Topic: leadership effectiveness in public organizations. A possible research question is how different leadership styles influence employee motivation and job satisfaction in government agencies. After selecting a research topic of interest, students will be required to write a comprehensive literature review. This entails a consultation of scholarly source material in the form of academic books and journals (See Chapter #17 in the Babbie textbook for an overview of what goes into a literature review.). Here, students will examine the current scholarly literature in an effort to frame the importance of their research topic. In other words, you will both describe previous research findings (not the authors’ distinct research methodology – you will do this later on in the journal article critique) and directly connect these findings to your own research topic. For example: How do the authors’ findings, variables, etc. relate to your own proposed research? If you can’t make a specific, immutable connection with what others have done, then it should not be included in your literature review. Don’t just summarize for the sake of summarizing (e.g., If an author makes a connection between gender and service satisfaction but your study on service satisfaction will not examine gender, there is no reason for you to discuss, in excruciating detail, the importance of gender’s relationship with service satisfaction. Only state/analyze that information which is relevant to your own study.). A good literature review, nonetheless, not only summarizes past research, but it also connects that past research specifically to your own research topic, questions, and hypotheses.
For this assignment, students are expected to utilize at least 10 scholarly outside resources in addition to the course textbook. Preferably, the sources should be within the last 10 years. An abbreviated list of scholarly journals can be found below. The use of Internet websites and blogs do not count as scholarly sources.
