The use of vignettes to overcome ethical and practical challenges in researching sensitive organisational issues

The use of vignettes to overcome ethical and practical challenges in researching sensitive organisational issues….

The main proposed study in my research involves an experimental design. This experimental approach was chosen based on expert advice and feedback from the University of Rochester which is the birthplace and hub of SDT research. My research angle is so unique and under-researched that an experimental design, based in a laboratory setting is an appropriate place to start to build up a research frame and body of knowledge. Once the findings can be established in an experimental setting it sets the ground for continued research in the field.

Aim: Using vignettes to vary need support, use of rewards, and other factors as independent variables, and assess need satisfaction, autonomous self-regulation, and work-related outcomes.

Design and measures: Subjects will be randomly allocated to different vignette conditions (i.e. need support/no need support; use of rewards/no use of rewards). Existing validated measures of autonomous self-regulation (autonomous motivation) being the ASR scale (Autononous Self-Regulation Scale) and need satisfaction being the BPNS (Basic Psychological Needs Scale; BPNS) will be used.

It was decided to use vignettes an approach to the administration of my study. This approach is used as a way to understand how people draw upon information to make choices. Vignettes are a technique made available to social and behavioural researchers to understand the basis for complex judgements (Kanninen, 2007; Rossi & Anderson, 1982). Caro (2012) described vignette use in surveys, as a hypothetical situation presented to participants to obtain their opinion and perception about anticipated behaviour. The main premise in using vignettes is that they provide insights into behaviour in real choice situations. Vignettes are often used when it is not practical or feasible to study actual behaviour.

The choice to use vignette based situations as a tool for assessing the independent variables (need support/use of rewards/other work related factors) was deliberate. The main reasons for this approach to administer experimental and control conditions are:

1.Offshoring presents a context that creates ethical challenges and makes it difficult in terms of practicality and feasibility to access organisations and participants in the midst of offshoring and study actual behaviour. Post offshoring, the workforce becomes dispersed and it becomes difficult to assemble participants with lived experiences of offshoring.

2. An advantage of using this approach is that the participant pool opens up and participants in the experimental study do not have to have had lived experiences of offshoring. The sampling method that would be adopted would be random sampling.

3. It was noted that while attending the 5th Conference for Self Determination theory in June 2013, a noticeable trend was the use of vignette methodology in emerging SDT research (Schaeke,K and Gagne, 2013). This offers some basis towards the opinion that the use of vignettes is becoming more widespread and validated.

The use of vignettes places decision makers in controlled experiments that yield hypothetical choices rather than actual choices in a real situation in the field (Louviere et al, 2000). The experimental stage of my research requires this type of control, to establish a sound experimental foundation in a new context that uses defensible principles that can be further researched in the field of work and specifically offshoring. Given the known ethical, practical and feasible constraints of access to participants with lived experiences of offshoring, the use of vignettes is a sound approach. It also meets the stringent framework of defensible academic experimental research.

Newtons First Law of Motion

“An object in motion will stay in motion, and an object at rest will stay at rest, unless acted on by an outside force”

This law has been applied to traditional theories of motivation to explain human behaviour. The “outside force” is a reward or punishment – “rewarding an activity will get you more of it and punishing an activity will get you less of it”.

What about if people do an activity purely for the enjoyment, challenge and fun of it? This is called intrinsic motivation and is an internally driven force. Traditional theories of motivation don’t take this into account.

The ball in the picture (rewards and punishment) certainly gets things moving and can stop things from going further. But – does the ball do any long term damage to the poor little stick man? Compelling and consistent research has found that that if a reward is expected contingent and tangible it can undermine intrinsic motivation for an interesting activity, stifle creativity and foster short term thinking , promote unethical behaviour , create addictions and can reduce individual performance.

Where my DBA journey began…….

Where my DBA journey began….

I have come from a background of Risk Management.  I worked as an auditor at Price Waterhouse Coopers after I graduated from uni, many, many, many years ago! I then moved to London, to travel the world for 6 months. It was after 10 years, 1 ex-husband, 1 new Essex boyfriend and 1 baby when I eventually returned to Australia with Essex boy and baby in tow! During that time I had worked in Investment Banking in senior management positions in London, New York, Asia and travelled every continent in the world! I was one very lucky girl!

Investment Banking was not a woman’s domain especially in the 90’s but I loved the challenge. I was involved in many organisational change events such as mergers, takeovers and restructures. I was always struck that these large global financial institutions made a mess of their management of the people side of these changes and often left a wake of destruction. They spent so much time and money getting these changes to work (I’m talking millions and millions of pounds), but apparently no budget or thought went into supporting employees during times of such big changes. How short-sighted.  Who after all instigates change and makes it work? It’s  the people in an organisation.

Fast forward 13 years and it is 2007. I now have 3 small children, work as a sessional lecturer at a number of universities in Sydney and provide consulting services to global financial institutions. One of my first clients was a large global custody business. They had made a global strategic decision to offshore many of their processes to the cheaper cost centre of Malaysia. Thousands of people were to lose their jobs as a result. I was engaged as a Risk Management expert in Australia, responsible for ensuring that all risks with the offshoring had been identified, documented, gaps highlighted and then appropriate strategies put in place to mitigate the risks. This involved hundreds of employees in Australia working harder and longer hours than ever….with the knowledge that most of them would lose their job at the end. This process was phased and went on for over 2 years. As I happily mitigated risks asking employees to do more and more work on top of their day to day ( feeling so guilty that this process was keeping me employed), I watched what happened to those around me. Morale was at an all-time low, and got lower with each phase. People were angry, resentful and unmotivated to do anything for the organisation. They watched as countless friends were made redundant – with no prospect of another job in the current economic climate. Everyone knew their time would come eventually……so much fear and ambiguity.

Organisational and management communication was appalling. Human Resources were floundering with no plan to deal with the people fall out or provide support and counselling to employees made redundant, about to be made redundant or told they would be required to stay in the post offshoring world without their many friends and colleagues who were now struggling to support their families. Not surprisingly, much of the work required by the organisation to get the offshoring implemented successfully was done very poorly or not at all. To this day the organisation is still cleaning up the mess and paying the price.

My Essex boy (who became my husband) had been working in a very large financial institution for 20 years – which is almost unheard of these days. His company moved him from London to Sydney to head up a large division. About a year after he started in Sydney he was told that a strategic decision had been taken to offshore many of the processes in Australia to the cheaper cost centre of India. Déjà vu!! He was told he would be responsible for this offshoring process and would then manage the post offshoring team responsible for oversight of India (this was a reward they dangled in front of him). He worked 15 hour days for the next 18months to make sure that the organisation was successful in its mission. Then the (I now realise) inevitable day arrived. I was lecturing a class and saw my husband outside the door. He looked broken and defeated. I thought someone had died – it turned out to be his self-esteem. He was out of work for almost 18 months. It’s only now (almost 5 years later) that he has told me how that affected him.

He eventually got a job with another financial institution managing an operations division. A year ago he was given the remit to offshore the more routine tasks to India (surely not Déjà vu again – but he was the expert in successful offshoring!). During the process which he  managed successfully, he was forced to make 60% of his team redundant – and then after he had done all that for the organisation he was told……..”Your job is now redundant”. Here we go again. He is lucky that he has been given a year’s contract before the redundancy takes place – but I watch helplessly as he lays awake at night wondering how he will support his family- me and our kids.

So all of this is what has brought me here to do my DBA. It will not necessarily get me a better job or bring more money to our house, but I want to make a difference. My motivation is to contribute some knowledge and understanding to the people side of offshoring. I am in the middle of my DBA and can’t believe I am going through this all again (the irony). It makes me truly believe in my research and the desperate need for it. Offshoring is an inevitable global trend which affects almost all of us in some way. I want to do my bit to ensure that employees involved in offshoring are supported in their work, motivation and well-being and this can only be beneficial for the organisations that make the decisions. This I hope will be a win-win outcome for both the individual and the organisation. My very small contribution will be important and significant.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT)

My proposed research focuses on human motivation , in the context of offshoring, thus, it is important to introduce a theoretical framework that can be used to examine work motivation in an offshoring context. SDT (Deci & Ryan, 2000) offers such a perspective and, unlike other theories of human motivation, SDT takes interest in different types (quality) of motivation rather than only in the amount (quantity) of motivation. More specifically, SDT distinguishes between autonomous and controlled motivation. Autonomous motivation refers to people’s behaviour resulting from volition and choice, self-endorsement, awareness and authenticity. Controlled motivation, in contrast refers to the “carrot and stick” approach which uses rewards, punishments and coercion to achieve desired behaviours . Deci et al (1989) describes to be self-determining to mean “to experience a sense of choice in initiating and regulating one’s actions (p580)”.  At the core of SDT are three basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Autonomy refers to the experience that one’s behaviour is volitional, self-endorsed and chosen. Competence refers to the experience of mastery in action and in interactions with the world. Relatedness refers to a sense of care, concern and connection with people around you. All three constructs have been empirically validated and shown to predict important outcomes in the work domain (Baard et al, 2004; Gagne & Deci, 2005).

 Empirical studies have consistently found that autonomous and controlled motivation is associated with different outcomes (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Studies have found that satisfaction of people’s basic psychological needs promotes autonomous motivation, which in turn yields positive outcomes for the individual . In addition, the theory has been tested in various life domains such as health, sport, education, psychotherapy and work (Gagne & Deci, 2005). It has been shown that the theory is relevant to all individuals regardless of race, culture, ethnicity or socio-economic status (Deci & Ryan,2000).

Research applying SDT to an organisational context has increased markedly over the last few years and has shown that employees perceived need support leads to need satisfaction, which in turn results in increased autonomous motivation, well-being and performance, which directly affect the bottom line of the organisation (Baard, Deci, & Ryan, 2004).

The place of contingent rewards in offshoring

My head is buzzing with ideas and my body is buzzing with caffeine (I have recently started drinking coffee after a 13 year absence post pregnancy – it makes me feel like running a marathon!).

I have just met with my doctoral supervisor to discuss the place of contingent financial rewards in an offshoring implementation (“if you do what’s required to make the offshoring successful I will pay you a bonus”).

Traditional motivation theory and indeed the way businesses actually  operate is founded on the “carrot and stick” approach. If you do something well you will be rewarded and if you don’t do what the organisation wants you will be punished. This is how organisations and indeed much of life works. 

But does it work? Studies have consistently shown (and we intuitively know) that contingent rewards are very effective in motivating people to behave a certain way and achieve desired organisational outcomes in the short term. However, even though rewards are the shortest path to achieving organisational goals there are many hidden costs. What is interesting,  is that studies conducted as early as the 1960’s all the way to present time have shown that contingent rewards undermine people’s intrinsic motivation (inherent enjoyment of doing a task), stifle creativity and often reduce individual and thus organisational performance. The longer term effects of rewards have been shown to be detrimental to the organisation and the individual. So why the big gap between what science knows and what organisations still do?

I am pondering the place of contingent rewards in an offshoring context. During an offshoring implementation many people are knowingly working towards putting themselves out of a job. Surely in this situation there is very little intrinsic motivation or creativity to be undermined especially for soon to be laid off workers? At least if there is a reward dangled in front of them to get to the finishing line, when they get there at least they have something. Will the reward motivate them into action even though the end result will be unemployment? The use of rewards for “survivors” (those employees that remain with the organisation post offshoring) will perhaps be where the long term detrimental effect will be.

An additional layer of complication is added when you look at the complexity of tasks involved with offshoring. The literature on the effectiveness of rewards says that they work best and have the least harmful effect when they are used for routine “algorithmic” tasks that are well defined which require little lateral thinking, flexibility and creativity. The literature supports that the hidden and harmful costs of rewards are greatest when used with heuristic tasks ie those that require lateral thinking, creative solutions and a flexible approach.

So perhaps the place of rewards in offshoring depends whether offshoring is algorithmic or heuristic. I think that it is both. The tasks that are being offshored are routine and well defined by their nature (they can be done by almost anyone in any part of the world). The actual process of offshoring is heuristic because it requires those implementing it to be able to respond to the many issues that will arise in a flexible, creative and appropriate manner. Offshoring presents various challenges and requires a heuristic approach to be able to overcome them.

So that brings me back to my unanswered question- what is the place of rewards in offshoring?

The first presentation of my research to my peers

In June this year, I was fortunate enough to attend the 5th International Conference of Self-Determination Theory, in Rochester, New York. I presented my research in a poster and received much positive and enthusiastic feedback. It is good to know that my peers and experts in my field feel that my proposed research is worthwhile and necessary. Many have said they are waiting for the results of my research!

Here’s the poster I presented:

FinalPoster_Melanie Ahmad

 

My proposed research and it’s aims and significance

Offshoring is generally associated with long periods of employment uncertainty and often requires onshore employees to engage in tasks that may ultimately contribute to their own job loss. In the current economic environment there’s little demand for those skills in the same location, so prospects for people are much worse. As such, it can be a highly demotivating and demoralising experience and the challenge of preserving employee work motivation represents a critical factor in successfully moving operations offshore.

Offshoring is associated with a variety of negative psychosocial outcomes (e.g. low self-esteem, anger, anxiety) that extend beyond the employees and have an adverse impact on family members, communities, local economies, etc. ( To understand how some of these negative outcomes may be mitigated, self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000) will be used to build a better understanding of the factors that affect employee work motivation during offshoring. Based on research in other life domains, I expect that provision of support for satisfaction of basic psychological needs (viz., autonomy, competence, and relatedness) will relate positively to healthy (i.e., autonomous) employee motivation in an offshoring context.

Given the paucity of empirical research that currently exists on offshoring, insights from the proposed research have the potential to guide organisations on how to manage the offshoring process such that the dual concerns of employee motivation and wellbeing as well as organisational performance are balanced

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Can an organisation recover from a post-offshoring nightmare?

I thought really hard about the problems faced by my friend and his organisation. It is such a typical post-offshoring situation where “survivor syndrome” is rife and the offshored functions have little control processes built in and as such are in a mess. The client is affected by the errors and the drop in service quality and that spells TROUBLE for the organisation. The damage has already been done to the employees, organisation and the client.
I don’t believe that there is any effective and realistic way back from this situation now that it has happened. Sure I can counsel my friend in how to support his remaining team and to foster their engagement and motivation. My background in risk management could assist in implementing oversight controls to manage the India functions. But….the real damage has already been done to the existing and laid off employees, the organisation and the client’s perception – and is hard to recover from. I discussed this with my DBA supervisor and he agreed.
This is why my research is so important to organisations considering offshoring. They need to get the change management process right from the very beginning – to avoid ending up in such a mess. In coming posts I will talk about my research and the perspective I will take using Self-Determination Theory to support work motivation and employee well-being in an offshoring context. Stay tuned…

A typical post-offshoring scenario

A friend of mine came to me this week for some advice. He figured that since I had been researching and reading about the effects of offshoring on people for the last 2 years, I would be able to help him. He is a manager in a global financial institution and has offshored most of his team’s functions to India in the past year. He is now responsible for managing the team of ‘survivors’ and the oversight of the functions sent to India.

Things are in a bad way for his organisation. Morale is at an all-time low and all departments are under-resourced. People are working harder than ever and apparently are disgruntled with the organisation for the mess it is in, as well as its attitude to dealing with the current challenge as well as the way it handled the whole offshoring process from the beginning. The people in India are struggling- they can do the basic vanilla day-day functions, but if anything is out of the ordinary or a problem arises that is not part of the procedure manual then they can’t handle it. To make matters worse the Operations Team in India was never given written procedures to carry out the control processes for the operations function they have taken over, so errors are the highest in the history of the organisation. The team in Australia that used to run the processes comprised of 7 members, 3 of which were made redundant after the offshoring. The same team in India has now grown to 12 people to handle a lesser workload and Indian management is still screaming for more resources. Indian management and employees refuse to accept any responsibility or even try to resolve the ever growing list of problems. They are all thrown back to my friend to “fix” with no additional budget or headcount. His team are already stretched after being cut to barebones after offshoring and their resentment about having to mop up the mess left by India is growing to breaking point. They have no motivation to get through their own work, let alone tackle the list of problems and errors. Australian management keep the pressure tactics on and keep pushing for more from these people, without providing emotional or financial support.

My friend can’t stand the pressure and doesn’t know how to motivate his team and break the horrendous cycle. He’s asked for my advice…..

Motivation

What factors can get us to care in a situation that is likely to result in negative outcomes?