Things to avoid when identifying a research problem

Avoid problems that cannot be well defined and which have no obvious boundaries. For example; Investigating the problem of why so many graduate employees leave a company within six-months has a clear focus. But researching the problem of employees retention across a whole business area has less obvious limits and will make the whole research process more complex. Researching more abstract concepts such as culture, commitment, motivation in isolation can be problematic because they are very often vague and hard to contain within the research process. For example, simply looking at a question of commitment amongst a specific department employees might be very hard to pin down as it could be caused by such a wide range of variables, and these variables could all be understood differently. A problem that has more focus includes a more tangible factor that one can explore and which might link to commitment, for example, what is likely impact of changing at work arrival times on employees of a specific department? Avoid the temptation to link something to ‘performance’. For example, does the promotion system have impact on individual performance? Any organisation wants to be able to find ways to get employees to perform better, but performance is another abstract term that can be affected by so many things that it is hard to measure accurately. If one puts these issues aside, one should be left with a core problem that is recognisable and will allow one to strip away all of the interference that is inevitable in any organisation. #Leadership #Change #OrganizationsResearch #ManagementResearch #sustainabledevelopment