Scenario 1: National Restaurant Chain

You currently have a part-time job at the headquarters of a national restaurant chain, which has 52 different branches across the country. Your manager has discovered that you study research methods at university and has asked you to look over some research that a former intern carried out for the company.

 

The intern was interested in factors causing the variability in profits across the restaurant’s branches. They thought that perhaps the capabilities of the branch manager (measured by their performance rating) might explain some of the differences.

 

They wrote the following research question:

To what extent does managerial capability impact branch profit?

 

They analysed secondary data from the organisation on the following three variables:

• NUM_EM: Number of branch employees
• PERF: 2019 performance rating of branch manager
• PROFIT: 2019 branch profit

 

These data were collected from all 52 branches.

 

They used correlations to analyse the data, and wrote up their findings as follows:

 

 

Answer Questions 1 – 5 about this scenario.

 

 

 

Scenario 2: Money Ltd

You are a summer research intern for a research consultancy. Your team has been working on a project for a large global financial services organisation called ‘Money Ltd’. Money Ltd is headquartered in London but has offices in many global financial centres (e.g. New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, Shanghai, Dubai). Money Ltd are interested in increasing employee engagement across the organisation.

 

Over the last year, your manager, Kayo, designed an intervention to improve employee engagement at Money Ltd. There were multiple parts to this intervention, including: creating an ‘Employee Voice’ forum for anonymous suggestions from employees to the organisation; introducing optional well-being initiatives in the workplace (e.g. massage therapist, weekly yoga class, team socialisation activities); and training managers in creating a positive and supportive culture in their teams. The intervention was implemented in all the Money Ltd branches across Europe.

 

Kayo created an online survey, which was administered to all Money Ltd London employees before (T1) and after (T2) the implementation – a one-year time difference. There are 1,500 Money Ltd employees working in the London office. 1,200 responded to the survey at T1, and 152 of that group responded again to the survey at T2.

 

The survey was designed to answer the following research question:

How effective was the employee engagement intervention in increasing the levels of engagement of Money Ltd employees?

 

The variables measured in this survey are listed below:

1. PNO This is an anonymous identification number for each respondent
2. GENDER What is your gender? (Male, coded as 1/Female, coded as 2)
3. WLB Measure of work-life balance using the single item designed by Kayo: ‘Overall, I believe that my work and non-work life are balanced’, using a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
4. ENGAGEMENT Measure of employee engagement using the ISA Engagement scale[1], which is a multi-item scale, and was developed based on existing theory and literature. Items in this scale were measured using a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). This variable is a composite measure of the item average for each person.

Variables 2 and 3 were measured at T1 only, whereas variable 4 was measured at both T1 and T2.

 

Kayo has given you access to the research dataset (labelled ‘5QQMN245 Exam MoneyLtd.xlsx’). This contains the cleaned and final data for the 152 employees who completed the survey at T2.

 

Answer Questions 6 – 7 about this scenario.

 

Answer ALL the questions below.

 

 

Answer questions 1 – 5 about Scenario 1.

 

Q1. The intern has forgotten to report their null hypotheses. Write three different null hypotheses for their research project.

[6 marks]

 

Q2. The intern has also forgotten to report important information about each correlation – the direction, size and significance level. Record these in the table below.

 

Correlation	Direction	Size	Significance level
PERF with PROFIT
NUM_EM with PROFIT
NUM_EM with PERF

 

[9 marks]

 

Q3. The correlation between number of employees and manager performance has a significance of p = 0.020. Explain what this p-value means in the context of this research.

[10 marks]

 

Q4. Do you agree with the intern’s statement that ‘We can therefore say that manager performance causes branch profit’? Explain your answer.

[10 marks]

 

Q5. List three things that you would change about the design of this research project, in order to answer the research question more effectively. Explain your choices.

[10 marks]

 

 

Answer questions 6 – 7 about Scenario 2.

 

Q6. Answer Kayo’s research question by carrying out the relevant statistical analysis (using Excel) and fully report your findings.

[25 marks]

 

Q7. Evaluate the strengths and limitations of the research that Kayo has carried out.

[30 marks]

 

 

 

[1] Soane, E., Truss, C., Alfes, K., Shantz, A., Rees, C. & Gatenby, M. (2012) Development and application of a new measure of employee engagement: the ISA Engagement Scale, Human Resource Development International, 15:5, 529-547, DOI: 10.1080/13678868.2012.726542