Analyzing employee behavior related questionnaires by combined fuzzy signature model

Abstract The evaluation of data obtained from responses given to questionnaires in humanities and social sciences, such as management, linguistics, etc. is a complex task with the necessity of dealing with the inherent subjectivity and vagueness in such data. In this paper, a method based on fuzzy signatures (FSigs), suitable for analyzing questionnaires with hierarchically connected (partially) vague responses is proposed, and its applicability will be demonstrated by a real life problem; the partial analysis of an ongoing research examining employee behavior in various companies. The linkage of the factors hidden in the data bases obtained from the answers to the questionnaires, containing various factors interconnected in a more or less tight way, are represented by a hierarchical FSig system, allowing further evaluation and the discovery of emerging connections and deeper patterns among the responses, thus extending the idea of the original FSig model towards a more general, fuzzy-fuzzy signature approach. The method proposed here is a combination of some statistical elements with the Fuzzy Signature model, and it also uses Kohonen-maps in order to discover deeper structural components in the data pool. As FSigs are suitable to express hierarchically structured connections among vague and imprecise features of the individual data, the statistical analysis helps reveal the degrees of redundancies and the closeness of connectedness of the individual elements within the responses, and thus enable the construction of a relevant FSig tree graph for the data on hand, while further expert domain knowledge helps with determining the proper fuzzy aggregations in the intermediate nodes of the FSigs. The case study presented is based on data obtained from North Lithuanian companies. The results of the case study focusing on the analysis of the connection between OCB and CWB, and other factors, disclose some interesting and, partly unexpected, results. They indicate a strong and unambiguous relationship between career satisfaction and OCB, which is not very surprising. However, it is found that there is no relationship with gender, age, and actual position in the company, which are generally supposed to be determining factors. These results may be further validated by expert knowledge, and thus the new combined method for evaluating structured multicomponent data and internal dependencies is adequate.

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