RES 728 Week 4 Individual Interviews Example

Hearing Owners at Every Level: Planning Individual Interviews Across Three Employee-Owned Firms

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

RES/728: Qualitative Case Study

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The learner, the companies, the practice exchange and the planned study are composites written for a model paper.

Week 3's protocol listed the investigator's questions for each employee-owned firm in the composite Cincinnati HR vice president's study. Individual interviews will supply much of the evidence for those questions. This paper plans whom to interview, what to ask and how to handle the social realities of interviewing employees about their own company.

Who Will Be Interviewed

In each firm, about 15 people:

Two senior leaders, usually the CEO and the CFO or head of HR, who can describe practices and intentions.

The ESOP trustee or plan administrator, who can explain how the plan has been communicated.

Four employees from each embedded group: front-line, such as warehouse staff, machinists or field technicians; professional, such as engineers or account managers; and first-line managers.

Employees will be chosen from volunteers, with the learner selecting to vary tenure, including people hired before and after conversion, and department. The liaison will distribute invitations but will not choose participants.

Interviews as Social Situations

Alvesson (2003) argued that research interviews in organizations are social situations in which interviewees may engage in impression management, follow cultural scripts or present the organization's preferred story, and that researchers should interpret interview talk reflexively rather than treat it as a direct report of reality. In employee-owned firms, which often celebrate their ownership culture publicly, the risk of the "company line" is high: employees may repeat slogans from ESOP education materials.

Three strategies address this. Questions ask for specific episodes rather than opinions. Follow-up asks for concrete detail: who was there, what was said, what happened next. And interviews with front-line employees take place away from supervisors, with assurance that comments will be attributed only to an employee group.

Leader Guide

Leaders describe the firm's ownership practices and intentions.

"Walk me through what happened after the decision to become employee-owned."

"What does the company share with employees about performance, and how?"

"What decisions can employees influence in their own work? Can you give an example from the past year?"

"Where has building an ownership culture worked, and where has it not?"

Employee Guide

Employees describe their experiences.

"Tell me about the last time you saw any of the company's numbers. What were they, and what did you make of them?"

"Can you think of a time you suggested a change at work? What happened?"

"When people here talk about being owners, what do they mean? What does it mean to you?"

"Has anything since you started made you feel more, or less, like an owner?"

Asking about the last time someone saw the company's numbers gets a story; asking whether they feel informed gets a slogan.

Trustee Guide

The trustee or administrator explains how the plan works and how it has been explained: "How do employees learn about their accounts?" "What questions do employees ask most often?" The trustee will not discuss any individual's account.

Responsive Follow-Up

Rubin and Rubin (2012) describe responsive interviewing as a flexible approach in which the interviewer builds a relationship with the interviewee, listens closely and adapts follow-up questions to what is said, using main questions, probes and follow-ups to reach depth and detail. The guides list main questions; probes ask for examples and clarification; follow-ups pursue themes the interviewee raises, such as a story about a shared bonus or a frustrating committee.

Keeping Employees' Language Central

Gioia et al. (2013) described a method for inductive organizational research that gives voice to informants by recording first-order concepts in their own terms before building researcher-centered themes and dimensions. The learner will note employees' phrases, such as "we all see the board," "it's just a retirement thing" or "they ask but they don't listen," and keep them as codes in early analysis, so the eventual themes rest on how employees describe ownership rather than on ESOP vocabulary.

Linking Questions to the Protocol

Each guide question is tagged with the protocol question it serves. For example, the employee question about the last time they saw the numbers serves the protocol question on how employees in each group understand company performance and supplies evidence for P1 and P3. A table in the protocol shows these links.

The Learner's Reputation

Many leaders in the regional ESOP network know the learner. Interviewees may assume she judges their firm against her own or will share comments with peers. She will introduce herself as a doctoral researcher, disclose her role at another ESOP firm in the consent conversation, state that she will not share any firm's information with others in the network and avoid comparisons with her own firm.

Testing the Guides

During the pilot visit to the printing company described in Week 3, the learner tested the employee guide with two press operators and a customer service representative. The question "When people here talk about being owners, what do they mean?" drew polished answers echoing the company's posters. The question about the last time they saw the numbers drew a press operator's detailed story of a monthly meeting where a slide on spoilage costs led her crew to change how they set up jobs. That contrast confirmed the episode-based approach. One question, "What is your role in decisions?", sounded like a test and produced short answers; it became "Can you think of a time you suggested a change at work?"

When Accounts Conflict

Leaders and employees may describe the same practice differently: a CEO may say monthly meetings share full financials, while machinists recall a single slide on safety. Such differences are not errors to resolve but evidence about how practices reach different groups. The protocol records both accounts, and observation and documents in later weeks will help explain the gap.

Logistics

Interviews last 45 to 75 minutes, shorter for front-line employees during shift overlaps. All are recorded with consent and transcribed. Employees take part on paid time, agreed with each CEO. A brief summary sheet after each interview records setting, mood and notable moments.

Protecting Employees

Consent forms will state that transcripts are seen only by the learner and a transcription service bound by confidentiality, that quotations will be labeled only by employee group and that no firm will receive notes from individual interviews. If an employee describes a problem with a named manager, the report will describe the situation without the name or role.

Consistency Across Firms

Core questions remain identical at all three firms so cases can be compared. Follow-up varies with what each interviewee raises. After the first firm, the learner will review whether any core question failed and, if so, revise it for all firms and record the change.

Conclusion

About 45 interviews across three firms, with role-specific guides tied to the protocol, questions that seek episodes rather than slogans, responsive follow-up and attention to employees' own terms, will produce comparable evidence about ownership culture at every level. Disclosure and neutral framing address the learner's place in the ESOP network. Week 5 will design focus groups.

References

Alvesson, M. (2003). Beyond neopositivists, romantics, and localists: A reflexive approach to interviews in organizational research. Academy of Management Review, 28(1), 13-33. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2003.8925191

Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., & Hamilton, A. L. (2013). Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on the Gioia methodology. Organizational Research Methods, 16(1), 15-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428112452151

Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (3rd ed.). Sage.