About employees? - Need hr research topic for Ph.d.

i have done my mba from an istitution where they have not taught us properly (sorry for saying about the institute,its a fact),so i decided atleast i will do my further studies from reputed institute. i need to know which topics are hot currently for research in human research (do not blame that i do not know even that,its not my fault,from very rural background)i was thinking of "spirituality can boost the performance of the work of employees" or "making employees feel home at the organization to increase the efficiency"," initial,middle,final stages of employee attitude in the organization that effect the organization "

Welcome to essayforum! I see what you mean. This reminds me of a topic called 'transactional leadership, because a scholar names W.H.C. Prentice names spiritual fulfillment as one of the individual needs that leaders can fulfill for people in order to motivate them to achieve organizational goals.

"making the employee feel at home" makes me think of the concept called 'organizational culture.'

I think that is what you should focus on. Search a library database for professional journal articles, and use these search terms: literature review, human resource management, organizational culture

Also, try it with 'corporate culture' instead. It means the same thing. This is what I hope: I hope you will find great articles written in the past 5 years, and I hope you will enjoy their literature review sections. Look for articvles with sections called 'literature review' because those sections will tell ALL about the recent research studies pertaining to the topic of organizational culture.

:-)
literature review, human resource management, corporate culture

I agree with EF_Kevin. I'm not sure of your situation but I would definitely spend some time in the topics suggested above to find where you can contribute to the field. For a PhD you basically want to find where the research is lacking to build a stronger foundation in that area.

Having said that, my company, as most in this situation, has had some challenges integrating companies it has purchased. There is probably a fair amount of research out there on increasing employee satisfaction at the bought company (as many times those employees resent being purchased and having to conform to the new company's standards) but I would be interested to know why do company's still have trouble with this (assuming there is a larger volume of research). And if there isn't a large volume then you have a bigger opportunity to contribute in that area.

Another topic my co-worker and I were discussing today is the effect of C-Suite communications on employee morale. For instance, some companies have an internal website where they can submit anonymous questions to the CEO, CFO, etc which are taken seriously and answered. Other companies may have a quarterly town hall meeting where the C-Suite may answer (or may say its a silly question and blow it off). It would be interesting to see how employees perceive the private vs public communication channels and how upper level management's responses (and transparency) affect employee engagement. Oh yes, that reminds me..."employee engagement" is a hot topic with companies. It's when the company, often times, hires an outside firm to benchmark its employees on different areas such as compensation, safety, happiness, job mobility, culture, etc.

Hope that helps!