Given the scenarios below; please indicate whether the research type will be exploratory, descriptive or causal with reasons.
Scenario 1: The manager of a multinational corporation is curious to know if the work ethic values of employees working in its subsidiary in Pennathur City are different from those of Americans. There is very little information about Pennathur (except that it is a small city in southern India), and since there is considerable controversy about what work ethic values mean to people in other cultures, the manager’s curiosity can be satisfied only by an exploratory study, interviewing the employees in organizations in Pennathur. Religion, political, economic, and social conditions, upbringing, cultural values, and so on play a major role in how people view their work in different parts of the world.
Scenario 2: A bank manager wants to have a profile of the individuals who have loan payments outstanding for six months and more. The profile will include details of their average age, earnings, nature of occupation, fulltime/ part‐time employment status, and the like. This might help him to elicit further information or decide right away on the types of individuals who should be made ineligible for loans in the future. A CEO may be interested in having a description of how companies in her industry have incorporated corporate social responsibility into the business strategy of the organization. Such information might allow comparison later of the performance levels of specific types of companies.
Scenario 3: A marketing manager wants to know if the sales of the company will increase if he increases the advertising budget. Here, the manager would like to know the nature of the relationship that may be established between advertising and sales by testing the hypothesis: “If advertising is increased, then sales will also go up.”
Scenario 4: A prevalent theory is that the diversity of the workforce increases organizational effectiveness. A manager wants to know if this relationship holds for her organization.
Scenario 5: A manager wants to test the hypothesis that stress experienced in the job negatively affects the job satisfaction of employees.
Scenario 6: A researcher is interested in testing the hypothesis that women are more motivated for their jobs than men.