A Review of Data Collection Methodologies

¶ … leadership styles in evidence at Proctor & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. The paper will begin with an examination of the different leadership theories. Of particular interest will be surveys that can identify leadership types. When looking at leader-member exchanges, the key for this paper will be to ask both leaders and followers questions to determine what leadership styles are in use at these two companies. The survey technique will be utilized. There are four different methods of data collection, including questionnaires (surveys), interviews, observations and unobtrusive measures.

The questionnaire method for this project has the advantage of being easy to gather and tabulate, and in that way it is relatively inexpensive to gather large amounts of data. This will be important given that the project requires information from many different managers in these two companies. Interviews are more in-depth, which allows for the gathering of richer, more detailed data. Observations can also deliver rich data, and they allow the researcher to view with the same eye.

This contrasts with interviews and surveys, where it is the participant that provides the information; in observation it is the researcher so interpretation is more consistent. Unobtrusive measures are detached, so there is no response bias, and is often easy to gather and quantify. There are drawbacks to each of these techniques. The unobtrusive measures only work where the data is available, which is not always the case. For my project, this data is not available, so unobtrusive measures might not be available.

Moreover, observations take a long time to gather, and the notes require a lot of work to process. Observations are the most time-consuming and expensive data to gather, though interviews are not far behind. By contrast, surveys can be relatively cheap because the respondents can be remote, and respond at their own leisure. Interviews and surveys are similar with these regards, but interviews require a lot more time to gather the information, since it requires the managers to submit to the interviews.

Both surveys and interviews have a problem with self-reporting bias, something that does not occur with observations. The bias inherent in self-reporting is a critical issue that undermines both interviews and surveys. Surveys also suffer from having predetermined questions; at least interviews allow for the flexibility to adapt the questions when need be. The justification for the survey technique lies with the exploratory nature of the paper. This is an exploratory case study seeking to determine differences in leadership styles between two companies.

This means gathering information from leaders about how they perceive their own leadership style, but also from followers about how they perceive the leadership style of their superiors. This information will be analyzed and compared. Leadership style is suitable for qualitative analysis, rather than quantitative. It is not numerical in nature, but is qualitative in nature. It is important for the effectiveness of the survey that the data collected is in quantity, because these are large companies.

The number of the sample needs to be reasonably high in order to make determinations about the entire company. Leader-member pairs will be surveyed, and these will need to be chosen at random. From there, the participants will need to be self-selected after having been randomized. The survey questions will need to be based on the literature regarding how to identify different types of leadership. There are many theories, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Indeed, the concept of situational leadership holds that leadership styles are adapted to individual situations. The survey questions will either be developed using existing models to identify different leadership styles, or they will be built from scratch where no prior models exist. The questions will not be explicit, because the respondents either will not be familiar with the terminology, or the terminology can bias the respondents. Another justification for the survey technique is that this information is not available through secondary sources.

The data will need to be collected specifically for this paper. Where secondary source data is available, it can usually be acquired at low cost, but in this case that is not possible. Furthermore, there is a need to tailor the survey questions and to ensure some control over the project. As such, primary data collection is the most viable option. Observations are not possible, because of the time involved, the expense, and the fact that the leaders in particular are likely to change.