RES 728 Week 7 Within-Case and Cross-Case Analysis Example

One Firm at a Time, Then All Three: Analyzing Ownership Culture Within and Across Cases

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

RES/728: Qualitative Case Study

Week 7 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

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

The composite Cincinnati HR vice president's protocol, interviews, focus groups, documents and observation produce a large body of evidence for each of three employee-owned firms. This paper shows how the analysis proceeds, using evidence from first-round site visits.

Stage One: Within-Case Analysis

Each firm is analyzed separately and written up as a case report following the protocol's outline: background first, then what each firm shares of wealth, information and control, then how each employee group experiences it and how practices and experiences connect.

A Timeline for Each Firm

Langley (1999) described strategies for theorizing from process data, including visual mapping and temporal bracketing, dividing a process into periods to see how actions in one period shape the next. Each firm's timeline marks events since conversion: plan communications, the start or end of meetings and committees, leadership changes and turning points described by employees.

At Firm A, the timeline shows two periods. In the first two years after conversion, the firm shared annual account statements and little else; interviewees describe the ESOP then as "a retirement thing." In the third year, after a new CFO arrived, the firm began monthly open-book meetings and trained supervisors to explain the numbers to their teams, and committees on safety and purchasing followed. Employees date their sense of ownership to that period.

Firm A: Within-Case Findings

Information is shared widely and taught: warehouse staff explain gross margin and freight costs in their own words, and observation found employees questioning a slide on damaged goods. Influence is real: a purchasing committee of warehouse staff chose new pallet jacks. Pattern matching supports P1 and P2. All three employee groups describe ownership similarly, so P3's predicted differences are weak here.

Firm B: Within-Case Findings

As Week 6 showed, Firm B shares financial slides monthly, but machinists do not engage with them, and no one explains them on the floor. Employees value their account balances and describe the ESOP as a good retirement plan. A suggestion program exists, but machinists recall few responses. Pattern matching fits the absence predicted by P1 and P2: wealth is shared without information or influence that employees can use.

Firm C: Within-Case Findings

Engineers attend project financial reviews, set budgets for their projects and describe themselves as owners. Field technicians receive the same company-wide meeting as engineers but describe it as "office talk," and their supervisors rarely discuss numbers. P3 fits: the group with less access to usable information and control reports weaker ownership.

In all three firms, the numbers were on the slides; what differed was whether anyone helped employees connect them to their own work.

Stage Two: Cross-Case Analysis

Miles et al. (2014) recommend case-ordered and variable-by-case matrices to compare cases systematically. The cross-case matrix lists the three firms, with Firm C split into engineers and technicians, as rows and columns for wealth shared, information shared, information interpreted for employees, influence in daily work and reported ownership feeling.

The matrix shows that wealth sharing is similar everywhere and does not distinguish strong from weak ownership. Information shared is also similar: all firms hold monthly meetings. The column that tracks ownership feeling is information interpreted: present at Firm A, absent at Firm B, present for engineers but absent for technicians at Firm C.

An Emergent Pattern

No proposition predicted the role of interpretation. P1 said sharing information and teaching employees would matter; the evidence shows the teaching happens mainly through supervisors who translate numbers into terms of the work, such as freight cost per load or rework hours per job. Where supervisors play that role, employees describe ownership; where they do not, the same slides fall flat. This emergent pattern refines P1 into a more specific proposition about translators.

Checking the Pattern in Each Source

Before accepting the translator pattern, the learner checked whether it rested on one kind of evidence. At Firm A, it appears in employee interviews, in the focus group's ranking, which placed supervisor huddles above the monthly meeting, in supervisor training materials and in observation of a huddle where a supervisor related freight costs to a missed delivery. At Firm C, technicians' interviews and their focus group both describe supervisors who "don't talk numbers," and the engineers' project reviews, observed directly, show the opposite. Because the pattern holds across sources at more than one firm, it is not an artifact of interview talk alone.

Explanation Building

Pattern matching tests propositions; explanation building constructs an account of how outcomes came about. The learner drafted a provisional explanation from Firm A, that ownership grew after supervisors began translating numbers, and then examined Firm C to see whether it fit both groups, revising it where needed. Firm B then served as a test: the explanation predicts weak ownership where no one translates, which is what the evidence shows. The explanation will be revised again after second visits.

Rival Explanations

Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007) advised that theory building from multiple cases should address rival explanations and that the logic connecting evidence to theory should be explicit, often supported by tables, so that readers can judge the claims. Four rivals are considered.

Firm size: Firm A is mid-sized, but Firm C, the largest, shows both strong and weak ownership within one firm, so size alone does not explain the pattern.

Industry: distribution, machining and engineering differ, but within Firm C one industry produces both patterns.

Time since conversion: all three converted within three years of one another.

Leadership: Firm A's change followed a new CFO, which could suggest leadership as the cause. But the CFO's key action was training supervisors to explain numbers, which supports the translator explanation rather than competing with it.

Implications for Practice

For leaders of employee-owned firms, the finding is practical. Monthly meetings and annual statements are not enough. Training supervisors to explain what the numbers mean for their teams' work, and giving them time to do it, may matter more than additional company-wide communication.

What the Cases Say to Theory

Psychological ownership theory holds that intimate knowledge of a target builds ownership feelings. The cases suggest that knowledge must be usable, interpreted in terms of one's own work, and that supervisors are a main route by which that happens. This is an analytic generalization: a refinement to theory that other researchers can test in other firms, not a claim about all employee-owned companies.

Limits of the Analysis

The evidence comes from first-round visits; second visits may change the picture. Three cases cannot rule out every rival. And the learner's ESOP background may make her alert to supervisor roles she has seen at her own firm; the second reader's independent coding and memos address that risk.

Conclusion

Within-case analysis with timelines and pattern matching, followed by a cross-case matrix and tests of rival explanations, showed that wealth and information alone did not build ownership culture. Interpretation by supervisors did. Week 8 assembles the case study proposal.

References

Eisenhardt, K. M., & Graebner, M. E. (2007). Theory building from cases: Opportunities and challenges. Academy of Management Journal, 50(1), 25-32. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.24160888

Langley, A. (1999). Strategies for theorizing from process data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 691-710. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1999.2553248

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage.