Problem Statement
What is the problem this study will address?
The contracting organizations and learning community that HASC supports habitually has a high turnover of employees. Contractor organizations will hire and the new employee leaves before or soon after onboarding and training is complete. There are a variety of reasons that there might be high turnover, one of these might be low quality “values fit” between the hiring organization and the new employee.
The problem that this study will address is to what degree are employee’s values considered by organizations when they are hired and are organizations working to make a “values fit” when hiring. By determining if values fit is a contributing factor when recruiting, hiring and onboarding new workers, contracting organizations could potentially decrease the high turnover rates in their organizations. Less turnover has the potential to decrease costs and increase overall safety for these contracting organizations.
What are your personal goals for doing this study? What motivates you?
HASC works with thousands of contracting organizations and their workers represent a learning community which has not had the benefit of much research or study in terms of training effectiveness or hiring and retention. As HASC is a non-profit association, which functions to support the contractor organizations, having a better understanding of: (a) what motivates workers in the industry, (b) who these workers are, and (c) what they value, can help HASC to understand the learning community it supports to a greater degree.
What are your practical goals for doing this study? What do you hope to accomplish or achieve from this study?
There are many reasons for high turnover. By ruling out one, or determining to what degree values fit might be contributing to high turnover, it is possible for contracting organizations to adjust how they hire. This type of adjustment could lead organizations to hire more effectively, which will drive down costs and increase safety. Secondarily, I hope to help these contracting organizations understand that values fit, and fit theory is a worthwhile concept to consider when hiring.
What are your intellectual goals? What do you want to understand?
Having been a recruiter in this industry in previous roles, and now working to research and understand this community, I hope to understand the motivations of our learning community and the workers we support to a greater degree. By understanding our learning community better, we can potentially design better training that keeps more learners working safely. Regarding retention, the longer an employee stays employed the fewer new employees will be on the worksite. It has been proven that most accidents occur due to lack of experience and understanding. Increasing retention could help keep our learning community safer.
What does the scholarly literature say or not say about the problem (cite 3-4 sources)
1. McCulloch and Turban (2007) study call center agents, a high-turnover job type, and the authors apply a field study to examine if PO fit can help in the selection of employees to increase job satisfaction and performance but do not find a direct relationship between PO fit and job performance.
2. Olubiyi et al. (2019), focusing on a different high turnover industry, retail, also do not find a significant link between PO fit and job satisfaction, however, their study does confirm that employees perceived values congruence not only yields greater job satisfaction, but that the increased satisfaction does reduce turnover.
3. Chen, et al. (2016) find in their study of 225 employees in 12 different catering organizations that PO fit predicts job satisfaction.
4. Hoffman and Woehr (2005) try to find a link between PO fit and behavioral outcomes such as performance, citizenship, and turnover by building on work by previous researchers and find that PO fit is directly related to an intent to quit, low job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization. However, their results although positive, suggest only a weak relationship between PO fit and behavior outcomes.
Who are the audiences for this study? How will others benefit from your study?
The audience for this study includes the organizations that HASC supports and other organizations who may have high turnover and workers who are like those who support the energy industry. The same expected benefits in safety and a decrease in recruitment costs could be useful to any industry that faces hazardous work sites with inexperienced workers.
Purpose
The purpose of this qualitative case study will be to explore in what ways industrial contactors are motivated to remain at their organizations after several weeks of work as compared to their expectations about the organization and their career goals. A secondary purpose is to help determine if the worker's expectations for the organization and their goals for themselves and their careers align with the organization’s goals for their employees and career development. At this stage of the research industrial contractors and the organizations that hire them are defined as those field workers who are hired to support work completed at work sites in the energy industry.
Research Questions
The research questions this qualitative case study hopes to answer included:
- How do the participants express their career goals and expectations for their positions within the organizations at the time of their being hired?
- How do the participants express their lived experiences about their first three months of working within their new organizations especially regarding fit theory?
- How do participants feel that values fit makes up a part of the reason that they remain with or leave the organizations within the first few months of working there?
Positionality
I have worked in this industry for over 20 years in various roles and although that may give me some insight, it also creates challenges. I have spent some time working in the field, however it is not as significant, nor at the level of most workers in our industry who will be a part of this study. Additionally, although I have a deep history in working in one particular skill within the energy industry, HASC supports multiple types of work and the participants for this study will come from a large cross section of work types. This lack of having worked in the field as many of the study participants might have or will be doing, could make it difficult for me as the researcher to relate to and properly interview the participants and gather information that is relevant and descriptive enough to draw conclusions.
Working at HASC, and being older than most of the study participants, there is the chance that the participants will not view me as a researcher, but rather someone who can help their career. This could lead to the participants to answer questions as they think I want to hear them, rather than giving me an answer that is more true to their lived experience.
Having a history of experiences in these areas, as well as working for a safety training non-profit, will mean that it would be natural for me to take a safety and training perspective in any research projects I design. The perspective of the participants will be more operationally focused. In most cases the participants are motivated to quickly get through the training courses so they can go back to work. This disparity between their experience and focus and my experience and focus could provide data collection and interviews to be muddled. Although this safety perspective could induce entanglements in my lived experience and, therefore, in my research design, potentially slanting the design and the results toward those related to safety or training, rather than operations alone; there are benefits to the experiences I have had. Part of being a safety trainer in our industry is the benefit of having observed many different work crews perform field operations in many other locations and environments. This more universal perspective could allow for a better, more comprehensive understanding of the results that our research might yield. Conversely, there could be negative influences on the research from having had this safety and training experience and perspective. The participants will have a more jobsite centric or operational perspective which could clash with the research design. There may be aspects I gloss over because they seem natural to me that would not be so easily understood by someone with less safety or training experience.
References
Chen, P., Sparrow, P., & Cooper, C. (2016). The relationship between person-organization fit and job satisfaction. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 31(5), 946–959. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp-08-2014-0236
Hoffman, B. J., & Woehr, D. J. (2006). A quantitative review of the relationship between person-organization fit and behavioral outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 68(3), 389-399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2005.08.003
McCulloch, M. C., & Turban, D. B. (2007). Using person-organization fit to select employees for high-turnover jobs. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 15(1), 63–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2389.2007.00368.x
Olubiyi, O., Smiley, G., Luckel, H. & Melaragno, R. (2019). A qualitative case study of employee turnover in retail business. Heliyon. 5. e01796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01796
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