Graduate / Argument essay: Correlation between sleeping habits of employees and profits in firms [7]

Question :A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Of the advertising firms studied, those whose executives reported needing no more than 6 hours of sleep per night had higher profit margins and faster growth. These results suggest that if a business wants to prosper, it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

Response:
The author's conclusion to correlate the number of hours of sleep and the success of the firms they work in has got some fallacies in various categories ranging from flaws in statistical analysis and inappropriate assumptions and generalisations.

The first and foremost flaw is that the study is conducted on the employees of a particular firm but the result is generalised to all forms of business. The work culture, environment and profit margins are different for different firms and the strategy that works for one firm may not be suitable or fruitful for other firms.There can be a number of other factors weakening the argument since the author has not taken into account other incentives that particular firm gives to the employees.

Secondly, the study is conducted on 300 people only and the conclusion is drawn out from the analysis of their sleeping habits. But this does not strengthen the argument. The author needs some wide variety of data including large number of people from different firms in order to state his argument strongly.

Thirdly, the authors conclusion is based on the assumption that the profit margins and the success of a firm depends only on the sleeping habits of the people working there. But there can be and there are many more factors which the growth rate of business as the skills , education level , diligence of the people and the strategies followed by the firm.

The author just comments on the people who sleep less than 6 hours that they had faster growth, but he has not said anything or conducted any analysis on those who sleep for more than 6 hours and still had higher growth margins. Even fixing this number 6 is questionable since there can be people who require still less number of hours yet perform better.

So , in a nutshell , it can be concluded that the author's argument could have been strengthened if he had incorporated the abovementioned factors and then drawn a generalised conclusion .