A Mystery Shopping an Adequate Instrument for Measuring Customer's Satisfaction - Essay Example

Research proposal of project: Is Mystery shopping an adequate instrument for measuring s satisfaction Introduction Mystery shopping can be defined as "A research technique allowing businesses to evaluate the quality of the service they and their competitors provide to customers. It involves trained professional researchers posing as real customers, assessing the nature and quality of the service they receive and reporting this in aggregate form to the client" ( www.aqr.org.uk ). Business organizations have a belief that providing a good customer service is a key factor to succeed in a highly competitive environment. Therefore managers identified the effective and continuous customer service delivery will lead to satisfaction of the customer in the long run. However to evaluate the service from a customer point of view is the critical factor that most organizations are faced with. There are different types of research methods and techniques to evaluate customer service and mystery shopping and it can be regarded as the significant tool used by modern businesses to measure the quality of the service or to collect particular information about product or service. It is a highly detailed shopping program and it will help managers to make sure that the particular brand experience is protected or not. Therefore managers have identified that effective service delivery will direct particular organization on profitable growth and lead to sustainable gains in the market. Moment of truth is a main element in a customer delivery process and managers will concentrate in depth of different moment of truth that get only one chance to make a good first impression about a particular product or a service. There are important features in service delivery process - the roles of product; place; process and physical atmosphere, and then there each element of the service delivery process is recognized as a significant factor in customer service experience. Further it evaluates whether the brand promise is delivered along with meeting customer expectations. Thus mystery shopping considered as a main management tool to measure the customer perspective and performance of the current products and service which is mainly affecting to customer loyalty and the satisfaction (Schmidt, 2007). When the marketing mix - price, product, place, promotion and by extension people, process and physical evidence - is considered against the current level of market concentration ratios there are a lot of opportunities in the market. For instance the existing brand loyalties might curtail the degree of freedom enjoyed by each seller. In such situations mystery marketing efforts don't help much. This development has a very significant impact on the organization's marketing goals too. 1.1. Purpose of the study or research aims To establish correlations and regressions, if any, among and between the above mentioned variables such as the mystery shopping programs and customer satisfaction as determined by organizational environment: cleanliness, speed of service, store appearance, grooming, friendly environment and greeting and so on . To identify and emphasize the existence, if any, of such mystery shopping programs related initiatives and policies and customer satisfaction, thus focusing attention on an otherwise often neglected aspect of customer satisfaction related compulsions. To delineate the existing correlations between mystery shopping programs and customer satisfaction against the backdrop of an ever growing complexity and diversity in theoretical and conceptual spheres of the modern business environment. To arrive at particular as against broader conclusions on the strategic importance of mystery shopping programs in the organization's own operational environment within the defined limits. 1.1. Hypothesis or thesis statement The hypothesis or thesis statement of this paper rests on the testing of the primacy and the immediacy of a broader cross section of theoretical and conceptual perspectives concerning the impact of mystery shopping programs on the customer satisfaction, as determined by such factors as cleanliness, speed of service, store appearance, grooming, friendly environment and greeting and so on. Organization's constant exposure to competition related issues along with the defined or undefined organizational outcomes have both a priori and a posteriori relevance to the analysis. Thus, the convergence/divergence framework of reference within organization's mystery shopping programs towards customer satisfaction would be investigated in depth here. 1.2. Research problems or questions What's the nature and extent of the impact of mystery shopping on the primarily and immediately relevant aspects such as cleanliness, speed of service, store appearance, grooming, friendly environment and greeting in general and so on towards customer satisfaction (Andrews, 2003) How does customer satisfaction acquire, if any, such a significant dimensions of mystery shopping programs in the qualitative research to the total or near total exclusion of other variables such as strategic competitor and market orientation policies and their strategic relevance to organizational outcomes and/or goals How mystery shopping programs have been adopted at the organizations and their direct and indirect impact on customer satisfaction as determined by cleanliness, speed of service, store appearance, grooming, friendly environment, greeting and so on 2. Justification for the project There are many important aspects associated with this dissertation and it would cover a series of theoretical and conceptual parameters ranging from marketing strategy of the firm to the customers satisfaction related theories. It would also focus on the positive correlations between mystery shopping research methodology and sales volume and profit growth trends. This researcher would focus attention on the widely used current model building efforts in which theoretical and conceptual convergence/divergence contingency frameworks are being tested against the evolving backdrop of mystery shopping so that its adequacy/inadequacy can be tested in conformance with learning outcomes. This study would also focus on the methodology of approach to a certain extent so that learning outcomes would be more appropriately dealt with in the light of current developments in the sphere of mystery shopping research. The literature review would also be broader enough to cover such new developments as cultural and technological overlaps in the market context. This aspect of the research effort would identify both theoretical and methodological underpinnings related to the conceptual paradigms. Mystery shopping & its impact Mystery shopping especially considered about evaluate the performance of service process and customer satisfaction focused on evaluating the outcomes of the service delivery and it is always relative terms against the standards of the service and competitor activities. Thus customer service is a service delivery process that consists of three stages - input (human and other resources); process (delivery of the product or service); and output (satisfied customer). It is necessary to understand and measure the factors affecting to three stages by the mystery shoppers to identify the customer expectations from a particular product or service and it will laid a foundation for design and implement a effective service delivery process with the aim of customer satisfaction (Wilson, 1998). Basically mystery shopping is research technique that providing an opportunity to recognize especially about their expectations, perceptions and priorities towards a particular product or service. Further it ensures that functions are implementing as intended by the management to ensure the final outcome that the satisfied customer. As such mystery shopping as a powerful tool it made significant contributions to survival of the organization with continually leading and changing the strategies. Therefore there can be draw some advantages of mystery shopping - it provides the company to understand exactly what customer delight-driving behaviors; align company-wide focus on improving the customers' experiences and retention, resulting in higher sales through an increased number of customer visits; discovering whether the customers are receiving consistently superior customer service at each level of the delivery process and measure the service performance; identifying staff training and development while making aware about importance of serving customers and introducing incentive-based reward system for employees; improving suggestive selling with providing more information about a product or service and it will result to increase the volume of basket value per customer; and ensure the legal requirements to avoid legal issues and to maintain a superior product/service quality and brand image among the customers. Despite the above advantages there can be some disadvantages too - legal issues regarding licensing requirements for investigators; consumer scams; tax issues regarding employment of shoppers; continuous maintaining the quality and integrity of the shopper; faster delivery of reports without considering the quality of data; educating consumers, clients about the reality of mystery shopping programs; and cost of mystery shopping programs so on. Mystery shopping is used not only for objective measurements but also it provides insight about the service delivery i.e. subjective information. In-depth understanding of the service delivery will leads to objective measurements with subjective data (Mariampolski, 2001). For instance objective measurements will provide data to the management that required service standards are being met within the stipulated time period and subjective information will provide more insight as to how that standard is met by satisfying the customer or not. Most of the organizations such as retail shops, restaurants, fast food chains, banks and healthcare service providers tend to get the feedback about the customer services. Gathering 'soft' data related to the customer satisfaction is much more desirable under such circumstances. Current Trends of Mystery Shopping Mystery shopping as defined above would be more suitable under a set of given circumstances where market strategy of the firm would be aligned with the research goals. A conceptual framework for a uniquely propositioned marketing strategy depends on the viability and logicality of these outcomes. Assuming that a good marketing plan once put in place would take care of the 7 Ps above, there is very little else to accomplish in order to maintain a good cash flow and ensure positive and constant returns over the life cycle of each product - launch, growth, maturity and declinePhilip Kotler (Author) .> Visit Amazon's Philip Kotler PageFind all the books, read about the author, and moreSee search results for this author Are you an author Learn about Author Central Price of the product is essentially a reference to the larger context of the company's pricing strategy and especially in the current competitive environment there is very little liberty if any available to the firm to adopt a pricing policy of its choice. Product characteristics include those tangible and intangible benefits for the customer. In other words the seventh P "Physical evidence" of the product carries much weight as in sensory marketing. Place again imposes some limitations on the firm's ability to exploit broader marketing principles. Market segmentation strategy is exclusively intended for the creation of brand dependency associated with its geography. Along with a proper promotion policy, an ideal people-oriented marketing strategy ought to be put in place. Customer-centric product promotion is nothing new in the industry though product promotion campaigns are less likely to be determined by any other factors than the strengths of the product. While the emphasis might be placed on the overall promotion strategy to attract as many potential customers as possible there won't be any strategic advantage in the long term if the company concentrates too much on its strengths only. This is a strategic shortcoming in the continual development process. While this marketing strategy has substantial scope and value in many industries for newcomers, there is very little application of it because if the manager hopes to increase sales by differentiating his products maximally, there would be similar attempts by others. In other words the current market comes closer to the perfectly competitive market structure where there are many firms selling an almost identical product. In other words the principle of minimum differentiation applies. On the other hand Porter's market segmentation strategy is identified with the firm's efforts to break the market in to different segments according to demographics and other characteristics. For example there is an increasing tendency among sellers to move in to new products segments because the number of health conscious consumers is increasing rapidly almost every day. Next innovation related strategies were first formulated in order to assess the first mover advantages. For example, markets where innovation engenders advantages for the pioneer or the first mover can be identified in business too (Iphofen, 2009). Innovation does not help always because first movers in to a locality would definitely benefit as against first movers in introducing a product. In the latter case a product may be accepted or rejected by consumers. In market research mystery shopping is a form of qualitative research that serves as a smple to determine the attitude of the sample customers towards a good or a service. For example questionnaires can be given to selected mystery shoppers (Sayre, 2001). The latter will be subject to a greater amount of examination to determine the qualitative aspect of the research effort. As such mystery shopping tool in market research enable researchers to identify and focus on some qualitative aspects of the research efforts. For instance if the researcher were interested in finding out how the average customer responds to the service delivery, he would have the mystery shoppers as a representative group concerned about the effective service so that managers can draws on conclusion on the qualitative aspect of the research with regard to the customer's attitudes towards service delivery process and further improvements. 3. Methodology This Chapter presents the research methodology utilised to analyse the research data and describes the various methods used in this study (Coghlan, & Creswell, 2009). This research paper basically consists of two data sets - primary and secondary. Primary data set consists of a survey and a questionnaire and questionnaire administered to 20 employees of two mystery shopping research companies and the survey will be carried out among 30 consumers who are basically familiar with mystery shopping. This primary research would focus on identifying those critical issues related to mystery shopping under varied circumstances such as responses of consumers in a affluent neighbourhoods where potential niche market segment exists and mass markets. While responses to the survey were recorded with much more accuracy and detail, responses to the questionnaire were sifted and collated to identify significant trends and process orientations in decision making. Secondary data was collected through an extensive research effort conducted both online and in libraries. The researcher extensively used the books written on the topic and also studied research journals, reports, graphs, articles, newspaper articles and so on. References were taken from most of the research material available in the field. Sampling This is the most important part in the planning of a sample survey, because a poorly designed questionnaire may ruin an otherwise well conducted survey. At this stage it is always advantageous to think in advance what variables and tabulations would be required for later analysis. It is advisable that a dummy tabulation plan should have been prepared in advance, if possible. This would ensure the inclusion of the information, which would be needed for the questionnaire. While preparing the questionnaire the following points were kept in mind in order to overcome the related problems. (i) As few questions as possible were included. (ii) Individual questions were framed in a simple and straight language. (iii) Questions followed a logical sequence. (iv) Highly personal questions were avoided, and if necessary for some enquiry they should be kept at the end of the questionnaire. Once the questionnaire is prepared it may be administered by three different methods. (i) Direct personal interviews. (ii) Email inquiry (iii) Telephonic conversation. In this case study the method of e-mail inquiry was used. This method was applicable because most of the respondents were educated and co-operative and they realised the significance and importance of such a sample survey. The problem of non-response due to carelessness on the part of respondents is expected to be very large, though in the current survey such negligence was minimal. Statistical surveys are often carried out to collect quantitative information about items in a population sample. While political and government related surveys of people and establishments are too common in health, social sciences and marketing, they are carried out with a particular purpose on mind, i.e. to investigate some facts or information. Many surveys are usually intended to administer questions to respondents. When a researcher administers the questions it becomes a structured interview. When the respondent himself administers the questions the survey is called a self-administered survey or a questionnaire. Data Collection Data collection is one of the central challenges in any research project. It is the process through which the opinion of people are collected and categorised. There are many methods of collecting data such as interviews; questionnaires; documents and observations provide invaluable information that is used for policy decisions, marketing strategies, and academic studies etc. Interviewing is a data collection method in which the researcher asks for information verbally from the respondents. It is the way to access people's perceptions, definitions, meaning, situation and construction of reality, where it involves discussing or questioning issues with people to collect data unlikely to be accessible using techniques such as questionnaires or observation. Interviews are suitable when in-depth information is desired and this type of information is required in order to fulfil the purpose of this research. Therefore the interviewing research method will be followed in this paper. There are three types of interview: structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews. This research utilises semi-structured type of interviews due to the fact that it helps the relatively structured interview guide, which includes ratings as well as relatively open questions (Fowler, 2009). This type of interview is the most appropriate choice to gather the necessary data since it allows the researcher to lead informal conversation based on predetermined topics. Generally speaking, an interview is social interaction between two people, with one person gathering information from the other. The interaction is what differentiates the direct methodology from indirect methodology. Structured interviews enable the interviewer to ask each respondent the same questions in the same way. A tightly controlled structured schedule of questions and format is used, very much like a questionnaire. The questions contained in the questionnaire were planned in advance. The interviewer has some discretion how these might be elaborated/explained but the aim is to standardize data as far as possible and to eliminate biases due to different wordings. The questions in a structured interview may be phrased in such a way that a limited option response is elicited. The possible answers are defined in advance so that the respondent is limited to one of the pre-coded responses and thus data analysis becomes relatively easier. Interviews must be well prepared and must have clear objectives for each interview. Interviews can be conducted after the team has established the topical areas to be covered in the interviews and after the lead investigator has reviewed with the board the objectives of the interviews and strategies for obtaining useful information. In many research situations permission requests should be received before the interview takes place. The interviewer should consider the length of the interview to cover his aims, normally between 15 minutes to an hour. Provide contact information of the interviewer and it must be determined whom to interview, in what order, what interviewing techniques to employ and what method of record to use. The following aspects should be considered when defining a strategy for the interview. The questions should make sense and be meaningful to the interviewee. The questions should be related to the interviewee experiences based on what is already known about them. The interviewer must take care to be sensitive to the needs of the interviewee. The interviewer should be aware of the flow of the interview interaction by attempting to move seamlessly between topics and questions. The interviewer needs to focus on issues and topics that are relevant to the research problem and questions. Interview questions have been compiled from the existing literature and detailed in relation to the research topic, aim and objectives, and focused on the main areas described above. The researcher noted all the replies to interviews and then transcribed the data of each interview. Although this was a time consuming process, the richness of interviews' contents warranted such an effort. Secondary data was collected through an extensive research effort conducted both online and in libraries. The researcher extensively used the books written on the topic and also studied research journals, reports, graphs, articles, newspaper articles and so on. References were taken from most of the research material available in the field. This research effort will be basically determined by primary research while secondary research would be used to support the analysis and conclusions on primary research findings. The available literature on the subject has been analyzed with specific focus on the mystery shopping program is an adequate instrument to measure customer satisfaction thereof in the context with particular emphasis on. Also there is considerable reflection on the state and relevance of current research. Future research possibilities in the field are discussed in depth to show how theoretical underpinnings evolve with time and space with specific reference to mystery shopping programs. This particular handicap has affected the researcher to a greater extent. However the research methodology segment of this paper places emphasis on the qualitative aspect of it rather than the quantitative aspect. The qualitative research aspect of this dissertation paper consists of two sections (Flick, 2009). The industry-centric qualitative research aspect of this paper focuses on the strategic decisions and choices thereof concerning the feasibility, attraction and obstacles to creating a mystery shopping survey model for customer satisfaction. The qualitative industry-centric research aspect focused on the international characteristics of the organizations in customer satisfaction and sought to investigate by the mystery shopping programs. The inevitable qualitative paradigm comes from the kind of obstacles and opportunities simultaneously available to the outsourcing. While obstacles particularly relate to infrastructural and governmental regulatory frameworks, opportunities have a qualitative impact on the decision making aspect of the organization. This particular aspect has attracted the attention of the researcher much more than anything else. While the strategic outsourcing operations in mystery shopping have a qualitative paradigm shift in favor of innovation, there is very little strategic shift towards such a qualitative change within the industry despite a sea change in attitude towards outsourcing. Firm-centric qualitative research aspect of this paper will focus on the core strategic functions of each organization to ascertain the degree of qualitative shift in internal dimensions. As critics have pointed out customer satisfaction and marketing would be the most important sphere of the industry and therefore those organizations which are able to gain a lot of customers would benefit from it. However the local companies might not be able to achieve scale economies in the absence of expansion opportunities. The analysis will be extended to include such spheres as current market strategy of the individual firm and desirable qualitative changes in its form and impact through refocusing and reprioritizing. Considerable research exists on the use of mail, telephone and in recent years the use of web surveys. An authority on mail surveys points out that telephone and mail surveys have many deficiencies; mail survey suffers from extremely low response rates; that the questionnaires might not reach all the people; that only educated people tend to return the questionnaire; that even when completed, the quality of questionnaires leaves a lot to be desired. Kanuk and Berenson (1975) conclude from their literature review of mail survey that: "Despite the large number of research studies reporting techniques designed to improve response rates, there is no strong empirical evidence favoring any techniques other than the follow-up and the use of monetary incentives". Web surveys enjoy the benefits of low cost, short fieldwork period and automation of data collection and analysis. Unprecedented expansion in the use of Internet has facilitated many research studies that have used web surveys since mid 1990s. For example, WebSM site lists thousands of publicly available online research sites. Many firms offer web survey software and increasing number of research agencies already incorporate web surveys as part of their research methodology. Critics have predicted that online self administered surveys will become the next major step in the evolution of computer-assisted survey information collection (CASIC) process. Marketing professionals claim that web surveys are rapidly replacing mail survey mode, as the popular method to collect data. However, one cannot lose sight of the fact that most web surveys are commercial in nature, many may have restricted access to public and the existing bibliography available on WebSM may indeed be a small proportion of the thousands of web surveys launched daily. Two important drawbacks with this method are: 1. Non-coverage, sampling and unit non-response 2. Low response rates compared to other survey methods These drawbacks can be attributed to the fact that we do not yet have a set of methodological principles to elicit high response rates as has been done in case of other survey methods. As the use of personal computers and Internet continues to expand among the general population, the drawbacks of inadequate coverage and sampling can be potentially eliminated. Impact of the graphic design of the web survey, the presentation of questions and the number of questions per web page on measurement have been explored by researchers. Researchers pointed that having several items on a single page can increase correlation among them since the respondents are likely to view the items as related entities. Many researchers stated that, placing one or several questions per page, leads to different answers owing to the cognitive contexts. Item non-response may be greater when one page is used since no control for item non-response can be implemented. Multiple page design enables controls for item non response and therefore theoretically, non item response should be lower. However, multiple page web design has the downside that respondents may abandon the survey completely or may become frustrated if download time takes longer. Nevertheless, as internet usage increases, multiple page design may become more intuitive, through ease of use. Presentation of Results and Analysis of Data All answers to the ntervew questions (nludng open-ended questions) would be entered into a structured database (SPSS) upon receipt and would ultimately be examined by respondent category. A common odng method used in qualitative analysis would select whereby an nvestgator would rle or mark relevant portions of the responses and then ategorze them thmatally. Due to the subjective nature of ategorzng respondents' questions and extracting themes from th answers, ndvdual analyses of the questionnaire will be performed separately by different analysts. After ndvdual analysis, the different analysts would meet together and omple a list of all the dentfed issues and themes. Overlapping issues and themes between analysts would be subsequently removed or renamed to produce a more onse list for odng analysis. The odng scheme would generate in this first stage of analysis, the analysts ndvdually will scan the respondents' texts and ategorze all respondents' answers. Respondents' answers will be coded several times if they ontan more than one theme. The analysts convene a second time to establish the level of agreement between all coders. Remaining differences in odng will resolve through group dsusson. If only one of the analysts judges a respondent to be onerned with one of the issues, then the judgment will either remove or keep after consensus agreement. Overall, this entire process ensures that the odng scheme will be adequate and capture the most prevalent issues and themes as reported by the respondents. More detailed nformaton on the survey methodology, nludng the analysis strategy, is found in the respondent's survey analysis. Research methodology also would be focused on the strategic industry level outcomes such as customer loyalty and long term survival. The questionnaire was designed to elicit information on three areas of strategic significance as outlined in the Literature Review (Fink, 2005). They are the degree of feasibility, attraction and obstacles to creating survey model. While the degree of feasibility in this effort of creating a survey model did have a positive chord of response in the answers provided by the respondents, there was an equally dismal sounding chord of response to the very nature of the trends in the markets. For instance, the existing regulatory environment does not enable competing organizations to significantly avail of the globalization related competencies arising from stiffer competition. Anticipated Findings Mystery shopping is typically more prevalent in nature than marketing research and is most often used for skills training and incentive payment purposes. Marketing research involves determining real customer needs, opinions, perceptions, needs, and wants. Mystery shopping fills in a gap of information between operations and marketing. Mystery shoppers are not real customers - they know what to evaluate before entering the store. They may not typically visit the store they are evaluating, thus precluding any positive outcome. Mystery shopping can complement, but not replace, customer satisfaction research. Mystery shopping is not predictive of every customer's experience. Unless sufficient samples are taken and data analyzed in aggregate. Recommendations Mystery shopping should not be used alone to determine customer satisfaction. Mystery shopping helps business organizations to make approximate assessments and not realistic assessment. Therefore mystery shopping research must be used only as an approximate guide to understanding the potential customer's response to products. Mystery shopping research has a greater degree of relevance in both the launch and the growth phases of the product life cycle and therefore continuous use of it to identify and target different market segments over a period of time can be counterproductive. Therefore business organizations hiring the services of mystery shopping research firm must exactly know in which phase the particular product is. Conclusion Thus this research methodology draws the following conclusions. Mystery Shopping is the practice that is often used by trained shoppers to evaluate customer service, operations, integrity of employees, merchandising, and the quality of the product. Today clients becoming more sophisticated in use of mystery shopping for their research activities, especially companies used to have internet based mystery shoppers due to the fast recordings. Depending on the degree of convergence between the responses to the questionnaire and those responses to the survey, there is a highly positive tone of agreement that has been established through a series of positive correlations among a significant cross section of the independent and dependent variables to prove that mystery shopping alone is not adequate as an instrument for measuring customer satisfaction. This is even better reinforced by the degree of positive correlation between the time-specific variable of corporate strategic shift and the marketing effort to replace mystery shopping with direct promotion methods. There have also been a number of exogenous factors that have contributed to this phenomenon. Among the latter factors the degree of variability between mystery shopping phenomenon and the corresponding revenue collections is predominantly biased towards producing a skewed histogram in favor of other instruments such as customer satisfaction surveys based on hard facts. Such surveys that employ metrics to measure customer satisfaction and then reorient the firm's marketing strategy to meet customers' perceptive requirements have been more beneficial as a direct method of intervention and investigation. In other words the existing inadequacies associated with the mystery shopping experience as the sole instrument for measuring customer satisfactions are too significant to be ignored. Finally most strategically important decision making aspects associated with mystery shopping would lead to much less customer satisfaction if they were continued on the belief that they produce positive correlations between and among a host of endogenous and exogenous variables such as customer satisfaction and eavesdropping. This researcher would thus focus the research methodology on finding a wider scope of analysis and investigation to draw more meaningful conclusions on the subject. REFERENCES 1. Andrews, R 2003, Research Questions, Sage publications, California. 2. Coghlan, D & Creswell, JW 2009, Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization Research design: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches, Sage Publications, London. 3. Fink, A 2005, Conducting research literature reviews, Sage Publications, California. 4. Flick, U 2009, An Introduction to qualitative research, 4th edn, Sage Publications, California. 5. Fowler, FJ 2009, Survey research methods, Sage Publications, California. 6. Iphofen, R 2009, Ethical Decision Making in Social Research: A Practical Guide Palgrave, Macmillan, New York. 7. Mariampolski, HY 2001, Qualitative Market Research: A Comprehensive Guide, Sage Publications, California. 8. Sayre, S 2001, Qualitative Methods for Marketplace Research, Sage Publications, California. 9. Schmidt, K 2007, Mystery Shopping, Deutscher University, New York. 10. Wilson, AM 1998, 'The role of mystery shopping in the measurement of service performance', Journal of Managing service Quality, vol.8, no.6, pp.414-420. APPENDIX 1 BIBILOGRAPHY 1. Bell, J & Opie, C 2002 Learning from research: getting more from your data, Open University Press, Buckingham. 2. Brewerton, P & Millward, LJ 2001, Organisational Research Methods: a guide for students and researchers, Sage Publications, California. 3. Gill, J & Johnson, P 2002, Research Methods for Managers, Sage Publications, California. 4. 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