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Corporate Field Researchers Share Tricks of The Trade

The document discusses a panel of professors sharing findings and techniques from recent field research conducted within corporations. Some key findings included that a sense of meaningful work most ignites employee creativity and satisfaction, and that simply prompting employees to write down when they planned to get a flu shot increased the vaccination rate.

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43 views5 pages

Corporate Field Researchers Share Tricks of The Trade

The document discusses a panel of professors sharing findings and techniques from recent field research conducted within corporations. Some key findings included that a sense of meaningful work most ignites employee creativity and satisfaction, and that simply prompting employees to write down when they planned to get a flu shot increased the vaccination rate.

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Corporate Field Researchers

Share Tricks of the Trade

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In a panel discussion, several professors shared practical findings and


tricks-of-the-trade from recent field research. Among the discoveries: how to
prompt employees to get a flu shot.

by Carmen Nobel
The term "academic research" can conjure images of scientists conducting
experiments in a basement laboratory, or of tweed-clad professors poring
through old theories to develop new ones. But let's not forget about field
research, which happens beyond university campuses, out in the so-called
real world.
Among economic scholars, field research often takes place within the walls
of corporations, non-profits, small businesses, or government entities.
Ideally, these organizations eventually can apply the findings of the research
to improve operations within their own workforces. But a successful field
study requires a lot of ingenuity and trust from both the academics and the
field participants.
"Doing Empirical Research in, with, and through Companies" was the topic
of a lively session last week at the annual Harvard Business School Faculty
Research Symposium. Held each May, the event provides the opportunity
for a few faculty members to share recent work with an audience of doctoral
students, staff members, and other professors.

In a panel discussion, several professors shared the practical findings of


recent field researchalong with tricks-of-the-trade for field researchers.

FORMING A RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP


Teresa Amabile discussed a comprehensive field study in which her
research team collected confidential, personal work diaries from 238 whitecollar employees at seven disparate companies. The key finding: When it
comes to igniting creativity and satisfaction among employees, the single
most important factor is a sense of making progress on meaningful work. A
related finding: If people are in a good mood on any given day, they'll be
more creative. But they'll also be just as creative the next day, regardless of
their next-day mood.
At the symposium, Amabile explained her rationale for taking her research to
the field. "I didn't believe and still don't believe that I could address these
questions outside of a company context," she said. "Where else could I track
creativity in the wild?"
Leslie Perlow, who moderated the panel, shared her admiration for
Amabile's project, starting with the data generation. "She managed to
convince people to tell her how they were doing every day," said Perlow, the
Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership.
Amabile explained the importance of approaching field study participants as
collaborators. "If you're planning on doing intense research with individual
employees, try to make them partners in the research," she said. (HBS
professor Nava Ashraf discussed this idea of co-producing knowledge in
the Working Knowledge article, Climbing Down from the Ivory Tower.)

DEVELOPING EXECUTIVE TRUST


Eugene Soltes shared research showing how certain investors spend a lot of
time in private meetings with corporate executivesand how this gives the
investors an unfair advantage, in spite of Federal regulations that are
supposed to level the investment playing field. In short, private meetings with

CEOs apparently led to smarter trades, according to the findings of a study


by Soltes, an assistant professor at HBS, and David Solomon, a professor at
the USC Marshall School of Business.
To conduct the research, the duo obtained investor meeting records from a
mid-cap company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, under the
condition that they would not reveal the firm's identity in their paper. This
required a tremendous amount of good faith on the part of the company,
which was crucial for the study.
"It's really about developing a relationship," said Soltes, whose research also
has included corresponding with Stephen Richards, the former global head
of Computer Associates, while Richards was doing time in prison for
securities fraud. (The correspondence led to the case study A Letter From
Prison.)

LISTENING TO THE FIELD


Ethan Bernstein discussed the field research that led to an intriguing
conclusion: In a curious phenomenon dubbed the Transparency Paradox, he
found that watching your employees less closely at work might yield more
transparency at your organization. "In a world obsessed with transparency,
I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with how it is and isn't productive," said
Bernstein, an assistant professor.
In the summers of 2008 and 2009, while he was still a doctoral candidate at
HBS, Bernstein hired a team of Chinese-born Harvard undergraduates to
embed themselves among factory workers on the manufacturing floor of a
huge global contractor in Southern China. Bernstein's research, which won
awards from both the Academy of Management's Organization and
Management Theory Division and Organizational Behavior Division, was
largely guided by the information that the factory workers shared with the
embedded students.
"You listen to the field when it speaks to you," Bernstein said.

ENCOURAGING EMPLOYEES TO RECEIVE FLU


SHOTS
The CDC estimates that from the 1976-1977 season to the 2006-2007 flu
season, annual flu-associated deaths in the United States ranged from a low
of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000. In spite of those sobering statistics,
a lot of people decline to get a flu shoteven when their company offers
free shots to employees on-site.
A few years ago, a team of researchers tackled that problem with field
research. At the symposium, one of the researchers, John Beshears,
described study, in which more than 3,000 employees of a Midwestern utility
firm received e-mailed flu-shot reminder e-mails. The catch: Some of them
received a standard reminder, with information about when and where the
shots would be offered, while others received an additional prompt
suggesting that the employees write down the date and time they planned to
get a shot.
Of those who received the simple prompt, 37.1 obtained a flu shot at the
firm's on-site clinican increase of 4.2 percentage points over those who
received a standard, no-prompt reminder.
Beshears held the research as case in point that field research can be
mutually beneficial to the field of academia and the field study participant.
"There's a [perception] that there's a tradeoff between serving the needs of
the organizations and doing rigorous research," Beshears said. "But the
organization you're working with doesn't know the answer, either. You really
are helping organizations if you give them rigorous tests to run their
business."
Note to readers: If you think your company might benefit from participating in
a corporate field study, please visit The Research Exchange, where
members of the Harvard Business School faculty have listed several studies
in search of a site.

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