DBAX 9102 Week 6 Open Remainder Statement Example

Not "Little Is Known" but Exactly What Is Not: An Open Remainder Statement Naming the Untested Combination of Manager Coaching Frequency, Coaching Skill and Recorded Quota Attainment in Industrial Distribution

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 9102: Business Research Project Stage 2

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Not "Little Is Known" but Exactly What Is Not: An Open Remainder Statement Naming the Untested Combination of Manager Coaching Frequency, Coaching Skill and Recorded Quota Attainment in Industrial Distribution

Why Not "Little Is Known"

Gap statements usually announce that little is known about a topic. That invites an easy reply: someone has studied it. A reviewer who finds one study can dismiss the gap. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) argue that research questions built only on spotting gaps tend to produce small additions to existing thinking, and that stronger questions come from identifying what existing work assumes. This statement instead names precisely what the reviewed literature has not tested, given what it has: the open remainder left after the settled findings and the claims sorted in earlier weeks.

What Has Been Tested

Coaching in general has been tested extensively, with positive average effects. Managers' coaching has been linked to employees' performance in many field studies, including distribution settings such as the warehouse study by Ellinger et al. (2003), but mostly with ratings as outcomes. Coaching skill and frequency have been separated in at least one sales study: Dahling et al. (2016) reported that more frequent sessions paid off chiefly for skilled coaches, using goal attainment in a large sales organization.

The Remainder

Table 1

What Has and Has Not Been Tested

Built from the extraction sheet of 37 studies.

The Remainder Stated

The reviewed literature has not examined whether, among outside salespeople in industrial distribution, the frequency of coaching sessions logged by their sales managers is related to recorded quota attainment once the salespeople's own ratings of their managers' coaching skill are taken into account, under a company policy that sets a frequency target. Each part of that sentence is tested somewhere; the combination is not.

Why the Combination Matters

The combination matters because the policy question in many sales organizations is precisely whether to set coaching frequency targets. Dahling et al. (2016) suggest that frequency without skill adds little, but their setting differed, and their study was not designed to evaluate a frequency policy. A company that sets a target of two sessions a month is betting that frequency matters on its own. The remainder asks whether that bet is supported where it is actually made.

What the Remainder Does Not Claim

The remainder makes no claim that sales coaching is unstudied. Nor does it say the combination is untested everywhere, only in the literature this review found with a documented search. A reviewer who knows a study meeting all five elements would weaken the remainder, and I would want to know of it.

How the Remainder Shapes the Study

Each element of the remainder becomes a design requirement. Studying branch sales managers in industrial distribution sets the population. Using logged sessions rather than recalled ones requires access to the company's customer relationship system, where managers record coaching under the current plan. Measuring skill separately requires a short survey of salespeople about their manager's coaching. Using recorded quota attainment over several quarters requires the company's sales reporting data. And the policy element means the study must describe how the frequency target was introduced, since a target that managers treat as a box to tick may produce logged sessions that differ from real coaching. None of these requirements is optional; dropping any one would move the study back into territory the literature has already covered.

A Check Against the Assumption

I then asked, as Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) urge, what the existing studies assume. Most assume that coaching is a voluntary managerial behavior that varies naturally. The policy setting breaks that assumption: when frequency is mandated, managers who coach poorly may coach as often as those who coach well. That shift is part of why the remainder is worth studying, not only a gap in coverage. It turns a question about a natural behavior into a question about a management policy, which is the question my company and many other sales organizations actually face.

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.59330882

Dahling, J. J., Taylor, S. R., Chau, S. L., & Dwight, S. A. (2016). Does coaching matter? A multilevel model linking managerial coaching skill and frequency to sales goal attainment. Personnel Psychology, 69(4), 863-894. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12123

Ellinger, A. D., Ellinger, A. E., & Keller, S. B. (2003). Supervisory coaching behavior, employee satisfaction, and warehouse employee performance: A dyadic perspective in the distribution industry. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 14(4), 435-458. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.1078