HRMG 4203 Week 6 Evidence Weighing Matrix Example

Seven Details Against Three Causes: Weighing the Commerce Street Hotel Evidence by What Each Detail Can Decide, and Why Team and Timing Carry the Conclusion

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Walden University

HRMG 4203: Human Resource Management: Analysis and Problems

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Seven Details Against Three Causes: Weighing the Commerce Street Hotel Evidence by What Each Detail Can Decide, and Why Team and Timing Carry the Conclusion

The Matrix

Three candidate causes remain for the rise in weekend new-hire departures at the Commerce Street Hotel, whose case this course has followed for six weeks: late checkouts squeezing a fixed room quota, the weekend supervisor promoted in May and outside job offers. Table 1 sets seven case details against all three. Each cell is marked consistent, inconsistent or silent, with a short reason.

Table 1

Case Details Weighed Against Three Candidate Causes

Composite case. Weight reflects how well a detail separates the candidates, not how important it seems.

Silent Is Not Against

The matrix keeps "silent" separate from "inconsistent." Where the case says nothing about a candidate, the cell says so. The case gives no date for when any outside employer began offering better jobs, so the April start neither supports nor undermines the outside-offers candidate. Treating that silence as evidence against it would be a mistake; absence of evidence is not contrary evidence. Heuer (1999) makes the same distinction in his method for analyzing competing hypotheses, which asks analysts to look for evidence that is inconsistent with a hypothesis rather than piling up evidence that fits.

Weight by What a Detail Can Decide

A detail that fits every candidate cannot help choose among them, however striking it is. Heuer (1999) calls this a detail's diagnosticity: its value lies in how differently the hypotheses predict it. Five of the seven details fit all three candidates, or are silent on most, and so carry low weight. Rising overtime, Sunday complaints and exit forms ticking "better opportunity" are real and worrying, but each would appear whichever cause is true. They describe the problem rather than explain it.

Why Short Tenure Decides Little

The concentration of departures among attendants in their first six months looks like a clue, and the executive housekeeper treats it as one. It decides little, because new employees leave first under almost any pressure. Mitchell et al. (2001) showed that employees who are embedded in a job, with links to colleagues, a sense of fit and something to sacrifice by leaving, are less likely to quit, and new employees score low on all three. Griffeth et al. (2000) found tenure among the more consistent predictors of turnover across studies. Short tenure is therefore what all three candidates would produce, and it cannot separate them.

Team and Timing

Two details do separate the candidates. The first is which team loses people. Departures concentrate on the weekend team, on identical pay, which fits late checkouts and the supervisor but sits poorly with outside offers, since an outside offer should tempt a weekday new hire just as much as a weekend one. The second is when the losses began. The weekend rise begins in April, a month after late checkout launched and a month before the supervisor's promotion. That fits late checkouts and contradicts the supervisor as the starting cause, since a cause cannot follow its effect.

Taken together, team and timing leave one candidate consistent with both: late checkouts squeezing a fixed quota. The supervisor fails on timing; outside offers fail on team. Neither is eliminated as a contributor. The supervisor could have made a bad situation worse after May, and outside offers could be raising turnover across the hotel at a lower level. But only one candidate accounts for both the weekend concentration and the April start.

What the Weighing Cannot Show

The matrix works with what the case gives. Two missing pieces would strengthen or weaken the conclusion. Floor assignments by tenure would show whether new hires clean the convention floors where late checkouts concentrate. Weekly departure counts set against weekly late-checkout volume would show whether departures track the squeeze. Neither is in the case, and the conclusion should be held with that in mind (Heuer, 1999). The next step, an elimination memo, will test the leading candidate against the full shape of the problem.

References

Griffeth, R. W., Hom, P. W., & Gaertner, S. (2000). A meta-analysis of antecedents and correlates of employee turnover: Update, moderator tests, and research implications for the next millennium. Journal of Management, 26(3), 463-488. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600305

Heuer, R. J., Jr. (1999). Psychology of intelligence analysis. Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency.

Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102-1121. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069391