MBA General Track

Business Research Exam

Submitted By :

Gihan Gerges Sayfain

Supervisor :

Dr : Wael Kortam

Business Research Exam

MBA General Track

International perspectives are prevalent in todays study of organizations. As business practices become more global, many theoretical constructs commonly used in domestic research are being applied in new cross-cultural arenas. This trend has prompted researchers to highlight potential methodological issues associated with conducting this type of research. Some of these issues include whether the researchers take an approach that focuses on examining a phenomena from within a specific context culture , industry ,.. and understanding that phenomena as the people from within that culture understand it or other approach that employs broader comparative analyses involving two or more contexts culture , organization ,.. If researchers ignore the methodological issues common to cross-cultural research, they risk interpreting findings that may actually be meaningless, inconclusive, or misguiding. So the Scientific business research method, must therefore, include any systematic, testable and replicable process by the end of which knowledge is ascertained, tested and systematized. Scientific business knowledge is rigor , objective, formal, rigorous, measurable, repeatable, verifiable, and reliable. And in order to increase the generalizability of a research which refer to the scope of applicability of the research findings in one organizational setting to other settings , the research sampling design has to be logically developed and a number of other details in data collection methods will need to be followed as the Research methodologies directly impact the validity and generalizability of a study as the rigorous way the business research is done by guarantee the effectiveness of the output. The more generalizable the research the greater its usefulness and value.

Ex: If a researcher found that the participation in decision making enhances organizational commitment in a variety of manufacturing , industrial , and service organizations and not only in a particular organization studied by the researcher so the generalizability of this research findings is high. In order for the generated business research findings to be solid and applicable with high level of certainty the followed steps in the research should be as follows: Step one : Definition of the business research problem One of the major activities that has to be done before clear definition of the business problem that we are targeting to solve, is the review of the relevant literature that I will build my

Business Research Exam

MBA General Track

research depending on it, sources of this literature review can be analogous academic or professional journals , books , articles and reports that provide the important variables that are related to the problem regardless of the specific context the research is held about The importance of this step comes from that it ensures that no important variable has been in the past been found repeatedly in different industries over different time periods to have had an impact on the problem is ignored in the process of defining the problem statement and also by this the researcher will avoid to spend considerable time and effort in discovering something that has already been researched reinventing the wheel Also that will guarantee that the problem investigated is perceived by the scientific community as relevant and significant, A good literature review should target both approaches of reviewing literatures related to the same or similar contexts done before such as previous researches conducted for the same organization , same industry in the same country and also the approach of reviewing literatures from different cultures ,industries , demographic , political and ethnic contexts . This allows researchers to put aside their culture/background biases and to become familiar with the relevant differences in each setting. Examples of problems that could be observed and triggers business research activities: Drop in sales volume of a product. High customer switching High turnover rate between employees.

Such problems can happen in companies of any size at any time in any cultures and the business research findings for such problems add to the business knowledge in a way that any other business researcher can benefit from. A good literature review needs to include reference to the key studies in the field such as articles and books even if they are written thirty or even forty years ago . International standards : The international standards can be used as a time and culture independent benchmark towards which we can measure the current situation to help defining the business problem

Business Research Exam Step 2 : Formulating the business research hypothesis or question :

MBA General Track

After conducting the interviews , completing literature review and defining the problem , a theoretical framework is developed as it will be the bases for the hypothesis that will be developed, as it will represent the beliefs on how certain phenomena variables are related to each other Model and why these variables are associated with each other Theory

You dont have to invent a new theory every time you are undertaking a research project , as sometimes you may be only applying existing theories to a specific contexts or you can make some contribution to existing theories by explanation for relations between variables.

Once we have identified the important variables and established the relationship between them , we are now in a position to test them to see if they are true or not , by testing the hypotheses and confirming relationships it is expected that solutions can be found to correct the problem encountered .

The hypothesis should be testable and falsifiable it must be possible to disprove it as there is always possibility that future research done by any other researcher in any other context industry ,time ,culture , size , will show that it is false .

After building the theoretical framework it is better to engage in idea sharing across different cultures, industries ,.. with researchers from different backgrounds and cultures as you can determine some factors that have different meanings across different cultures/industries that you may prefer to drop from the pool .This approach helps ensure that the hypothesis and measures are employed appropriately across samples.

Step three : Selecting a business research design : There are two major kinds of business research designs exploratory and conclusive research , one of the designs in the conclusive is the descriptive design which can be either cross sectional or longitudinal design . It would seem that longitudinal research would be the developmental researcher's first choice as it allow him to observe the development of the phenomena . The problems of this type of design is that it is expensive to study a large group of individuals over an extensive time span To try to avoid some of these potential problems, researchers often study small groups of individuals; but this may make it difficult to generalize the findings to a larger group.

Business Research Exam

MBA General Track

Cross-sectional studies are quick by nature but the researcher does not gain the rich data on phenomena development that can be garnered from longitudinal studies. The cross-sectional design still suffers some criticism that it doesnt take care of the dynamism of business .But taking the approach that the business doesnt change surprisingly and any observed phenomena is the result of accumulative decisions So in order to be able to generalize the findings of the business research We will use the Multiple cross sectional descriptive design where we will two or more set of questions to gather data from two or more levels of the units of analysis such as Top , middle , operation management,.. as we will take two or more samples of the different levels and use two or more measurement scales , we do this because these different levels has relevant data that we need to gather , the determination of these levels that we will use to gather the data is done using the exploratory work results done in the initial phases of the research

Conclusion : Multi cross sectional design support the generalization of the research results.

Step four : Sampling plan and design : The selected sample should be a good representative of the population so as to be reasonably sure that the sample statistics is fairly close to the population parameters , otherwise the generated findings will be misleading . The sample size should be adequate to the method of analysis , for example in order to be able to use the multiple regression the sample size should be between 150 , 3000. The population homogeneity should be checked regarding the phenomena under study as all subsamples in populations such as gender , age ,ethnics ,geographic.. should be taken into consideration while selecting the sample to guarantee the generalizability of the findings . Researchers need to minimize the effects of sample differences between cultures and industries and match samples in terms of the studied characteristics so as to avoid a misleading explanations of results , Ex :in a cross culture research samples from Germany, Japan, and the United States are picked in way that each of participants had been educated by business programs in their culture and were similar in terms of age and gender.

Business Research Exam

MBA General Track

In business the least sample size is 100 for each subsample otherwise it wont be representative. If the sample size needed is not reachable for any reason time , budget ,.. the confidence level in the results should be decreased so as the findings can be generalized . Probability (random sampling) is better used tin homogeneous population to achieve generalizability , the stratified random sampling is efficient in case of heterogeneous population.

For the findings to be generalizable researcher should decrease Non response error : which is a failure to obtain response from number of units inside the sample by decreasing the length of the survey and use appropriate method for collecting data

Step five : measurement scaling and data collection : Measuring scale: Different cultures react differently to the issues of scaling as recent research has shown that people from different countries differ in both their tendency to use the extremes of the rating scale (for instance 1 and 5 or 1 and 7) also it was found that in some countries a seven points scale is more sensitive than a four point scale in eliciting unbiased responses. The most common scale in the business research is the interval research in which it is better to identify intervals in numbers in order to unify the distance between the interval units Data collection : Attention should be paid to cultural and contextual differences in the use of certain terms in different surveys used to collect data . Surveys should be tailored to the different cultures so as to guarantee the unbiased in the collected data and so in the generated findings later on . It is important to ensure that the translation of the instrument to the local language Ex: Japanese matches accurately the original language Ex: English by translating the instrument to the local language then another bilinguist translate it back to original language back translation . Take care of conceptual equivalence , where the meaning of certain words could differ in different cultures the meaning of the concept love may differ in different cultures .