Workplace Insights: Research Roundup

By Nicola Brown, MPC2014

From employee engagement to creative motivation, MRP projects seek greater visibility into our workplaces, employees and business practices.

Project: Opinion Mining For Employee Engagement: Are Surveys Extinct?

Author: Paige Westbury

This major research paper investigates the possibility of measuring employee engagement through online job-review sites such as Glassdoor.com. Using prevalent themes from the Gallup Q12 engagement survey as independent variables, 106 Glassdoor reviews were deductively analyzed.

Literature surrounding employee engagement theory, critical managerialism and the affordances of online review-forums was reviewed and used in conjunction with thematic content analyses to guide and answer the following research questions: 1) What are the prevalent themes addressed by the Gallup Q12? 2) Are employees addressing the themes prevalent in the Gallup Q12 in their Glassdoor reviews? 3) Are there prevalent themes addressed in Glassdoor reviews other than those addressed by the Gallup Q12?

Paige found that employee reviews on Glassdoor do in fact address the themes in the Gallup Q12. However, each individual review only addressed a fraction of the 12 prevalent themes at a time. These findings suggest that while online review sites may not replace employee engagement surveys such as the Gallup Q12, they may provide useful insight into what factors should be addressed in employee engagement surveys.

You can read Paige’s paper here.

Project: Antecedents Of Creativity: Testing A New Psychometric Measure Of Creative Motivation

Author: Nicola Brown, MPC2014

This study offers evidence for the validity of a new psychometric measure in assessing an individual’s creative motivation and helping to predict their creative performance. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship of this new psychometric measure of creative motivation, the Short Scale of Creative Self (SSCS), with several other well established measures of creativity including the Big Five Inventory (BFI-44) personality factor “Openness to Experience,” the Creative Personality Scale (CPS), the Creative Behaviour Inventory (CBI), and a divergent thinking task (DT).

The SSCS is comprised of two self-concept variables that have been of growing interest and importance in the literature on creativity because of their hypothesized value in capturing key aspects of intrinsic motivation for creativity and thus a form of creative potential that could help predict creative performance. Statistical analysis confirmed expected positive correlations between the SSCS and all the other measures of creativity tested.

The results of the study support the hypothesis that this new measure, the SSCS, may be a valid measure of creative motivation and may have some potential for helping to predict creative performance. Suggestions are made for future studies to further examine the potential usefulness of the SSCS in relation to other measures of creativity.

You can read Nicola’s paper here.

Project: Cross-Cultural Business Proposal Strategies In Practice

Author: Anne Whitehead

This study attempts to identify some best practices for developing and delivering business proposals in different cross-cultural environments. Anne interviewed seven international business people, analyzed proposal documents and reviewed relevant literature. She discovered some commonalities in the proposal process which do not line up with theoretical assertions in all cases.

The findings suggest that business people appeal to potential clients and partners through methods of cultural and linguistic accommodation, and these strategies emerge informally through personal experience.

You can read Anne’s paper here