Foundations of knowledge and skills

¶ … Knowledge and Skills

FOUNDATIONS of KNOWLEDGE and SKILLS

Detert and Burris are seeking to determine ways to better understand employees who will speak up with valuable information in an organization that favors these habits (p. 869).

There are four assumptions included in this article and the authors list them as hypothesis. They are as follows:

Leaders' perceived display of openness is positively related to subordinates' improvement-oriented voice (p. 871).

Leaders' perceived transformational behaviors are positively related to subordinates' improvement-oriented voice (p. 871).

Perceived psychological safety mediates the relationship between change-oriented leader behaviors and subordinates' improvement-oriented voice (p. 872).

The relationships between leaders' change-oriented behaviors and subordinates' improvement-oriented voice is stronger for subordinates with high performance than for subordinates with low performance (p. 872).

III. METHODS USED

The authors conducted two studies at one company to test the first three hypotheses. The first study was tested on crew members of a chain of a company's restaurants. The second study was conducted with shift managers by using longitudinal data from the first study to test the fourth hypotheses.

With the first study, a questionnaire was used and the participants were paid for thirty minutes of their time to complete the questionnaire. To be sure that there were no confidentiality issues, the questionnaires were mailed directly to the survey administrator. The participants had the option to include or omit their employee identification numbers from the survey. This group was asked questions about the general manager and about their psychological safety.

The second study used shift managers as the participants as well as information on these shift manager's general managers. The authors state that a large portion of the surveys from this study could not be used because of issues such as like high turnover and relocation rates. The questions were similar to the first study except that this time, the shift managers were rating the performance of the general managers.

IV. RESULTS

The testing of hypotheses' one and two on the general manager's openness and transformational leadership confirmed the author's assumption for the first of these hypotheses, but not the second. For the first assumption, if the subordinates felt that the general manager was open to new ideas, they were more inclined to speak up. For the second assumption, the test results did not support the hypotheses that the general managers perceived openness is directly related to the workers willingness to speak up. The third hypothesis was partially supported with results showing that there is a slight perception of job safety in relation to the openness of the general manager. The fourth and last hypothesis was supported proving that if the general manager shows that he is open to change, the employees that are high performers are more likely to speak up than those who are low performers.

This study is generally one of a qualitative nature and as such, it can sometimes be difficult to get accurate results. The researchers note in the article that many parts of this study are similar to previous studies done on this topic. Because of this, the assumptions made by the researchers should have been pretty much expected. Three of the four tested hypotheses turned out to be supported. Another was partially supported. The research questions were appropriate and the researchers did a good job of ensuring confidentiality. However, the survey questions themselves were not very original in that (as mentioned earlier) most of them were based on similar research. The four hypotheses or assumptions seemed like they were common sense and did not really need to be tested.

Another way to explore the research question might be to conduct a quantitative study as opposed to a qualitative one. The researchers themselves admit that this study used perceptual data. That is, it was conducted based on what the participants perceived and everyone could have a different perception of the issue. A quantitatively-based test might be difficult to perform because the questions and other aspects would need to be altered or changed completely. but, this would be for the researchers to figure out.