Describe a situation related to business or management where

Describe a situation related to business or management where action research may be appropriate. What would you do to research the issue?

Solution

There are few instances where action research may be appropriate in Business. Consider a scenario in small size geographically dispersed organisation where 20% of the costs are not employee related, nor business costs. Management has initiated task to reduce such costs.

In this case, action reasearch would be appropriate as it will tell the members/employees how and why their action can change or improve the workings of the system. The research team tried to look into each cost over period of time and identified focus area to be concentrated. They identfied that employees were traveling lot for meetings. These meeting were internal and hence directly do not impact the business.

The next action was to discuss and clarify the theories and hypothesis which needs to be tested first. They designed the action oriented research questions and circulate it among the employees who travel frequently. The responses were collected and then analysis is done on it. We need to validate the data by triangulation method before analysis.

Analysis is done by understanding the story of this data. We need to answer the question why did this data played in this way? In this case, people may have to travel for meetings because there is no technological support to have virtual meetings. Decision making process is also slow in the teams, hence employees have to travel frequently for same agenda. Some people considered the meeting trips as fun trip or relaxation trip.

The researchers found that this focus area was 10% of total costs. They decide to publish the results with actions needed to take by employees that will improve the working of the system. Saved costs can be reinvested in employees if needed. The employees need to understand the actions they need to undertake to bring the change in the system.