KNOBBY ANALYSES OF KNOBLESS SURVEY ITEMS, PART I: THE APPROACH

Companies often conduct general Employee Opinion Surveys (EOSs) to measure some features or outcomes of an organization. Converting data to results is routine and governed by the design of the EOS and the use of standard statistical methods. However, as one moves away from results to their meanings or conclusions, and from conclusions to recommendations, other factors and variables come into play. These factors and variables are governed more by the context, the presence of constraints, the intuition of the decision makers, and the actions by engaged agents. Essentially EOSs produce ambiguous conclusions and recommendations because they are “knobless,” or lacking underlying processes which are controllable by management. The theory of the organizational hologram has evolved operationally into a family of Organizational Diagnostic Survey (ODS) forms which generate sets of results representing managerially controllable processes or combinations of processes. That is, the ODS provides a set of x‐axis variables that can be employed to explain variability in EOS results, which are viewed as dependent variables plotted on the y‐axis. Every item in an ODS form is “knobby.” The relationships among the questions and higher order results are causal and structured with known interdependencies. Combining ODS and EOS allows knobby analyses of knobless survey items.