Hypothesis

Hypothesis Identification Article Analysis

 

This paper references the document "Winning Companies; winning people: enabling average people to emulate the approaches of high performers" (Coulson-Thomas. 2007. p. 108), and the reference paper was obtained through a ProQuest search for "research studies in" as required in the class assignment. It is peer-reviewed.

The research paper is defined by the author's abstract in which he states, in part, "The purpose of this article is to share some high level findings of a continuous program of research designed to identify critical success factors for important corporate activities such as bidding, building relationships, purchasing and pricing." (Coulson-Thomas.2007. P.108).

The primary hypothesis is virtually all companies participating in this research program (over 4,000), and thus representative of a much larger population, is that they under achieve in performance partly because they apply standardized training and incentive efforts toward the high performers in the same manner as to those who under achieve.

The research program used by the author states that the primary critical success influences are both attitude and behavior of employees. Many companies devote inordinate amounts of resources to non-critical areas while missing key success requirements which they have overlooked. These inconsistencies result in organizations scoring highly in certain studies, but ranking poorly in others and thus restricting their overall performance.

The author suggests that perhaps because of the company's focus on low achievers and attempting to bring these employees up to par, the opportunity to identify high performers in critical workgroups is missed. These companies also do not seem to understand what these high achievers do another way than their peers. The accent is far more often on dispersing