ABSTRACT
Do satisfied workers perform better in their jobs than their less satisfied peers? And what makes some people more satisfied in their work than others? These are reasonable questions to ask and indeed have been asked on numerous occasions by organizational researchers. But how might one go about answering them? This book is about the ways in which organizational researchers approach the task of answering such questions and the myriad other questions with which they are habitually concerned. But why a book specifically on the task of organizational research? Is the task of doing research in organizations not fundamentally the same as any social science research? After all, much organizational research borrows and relies upon concepts and approaches to the conduct of research deriving from the social science disciplines (especially psychology and sociology) that have given and continue to give organizational research much of its impetus and character. Many of the field’s practitioners were trained in the social sciences, and it is therefore not surprising that much organizational research bears the imprint of the contributing social sciences and also shares many of the guidelines and difficulties associated with conducting research that social scientists have identified.
