Getting Action from Organizational Surveys: New Concepts, Technologies, and Applications (J-B SIOP Professional Practice Series) [Hardcover]

Allen I. Kraut (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0787979376 | ISBN-13: 978-0787979379 | Edition: 1

Getting Action from Organizational Surveys provides the information industrial/organizational psychologists and human resource professionals need to put survey results into action—action that gets results. Edited by organizational survey pioneer Allen I. Kraut and contributed to by leading-edge practitioners, this comprehensive volume outlines new concepts to the survey lexicon, new methods of collecting and delivering results, new applications to various organizational situations, and new perspectives on how to look at and understand surveys and their place within organizations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"… offers great value in terms of instructional content." (Training media Review, April 6 2007)

Review

"This comprehensive work is a compendium of the best thinking and practice in how to design and use surveys. It will be a must have, for many years to come, for anyone who designs or uses surveys to guide managerial behavior."
--David Ulrich, professor of business, University of Michigan, and coauthor, The HR Value Proposition

"Kraut and his colleagues have made a major contribution by
focusing on the issue of how to leverage surveys to create action and
change. Each chapter does a great job of capturing the leading edge of
practice and innovation."
--David A. Nadler, chairman, Mercer Delta Consulting, LLC

"A terrific guide to the latest developments in survey-driven change."
--Edward E. Lawler III, distinguished professor of business at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; director of USC’s Center for Effective Organizations; and coauthor,Built to Change

"This book takes organizational survey initiatives to a refreshing new level by emphasizing ways to leverage survey results to achieve business results."
—Mirian Graddick-Weir, executive vice president, human resources, AT&T

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Pfeiffer; 1 edition (February 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787979376
• ISBN-13: 978-0787979379
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #813,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best Survey Practices to Increase Organizational Impact, January 9, 2010

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John M. Ford "johnDC" (near DC, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Getting Action from Organizational Surveys: New Concepts, Technologies, and Applications (J-B SIOP Professional Practice Series) (Hardcover)

Allen Kraut's collection of contributed chapters is not a survey methods text with guidance about question wording and sampling formulas. He directs readers in need of such guidance to his earlier volume, Organizational Surveys: Tools for Assessment and Change. This book contains advice from leading survey practitioners about how to design, conduct and report results from surveys in ways that will foster positive change in the organization under study.

The twenty-four chapters are organized into three sections. The "New Concepts" section discusses employee participant views of survey research, use of survey results in business planning, and linking survey results o subsequent organizational development efforts. Chapters in the "New Technologies" section reports innovations in web-based survey delivery, automated processing of responses to open-ended questions, quantitative analysis, and creating effective presentations based on survey results. "New Applications," the final section, describes a variety of scenarios in which survey results have been used, including corporate mergers, employee engagement and retention, and managing conflicting cultures in international organizations.

My most useful chapter was "What Did They Really Mean? New and Emerging Methods for Analyzing Themes in Open-Ended Comments" by Patrick Kulesa and Ralph Bishop. The authors overview text mining and text analysis technologies for extracting meaning from narrative survey responses. Their work involves using the WordStat content analysis software to create word lists that identify key words used by survey participants. This approach works because open-ended responses tend to be brief (40 to 80 words) and use a restricted vocabulary that is closely related to the survey topic. These researchers highlight the value of open-ended question analysis to identify new ideas offered by an organization's employees.

Your most useful chapter may well be a different one. This collection is recommended for survey practitioners who have mastered the basics of their craft and want to fine-tune their survey efforts to achieve greater impact.