Application: Focus Groups

Now that you have heard the Walden Sports CEO's perspective on employee attitudes, the next step might be to organize a focus group to hear directly from the employees. Focus groups are groups of people who are asked carefully planned questions about their perceptions, emotions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes. A best practice is to use open-ended questions that are intended to generate multiple responses.

Focus groups (and interviews) are designed to assess what people think or feel about what is going on in the organization, including how satisfied they are with their jobs and what factors or antecedents exist that influence their job satisfaction. Answers to these questions can be used to select additional survey questions for an organization-wide survey. See what clues you can uncover at Walden Sports.

For this Assignment, consider questions you might ask the Walden Sports employees in a focus group to investigate why morale is low.

The Assignment (2 pages)

Based on the information presented by the Walden Sports CEO in the media in Week 1, develop five open-ended questions you might ask the Walden Sports employees in a focus group to investigate why morale is low. Explain why you developed these questions. (Make sure that the questions you develop are different from the job satisfaction instrument you selected for the Discussion.)

Support your Assignment with specific references to all resources used in its preparation. You are to provide a reference list for all resources, including those in the Learning Resources for this course.