Qualitative Research Inquiry to Explore the Corporate Leaders in the Time of COVID-19

B A N Eranda

doi:10.4038/kjm.v10i2.7693

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 has influenced the business organizations’ performance and behavior in numerous ways. Based on the pressing need to respond to this pandemic researchers have to play a significant role in uncovering the possibilities for business organizations to adapt to this uncertain situation. Therefore, it is important to pay attention on the corporate managers’ and entrepreneurs’ contextualized experiences and their meanings attributed to COVID-19 in order to mitigate failures and to learn to be sustained. This requires qualitative research which can be helpful to capturing the deeper understanding of lived realities of the corporate leaders who are affected by the pandemic. The qualitative researchers can adopt five types of approaches including narrative inquiry, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study to uncover these lived experiences of corporate respondents and to make sense of those experiences for the benefit of various stakeholders. Each of these five approaches to qualitative inquiry can be utilized for researching different facets of the corporate leaders at the time of pandemic. The in-person interactions need for qualitative inquiry to look into the corporate leaders’ lives is challenged by the social distancing generated by the new normal behavior. However, the evolving nature of the modern technology has ended this challenge with its novel initiatives.

Highlights

Qualitative research has been instrumental over the last century and it has gained the momentum due to its innate ability to uncover the social reality which is free and independent from the researcher as well as the other stakeholders
The notable growth in qualitative inquiry is due to the notion that existing quantitative inquiry was not comprehensive enough to capture the dynamic nature of the society and human beings
COVID-19 has made lives of human beings to chaos that no one imagined before and its impact for the business world is enormous from micro level organizations to giant corporates

Summary

Introduction

Qualitative research has been instrumental over the last century and it has gained the momentum due to its innate ability to uncover the social reality which is free and independent from the researcher as well as the other stakeholders. As researchers it is needed to understand that the nature of the issues encountered by the business leaders are highly different among each another This requires a detailed and deeper inquiry in to those issues that cannot be realized through quantitative studies. There are several approaches for conducting qualitative research Among these narrative inquiry, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study can be identified as commonly used and appropriate for the field of business management. Phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study can be identified as commonly used and appropriate for the field of business management Out of these five, it is important for business organizations and the researchers to select which approach is more suitable for them to research the corporate leaders at the time of COVID-19. Each of this research approach is explained below by emphasizing how it can be used in the context of business management at the time of COVID-19 to explore the corporate leaders

Narrative inquiry

Grounded Theory

Case Study

Agility of the qualitative researcher