PhD Research Topic - HRM / OB / Employee

Hi Everyone,

Just hoping for some help or suggestions from you wonderful people! I really want to complete a PhD in either HRM or OB, but I'm not exactly sure on what specifically.

There are several areas that really fascinate me as follows, please let me know your thoughts...

- Employee Motivation

- Employee engagement / discretional performance (i.e. as a tool for employee retention, improved customer experience etc)

- Employer response to greater employment legislation & impact on employment relationship

- Peformance management & related reward systems (esp in contact centres).

Any ideas on how I can refine some of these into a workable PhD proposal...? If you need to know anything else, please ask me.

Looking forward to your comments.

Well, the way to make it "workable" is to make it useful It will only be useful if you add a new dimension that has not been covered before. The whole point is to show, in your introduction and lit review, that you see what ha recently been done in the field and you are taking steps to add something new based on the foundation of what other recent researchers have done.

It's just like walking into a room and listening to find out what the people are talking about and then adding your own insightful point.

Look at this recent article about employee engagement/withdrawal:
Comparative Effects of Race/ethnicity and Employee Engagement on Withdrawal Behavior.
by James R. Jones , Jinlan Ni , David C. Wilson

That is a good place to start.

:-)