REVIEW OF HR RESEARCH

One of the major advantages that come with conducting a quantitative surveys is that it allows for greater generalization of findings (Clifford & Clark, 2014). In the research paper that was studied however, this cannot be said to be the case. The reason is that there were some issues and weaknesses with the data collection process that made it difficult for the researcher to achieve generalization of findings. That is, even though this was not a case study, the researchers decided to limit the data collection to only one city and a selection of sectors. As a result, the outcome of the study could not be generalized for organizations as a whole. What is more, because the researchers used SPSS in their analysis, they had the opportunity of widening their sample size so as to enhance the reliability of the study but this was not done as less than 200 entries were considered for the study.

Going into the future, it will be important to address the generalization issue since a survey whose outcomes cannot be generalized could also have reliability issues (Blaxter, Hughes & Tight, 2011). That is when the same study is repeated at another place with the same variables maintained, it is likely that the outcome will be entirely different from the current one. To address the issue, future researchers can use very large sample size of about 500 respondents, taken from over 50 sectors in many cities. Alternatively, future researchers can undertake several series of case studies in different sectors to find the relationship between human resource management practices and organizational commitment in each of them. By so doing, there would not be the issue of generalization since the researchers will be comparing the outcomes specific to each sector to others (Gerrish & Lacey, 2013). For example the results pertaining to the banking sector could be compared to those in the health sector.