Variables are measurable attributes that assume different values among the subjects under consideration. The variables used in this study fell in the broad category of the dependent variable and independent variable. The variables that have been considered independent are those that the researcher doctored to determine their effect on another variable. The variables that were considered to be dependent are those that the researcher measured, predicted, or monitored and was generally expected to be affected by the researcher’s manipulation of the independent variable (Lind, Marchal, & Wathen, 2010). Some variables were qualitative (non-numeric, that is, they are attributes) while others were quantitative (numeric) and were either discrete or continuous. The major variables for this study will be briefly discussed in the following section of this paper. This would go on to list the variables you use in your research – so it matches hypotheses.
Outsourcing and off-shoring help the organization cut down on operating costs while at the same time achieving optimal customer service. Outsourcing was identified on a nominal scale by asking the respondents “Do you outsource or off-shore any of your operations from another provider?” The responses were given labels as follows; 0 = No 1 = Yes and then 2= partially. The third option depicted by 2 was necessary as it enabled the study to categorize differently the IT firms that were in-between; that is not completely outsourcing/off-shoring but only to an extent. This way the study will be more inclined to identify trends on how the variables of interest change across these categories of firms. Since the focus of this study is “to examine IT outsourcing as applied in multinational corporations” the only firms of interest that will be surveyed are only IT related.
Are we not at risk of lumping together a small part of one division of one enterprise with another that does massive redistribution of work across all places? Are you not restricting this to IT?
Operating costs are the expenses incurred by a business venture daily during its operations such as administration, sales, and marketing expenses. It does not include depreciation expenses, interest expenses, or income taxes. The data sources used will be obtained from the income statements of the different companies. Operating costs are identified on an interval scale by the determination of the total operating cost of the specific company versus its generated revenues (Thouin, Hoffman, & Ford, 2009). To measure how the operating costs changed across the firms being surveyed the study calculated the % of the operating costs of the company using generated revenues figures as the base number retrospectively for two years. This is for two reasons; one, to standardize the operating costs across all the firms surveyed because generated revenues will be used in this case to control for excessive operating costs in big companies for instance and vice versa. And secondly, by using financial data for the last two years which is a long duration it will enable any correlations between outsourcing and off-shoring to be noticeable as far as operating costs are concerned since other compounding factors will be able to be controlled such as the effects of the financial crisis and inflation.
How do you measure this across organizations? Is it a change over time, a percentage at a point in time? It seems there would be 100s of reasons for differences. The number of a massive company would be added to a big enterprise?
Customer satisfaction is the degree to which the client is contented with the service provider of the company. Customer satisfaction was identified on an ordinal scale by asking the respondents “How satisfied are you with the products of the company?” Their responses were then used on a five-point likertCapital scale as follows; poorly satisfied = 1 and very satisfied = 5 (Francis, 2006). This variable involved the ordinal level of measurement as the responses were ranked in an order based on their level of satisfaction.
Customer loyalty relates to the customers remaining loyal to the products manufactured by a company. Customer loyalty was identified on a nominal scale by asking the respondents “Would you switch to a product produced by another company?” The responses were then coded and given labels as follows; 0 = No and 1 = Yes.
Profitability indicates the ability of a company to yield a financial gain or profit. It is commonly measured by the “price to earnings ratio” which is “market price per share” or “earnings per share”. To assess the profitability, the researcher used the profitability ratios from different companies that could purely be attributed to the business outsourcing and off-shoring of IT. The data sources were obtained from the survey information collected from various companies. The figures were interval level of measurement as it is not possible to have zero profitability (Blumann, 2009).
Participants are operationally defined as the position the respondent currently holds. The responses were then coded and given labels as follows; IT Technician = 1, IT Manager = 2, Senior Manager = 3, IT Program Manager = 4, and IT Director = 5.
Organizational performance is an accumulated result of organizational process and activity. Commonly organizational work measures include organization effectiveness, productivity, profitability, innovation, and operational efficiency (Hazra, Turban, MacLean, & Wetherbe, 1999). The construct is a composite series of questions.