those measures. Testing measurements in a smaller batch samples could help determine their functionality and representativeness. Did they actually answer the question? Is the information beneficial in making a strategic action plan? 

Collecting and scrubbing the data helps in keeping it clean and representative of organizational phenomenon. The collection process can should be thought out to ensure purity of the data. Such data protection and cleaning is necessary to ensure the information is useful for strategic analysis. One would encode that data and put it within a spreadsheet or software for analysis. 

Once you have some strong conclusions and statistically significant results it becomes possible to consider how those conclusions help the business. Implementation of change is one of the most difficult and you might want to rely on executives to design the implementation process based on their needs. A researcher can provide some guidance but ultimately the internal/external customer must use their knowledge to determine how best to use the new discoveries. 

Resources:

Observational Research Methods in Psychology

Organizational Behavior in a New Era

Researching the Dark Side of Organizations

Methods for Understanding Organizational Behavior