I have recently commenced my contract at sea. It’s taken me a few days to settle in, so I apologise to those who have been awaiting responses from me on the comments on my blog posts.
Having already created an online SIG, I have also put some effort into creating an SIG here on board the ship. Being at sea, I have a lot more access to communicating with people physically than maintaining efficient levels of communication on my online SIG using the Internet.
Although away and with limited access to the Internet and other resources, I have managed to search out and identify three significant important pieces of information relating to my inquiry interests. I have reviewed the pieces of information below.
The first piece of literature that I found was the work of Shelly J. Correll and Stephen Bernard, titled, ‘Biased Estimators? Comparing Status and Statistical Theories of Gender Discrimination’ which I discovered whilst reading the book ‘Social Psychology of the Workplace’ (2006), written by Shane R. Thye and Edward J. Lawler. Surprisingly, in the latter section of this book, I found several pieces of information significant in relation to my line of inquiry. Particularly, what was written about ‘the importance of commitment and effort.’
“In fact, it is easy to imagine situations where employers might rely more heavily on anticipations of effort/commitment than ability/competence. For example, when a job requires sufficiently low skill such that most potential employees have the requisite ability, effort anticipations will likely be the basis for forming relative performance expectations.” (Correll. Bernard.)
Upon reading this, it caused me to dedicate some time to think about how I should approach my analysis of observations should I choose to use it as a tool for my inquiry. For example, this could be in relation to taking a decision whether or not a member of my team is producing high quality work due to the difficulty of skill they are executing or the amount of effort/commitment they are putting in.
The second piece of literature that I came across was the work of Jerald M. Jellison, PHD, from the book ‘Managing the Dynamics of Change’ (2006). There were many interesting points from this book that I found interesting. Especially the point stated in the chapter; ‘Putting the J-Curve to work’. Where Jerald wrote,
“Where performance drops to the level of the negative benchmark, there are two basic options. One possibility is to simply abandon the new initiative entirely. Or the poor performance may trigger a dispassionate and comprehensive reevaluation of whether to commit more resources or to consider other alternatives.” When putting this writing in context with my work place. I can relate it to previous experiences, which could be used to prove Jellison’s point. For example, the shows that my fellow cast members and I perform are scored out of 100 using CSQ’s (customer service questionnaires) that are filled in by the passengers. As a department, we have a minimum target score of 85 out of 100 to achieve by the end of the cruise. Should the cast not score high enough, this often will cause a dissatisfaction amongst my fellow cast members and often result in them committing more energy and effort in their work during the following cruise in order to boost the scores once again.
Thirdly was the work of Frederick Herzberg in his book titled ‘One More Time: How do you Motivate Employees?’ (1987). I found this piece of literature to be equally as interesting as the work mentioned above. Herzberg writes of a term/formula he coined calls KITA (Kick in the...) and its variations. It was useful to see how Herzberg presented his findings through research. (Using text, diagrams and graphs to support his points.) Not only that, the work of Herzberg has given me several ideas of tools that I could use for research when conducting my inquiry.
There are many other pieces of information that I have come across whilst researching into my line of inquiry. It is safe to say that there is a lot of relevant information available in relation to the topical area of my line of inquiry. But I cannot seem to find any works that directly answer the latest development of my inquiry question. This gives me more reason to continue working with this line of inquiry.
I shall continue to research different pieces of literature, to aid the continual development of my line of enquiry. For I believe that the more research I conduct during the development of my inquiry, the more I can take into consideration the information discovered whilst planning my inquiry.
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