Help with research

[altariel]

My friend Ben, who is completing his PhD, is in need of survey participants. If you are a speaker of American English and have 10-15 minutes spare, perhaps you can help:

"I’m undertaking research into what people understand by various statements and questions which are used in management research. The link below is to a survey which seeks your opinion on a variety of questions and statements which takes about 10-15 minutes. If you are a native speaker of American English (i.e. not Canadian, Australian etc) then I would be very grateful if you could spare the time to fill the survey in. It is both anonymous and confidential. If you can think of anyone suitable to forward it to then that would be very helpful too. The survey can be found at:

http://cambridge.qualtrics.com//SE?SID=SV_afNFhC0ZEIhlZ9a&SVID=Prod

Thanks in advance."

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I took the survey! Although when I saw "Judge Business School" on the heading of the Website I murmured, "mene mene tekel upharsin."

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Bless you, my child.

[tyellas.livejournal.com]

Okay, I took it...even though managerial-speak, as a rule, makes me want to scratch my eyeballs out, and British managerial-speak even more so.

As an American, I found the terms "fair" and "unfair" particularly grating. And that's odd, since I approve of the principles behind the words. I think I perceive a connotation that performance isn't valued as much as "evening things out" so that nobody in the organization gets jealous.

[mikekellner.livejournal.com]

These are the type of BS questionnaires employees hate. You never can believe that they are truly anonymous, and therefore everyone lies and says they are just thrilled to be pulling hot plastic wastebaskets out of moulds 8 hours a day, and that 4£/hour before taxes is a princely sum, indicative of the boss' generous nature.

Everyone knows that their boss then shows said survey results to his boss and gets a large raise for keeping the Proles happy.

Company morale would be much more effectively boosted by putting out a generous spread of quality snacks and a few barrels of beer after work once a month.

mk

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for doing it (sympathy over management-speak). That's a really interesting nuance about "fair" and "unfair", one I'd not thought about.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I hope you posted all this! :-)

[brinian.livejournal.com]

I got ruffled about the fair/unfair terms as well. Either you have a meritocracy or you shouldn't even bother with performance evaluations and just give everybody the same raise. You get what you pay for...

[altariel.livejournal.com]

It's really interesting to hear this perspective. Thank you for taking the time to respond.