4.2.1 Participants
Forty middle and senior managers participated in the study: 20 minority-ethnic and 20 majority-ethnic managers, a similar sample size to existing attribution research (e.g. Silvester, 1997; Silvester et al., 1997). Managers were matched for organisational level, gender, and work area. The average time spent at their current level of seniority was M = 41.4 months (SD = 34.1 months) and M = 31.2 months (SD=30.5 months) for minority- and majority-ethnic managers respectively. All were educated to degree level and four minority-ethnic and four majority-ethnic managers had MBAs. The minority-ethnic group comprised five men and 15 women, and the majority-ethnic group comprised six men and 14 women. Managers typically managed teams of between five and 20 employees.
Participants were recruited through purposive sampling; email shots (see Appendix 1) were sent out to managers who were registered with the organisation’s minority- ethnic support forum, the diversity team and diversity champions were also asked to forward the email to potential participants. This strategy was adopted because only approximately 5-7% of all middle and senior managers were minority-ethnic and therefore gaining enough minority-ethnic participants would have been difficult using a more generalised sampling method. The email explained that the research was examining career experiences, and details about how to participate. The email did not specify the focus on ethnicity, in order to enhance initial buy-in and to prevent participants misunderstanding the research rationale or using it as an opportunity to air specific grievances (Buchanan & Bryman, 2007). To ensure ethical practice and build trust between researcher and participant, all potential participants were informed of the full aims of the project once they had contacted the
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researcher (see Appendix 2 for the information sheet). Upon deciding to participate, they also completed an informed consent form (Appendix 3).
Demographic information was collected to enable the minority- and majority-ethnic samples to be matched. For the most part this was achieved by asking minority- ethnic participants to refer their majority-ethnic colleagues to the research. If there was no suitable match, convenience sampling was used and managers continued to be matched where possible on the characteristics named above.
4.2.2 Procedure
Prior to the interviews, the managers were contacted by email and phone, and asked to complete a ‘timeline’ by drawing a pictorial representation of the general sequence of their career (see Figure 4.1 for an example). The timeline method is used widely in career counselling (Brott, 2004; Goldman, 1992) and has been advocated as a way of focusing interviewee attention (Chell, 2004). In this research the timeline method was used to encourage managers to reflect on their career experiences and to facilitate the interview by allowing the manager and researcher to share a visual aid during discussion. Its primary purpose was to provide key career incidents that were explored during the interviews. Managers were asked to identify any specific events that they believed had had a positive or negative impact on their career trajectory or satisfaction. For the purposes of this study, experiences that had a negative impact on career success were defined as “events or conditions, either within the person or in his or her environment, that impede career success” (Swanson & Woitke, 1997, p. 434). Positive experiences were defined as events or conditions that assist career success. Those managers, who were unable to complete the timeline beforehand were asked to develop it with the researcher during the interview.
110 Figure 4.1: Example Timeline
All interviews were conducted individually with managers. Although no time limits were fixed, interviews lasted approximately 60 minutes for the minority-ethnic sample and 40 minutes for the majority-ethnic sample. Interviews were semi- structured using the critical incident technique (CIT), a method used in qualitative interviews to investigate significant events, incidents, processes and outcomes, which in this study were identified by the manager in question (Chell, 2004; Flanagan, 1954). CIT has been suggested as a useful tool for gaining broader insight into the role and experience of ethnicity within organisations (Kenny & Briner, 2007). It was particularly useful in this research because it was possible to explore each incident with probes, in order to understand the cognitive, affective and behavioural factors associated with successful or unsuccessful career success.
First, managers were asked to provide a summary of their career to-date using the timeline as a guide. Then CIT was used to explore positive and negative events managers had identified on the timeline. Probes were used to uncover the background, perceived causes and consequences of key events. For example, “Why do you think you were (un)successful?”, and “What have you learnt from this experience?” (see Appendix 4 for the interview schedule). All interviews were recorded with the permission of participants and then transcribed verbatim for analysis. Managers were assured of their confidentiality, as any names or identifiable information were removed from transcripts of the interviews and recordings were securely stored. All information fed back to the organisation was also in general terms, with no reference to specific ethnic backgrounds or grades. This was to ensure
Moved departments: June 1996 Development course: November 2003 Unsuccessful at promotion: January 2000 Successful promotion: May 2005 Joined the support forum:
April 2001
Worked with a difficult line manager
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that participants were not identified, for example, if they were the only female, Grade 8 Black African in the organisation.
4.2.3 Attributional Coding
Attributional analysis of the interview transcripts was conducted using the Leeds Attributional Coding System (LACS: Munton et al., 1999). It is a five-stage process involving (1) identifying a source of attributions, which can be any discourse material, verbal or written, (2) extracting attributions, (3) identifying agents and targets, (4) coding attributions on five causal dimensions and finally (5) analysing the numerical data.