'Perception of Organizational Participation: A Cross-Cultural Study' (AsPredicted #77668)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 3 authors.
Pre-registered on 10/22/2021 12:11 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? This study tests whether employees from the US and China prefer a participatory work environment to a non-participatory work environment. A high participation workplace is depicted as having more opportunities for its employees to make decisions and voice opinions at work.
We hypothesize that employees in both the US and China generally prefer a participatory work environment to a non-participatory work environment. Employees will link high-participation to higher productivity, higher job satisfaction, and more workplace conflict. There may be cross-cultural differences in the perceived relationship between participation and its outcomes (i.e., in terms of worker productivity, job satisfaction, and workplace conflict).
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. We will present two vignettes depicting two different work environments: a participatory workplace and non-participatory workplace. The key dependent variables are employees' general preference of these two workplaces, their perceived productivity at these two workplaces, and their perceived workplace conflict at these workplaces. :using the following items:
"How productive are you at this workplace?"
[1 - Extremely unproductive; 7 - Extremely productive]
"How satisfied are you with your daily job functions?"
[1 - Extremely dissatisfying; 7 - Extremely satisfying]
"How much do you like the work environment at Enterprise Industries?"
[1 - Dislike a great deal; 7 - Like a great deal]
"How much workplace conflict do you think you will encounter?"
[1 - None at all; 7 - All the time]
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Participants will undergo a within-group assignment where they will be presented with two vignettes describing different work environments (participatory VS non-participatory). The order of the work vignettes will be randomized. The first vignette will correspond to a workplace with a high participatory norm where everyone is encouraged to speak up and voice opinions in the work environment; the second work environment will correspond to a workplace with low or non-participatory norm where employees do not exercise any influence over their work environment.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. First, since there are two measurement points (participatory and non-participatory), we will do a paired sample t-test to examine whether there is a within-subject difference in a) preference to a participatory work environment versus a non-participatory work environment; b) perceived productivity; c) perceived job satisfaction; and d) perceived workplace conflict.
We will also do repeated measures multiple regression, using both a between-subject predictor (country: China or US), a within predictor (participatory or non-participatory), the interaction term, and covariates including gender, age, education, occupation, and other demographic variables not affected by the experimental manipulation.
In addition, since we randomize the order of the participatory and non-participatory vignettes, we will get two balanced groups: one group that see the participatory condition first and the other that see the non-participatory condition first. In this analysis, we will truncate the data to only include participants' responses to the first-seen condition and therefore treat the data as essentially between-subject. In the truncated data, we will do linear regression--regressing the dependent variables on the condition (participatory or non-participatory), country (US or China), and demographic covariates.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will only exclude participants who fail simple attention checks. No outliers will be excluded.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. A total of 400 observations will be collected, 200 of which from China and the other from the US.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We will also collect demographic information from the participants, as well as the perceived similarity between the experimental workplaces and their actual workplace.
