Leadership in the Workplace
Your research proposal is a major step toward researching and writing your research paper for this course. Potential topics should meet the same criteria you used in the Wk1 brainstorming activity:
- Your subject must be a current issue in management or leadership in the workplace. It should not be a recurring issue, such as something that could have just as easily been discussed ten years ago.
- Your subject must have some literature available on it; the proposal requires 12 sources and the final paper should have more. Because these are recent issues, the availability of peer-reviewed journal (PRJ) articles may be limited, but there should be some high-quality literature available through the university’s databases.
While publication of your research paper should not be the end goal, it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility, so you should strive to produce a high-quality product, potentially publishable paper. The research proposal has been designed to help you meet that goal. Your paper should have the following sections.
Section Requirements Subject: Provide the broad topic for your research paper. This topic must be a management or leadership issue of current importance.
Research Benefits: Why are you interested in this topic? What benefit does it have for your job, you career, and/or your employer?
Thesis: Your thesis answers a relevant question (but is not the question itself; it is the answer to the question). Generally, the best thesis statements answer a how or why question.
Intended Audience: Describe your intended audience, which is who could be interested in and helped by your research. This could be your employer, or others researching in this field, or groups of people who might benefit from your research. Note that, while your professor is interested in your research, s/he is not your intended audience. Another way to look at this is to ask the question, “if this research were to be published, who would be interested in reading it?”
Approach to the Subject: With your intended audience in mind, describe the logical, orderly sequence you will use to develop your paper so that it transitions appropriately from thesis to body to conclusion.