relationship between Organizational Behaviour variables:
Done as an individual
Due Friday of Week 11, by 11:55 p.m.
Weight: 30%
1500-2000 words essay
Topic of your essay:
To shape your topic for this assignment, first, choose concept 1 from the list below:
- Job satisfaction,
- Job involvement,
- Organizational commitment,
- Perceived organizational support,
- Employee engagement,
- Affect,
- Ability,
- Personality,
- Motivation,
- Values,
- trust
Then, choose concept 2 from the list below:
- Job performance,
- Absenteeism,
- Employee turnover,
- Job satisfaction,
- Deviant workplace behaviour,
- Creativity,
- Organizational commitment
The topic of your essay for this assignment will be:
“The influence of Concept 1 on Concept 2”.
For example, if you chose “job satisfaction” as your concept 1 and “employee turnover” as concept 2, then your topic will be “the influence of job satisfaction on employee turnover”.
How to conduct literature review and write a 1500-2000 word essay:
The following components are required in your essay:
1) Introduction: introducing Concept 2 (e.g. employee turnover)
2) Concept 1 (e.g. job satisfaction)
3) A parent theory (to justify the impact of Concept 1 on Concept 2)
4) Relationship between Concept 1 and Concept 2 (e.g. Relationship between job satisfaction and employee turnover)
5) proposition
6) Conclusions (implications of your conclusions for practice)
Details about each component of the essay:
1) Introduction (introducing Concept 2; e.g. employee turnover)
Conduct a literature review to understand how the existing studies (peer-reviewed journal articles) conceptualised or defined Concept 2 (e.g. employee turnover). For example, if your topic is: “what is the influence of job satisfaction on employee turnover?”, then you need to synthesise the existing research to see how different researchers conceptualised (defined) concept of “employee turnover”.
For this section of your essay, first, write an introductory paragraph introducing Concept 2 and briefly make mention of the ways the existing literature approached this concept. Then, explain why it is important to study Concept 2. For example, if you chose “employee turnover” as concept 2, explain why “employee turnover” is an important issue to be solved in an organization; Or if you chose “employee commitment” as Concept 2, then you need to explain why “employee commitment” is essential for organizations, and why organizations need to enhance or maintain
employee commitment.
Important:
You are required to provide references from peer-reviewed journal articles within text (please see the file on the Moodle explaining how this essay will be marked).
Finally, clarify how you, yourself, conceptualised Concept 2. That is to say, you need to clarify that the way you approached and defined Concept 2 is in line with a particular existing conceptualisation you discussed in your paper while synthesising the literature.
2) Concept 1 (e.g. job satisfaction)
Conduct a literature review to understand how the existing studies (peer-reviewed journal articles) conceptualised or defined Concept 1 (e.g. job satisfaction). For example, if your topic is: “what is the influence of job satisfaction on employee turnover?”, then you need to synthesise the existing research to see how different researchers conceptualised (defined) concept of ‘job satisfaction’.
For this section of your essay, first write an introductory paragraph introducing Concept 1 and briefly make mention of the ways the existing literature approached this concept.
Important:
You are required to provide references from peer-reviewed journal articles within text (please see the file on the Moodle explaining how this essay will be marked). Finally, clarify how you, yourself, conceptualised Concept 1. That is to say, you need to clarify that the way you approached and defined Concept 1 is in line with a particular existing conceptualisation you discussed in your paper while synthesising the literature.
3) Parent theory (to justify the impact of Concept 1 on Concept 2)
Find a parent theory to justify why you think Concept 1 influences Concept 2. By doing this you are actually practicing deduction. See an example of deduction:
1) All animals require Oxygen (this is a parent theory).
2) Horses are animals.
3) Therfore, horses require Oxygen (your proposed conclusion).
Or:
1) Attitude influences behaviour (theory of reasoned action: a parent theory)
2) ‘job satisfaction’ is analogous to the concept of attitude (an understanding based on your conceptualisation and synthesis of the literature presented in section 2).
3) Therfore, satisfaction influences (turnover) behaviour (your proposed conclusion)
Note: A Parent theory is any robust (famous) theory, which has been tested several times and has been shown to be generalizable to many contexts. Since parent theories are reliable, they can be used to justify relevant hypotheses in other research works.
Several famous theories were discussed during the semester (e.g. theory of planned behaviour, attribution theory, social cognitive theory, self-determination theory, personality-job-fit theory, etc.).They are all famous robust theories (parent theories) that, depending on the context, can be relied on and can be used to justify the relationship you propose might exist between two concepts (e.g. Relationship between job satisfaction and employee turnover).
You need to justify that Concept 1 influences Concept 2 relying on a parent theory.
To this end, first, explain the parent theory in a paragraph. Then in a second paragraph justify why you think this parent theory can explain why Concept 1 might influence Concept 2 (for justification, see the example of deduction mentioned above).
4) Relationship between Concept 1 and Concept 2 (e.g. Relationship between job satisfaction and employee turnover)
To further justify that Concept 1 might influence Concept 2, you are required to do a literature review and see if there is an existing study which found this relationship statistically significant. Develop a table in which one column contains the list of all research (references) which found this relationship statistically significant and a column
which found this relationship non-significant. You can further synthesise the literature by exploring the similarities and differences of the studies in each column. For example, you might find that the majority of the research found the influence of Concept 1 on Concept 2 is statistically significant for men vs. women, for baby boomers as compared
to generation Y, or for people with different personality traits or intrinsic motives. See if you can further synthesise the literature to provide support for the possible influence of Concept 1 on Concept 2. Also acknowledge the studies that did not find this relationship statistically significant [Please note that, in addition to presenting your synthesis in a table, you need to describe the table in two to three paragraphs and elaborate on your synthesis of the literature].
Important:
Please see the file on the Moodle site to find out how this section will be marked including information on required number of peer-reviewed journal articles. Please don’t forget that you need to provide references both in the table and within text.
5) Proposition
In this section you write down your proposition in italic. For example, you can say, relying on the parent theory (e.g. theory of planned behaviour) and based on the synthesis of the literature discussed in the previous sections, we propose that:
Concept A influences Concept B
Or:
Concept A influences Concept B for men than women
Or:
