week 1 homework

Week One Homework

Part One: The Literature Review

1. Select a business dilemma or management question. To get the most out of this class, select a dilemma/question that is relevant to your current or desired job.

Ex: Social media is quite prevalent in today’s society. Many organizations want to tap into the power of social media for marketing purposes. What is the most effective way to do that…. Hmmm maybe I should do some research…

2. Google searches are fine for every day questions, but how do you know the information you find it legitimate. Contrary to popular belief, just because something is posted online, doesn’t mean it is accurate. With that in mind, consult your local library or our online journal resources for peer reviewed books and journal articles to help answer your question. Schiller library resources are located under the “Additional Resources” link on the course menu. You may find common themes in your initial search that will lead to a deeper search of like items and/or secondary resources.

3. Evaluate the value of each of the sources you selected.

4. In the real world, sometimes you will be able to stop at this stage because you will have found your answers. Other times you may have to do your own research. For this assignment and for this class, we are going to assume additional research is necessary.

For this part of the assignment please do the following:

Identify the question/dilemma (from Part Two) and at least (4) four legitimate peer reviewed sources that attempt to address your dilemma/question (Part One).
Prepare at 4-5 page literature review of your sources. Remember, a literature review is not a research paper. You are simply summarizing and synthesizing the information you collected. It is NOT copying and pasting the information as plagiarism is a violation of University policy and will result in a 0 for this assignment.
Be sure your literature review is well organized, formatted in APA, and includes a reference page (which is NOT part of the 4-5 page count).

Part Two: Management Question/Research Question

In the first part of this assignment you identified a work place problem and located peer reviewed literature to conduct a literature review. Now you are going to turn your work place problem into a management question/research question. You will use this research question as the basis for your research during the next four weeks. You need to have an audience for your question because you will have to write and deploy a survey next week. If you are not currently employed or do not think you can come up with an audience for your area of research, please e-mail me ASAP. I will help you brainstorm ideas on where to find your survey audience.

Let’s say the dilemma you used for your literature review was about the causes or impact of declining employer morale. Your question might be “How can we improve employee moral” or “Will improving employee morale increase our productivity?” You get the idea.

Since this is a four week course, you do not want to tackle a topic that requires a six month observation period. So if your question is about employee morale, don’t expect to solve the problem with your research, you might be looking to find out your team’s thoughts on the impact of the current culture or how they feel some of the literature best practices might fare in your work place.

For this part of the assignment you need to:

Write a research question that goes with your work place dilemma and literature review
- Keep in mind the work place dilemma is a big picture issue, the literature review tries to look at that and give you clues to possible interventions. Your research question is about an intervention or idea.
- Example: If my work place problem is student satisfaction is not as high as I would like, I would research student satisfaction in online higher education. I would learn that often times students feel alone and really want to feel engaged and like they are an important part of the organization. My research question might be: Would a weekly video overview and discussion lecture improve student satisfaction in an online classroom as compared to courses at the same institution that do not use these tools?
Identify your data collection method
- How will you collect your data to find out the answer to your research question. Per the final project directions, you are going to use a survey so your research problem has to be conducive to a survey. Perception, satisfaction, etc are all good topics for survey data.
Tell me what type of study you believe you are going to do based on this week’s reading.
- There are different types of research studies. It is important to pick a study type that fits with your project. Research study types are outlined in your reading. Be sure to select one and explain why it is the best fit.