Sangita is interested in the impact of self-managed career development and organisational career management on individuals’ decisions of career boundary crossing. After reading some articles, Sangita discovered that organisationally driven career management may improve job performance and sometimes bring about promotion of individual career management behaviours, which may then influence individual’s decision of job changing. So, Sangita’s research intends to find out whether or not organisational career management policies can help reduce career-related employee turnover.
Her initial research question can be broken down into four specific questions: (1) what’s the content and nature of career management policies in XX organisation? (2) How these policies are related to performance measures and internal promotion decisions? (3) Whether employees are satisfied with organisational career management and how they combine organisational career management policies with their own career development plans? (4) What factors will influence individuals’ decisions about career boundary crossing? The research is targeted at organisations so that organisations can use the research findings to improve their career management projects to decrease career-related employee turnover.
As an exploratory study and case study, the inductive approaches are more appropriate for the research and a new explanation about the impact of organisational career management on individuals’ decisions of career boundary crossing may be induced as a result of the research. As a pragmatist, I believe both quantitative and qualitative research are worthy and the choice of research methods should be based on the nature of research, specific research questions and likely research consequences. In this case, mixed methods will be used to collect and analyse data because quantitative data can help examine relationships between variables while qualitative data can explain the relationships. I will pay more attention to qualitative methods because I need to know information about specific policies and