Are you questioning your choice of picking the HRM field? Well, welcome to the club!!

This is not just a case of an HRM student but every student starts to question their choices when they are asked to write a thesis for their major subject. One of the effective ways to eliminate the terrors of your thesis is to set the base right, and the base of a thesis is its proposal.

What is a thesis proposal?

A thesis proposal is the road map of the thesis, in your thesis proposal, you inform the reader about what you are going to do in your research and how you are going to do it.

The purpose of a proposal:

The proposal is written to justify your choice of research topic and to propose to your supervisor how you plan to conduct the research to answer your research question.

A thesis proposal is always going to be in the future tense.

Elements of an HRM thesis proposal;

Talking about the HR thesis, it is not so much different than any other proposal. Remember whenever you are writing a thesis proposal, no matter what the field is, the structure always remains the same, the only thing that changes according to the subject is the attributes of the content in your proposal. Let’s understand this statement a little further;

Introduction:

The introduction part of your thesis proposal gives the following information;

• What is your topic?
• What areas your research is about to cover?
• What is the background of your research?
• What are the aims and objectives of your research?

When you are proposing an HRM subject, your topic will be related to human resource management. The area of your research will be bounded to the field of HRM as well. The aims and objectives of your research will also be revolving around the field of HRM.

Literature Review:

A literature review is when you critically analyze the previously researched data on your topic or related to your topic. For an HR thesis proposal, your literature review will be limited to the case studies, pdfs and data related to employees and their affairs in any organization.

• The aims and objectives of other HRM studies done by other researchers.
• Weaknesses in those studies.
• What are your learning outcomes from your HRM literature review?

Methodology and design:

In this step of your human resource management thesis proposal, you will inform the reader about the methodology of your data gathering. This might be the only thing that remains unchanged regardless of your chosen field. In this section of your thesis proposal, you inform the reader about the nature of your thesis and what were the approaches you used to achieve data.

In the methodology section, you discuss the following things;

The type of your research; is it qualitative or quantitative?

Mention your population; here it is an obvious thing that your population would be the corporate officials or the HR personnel. For example; Expectations of employees from their organization.

Research methods; inform the reader about the surveys, interviews, experiments, or observations you conducted to find the reasoning to support your hypothesis.

Hypothesis/ Arguments:

A thesis would be useless without the hypothesis or arguments that support your thesis statement. An efficient proposal must contain both alternative and null hypotheses. Hypotheses are usually formed after reading the literature review as you have found the research gap from analyzing different researches. A little pro tip would be to make the hypothesis that contributes to your field. The best would be to pick the most common problem faced by the employees of any organization.

  A problem-solving thesis is much more interesting to conduct.

Bibliographic List of References:

It is completely a foolish thought that a thesis can be written alone, it is a complex task that requires professional assistance. The reason why researchers study the work of other researchers, and when students get inspired by the work of other people, they have to acknowledge theirs by giving them credits. The most commonly used referencing style used in the HRM thesis are following;

• MLA style
• Vancouver System
• Chicago referencing

A research proposal needs to discuss the referencing style the thesis has been shaped in. In most cases, this requirement is set by your educational institution or your research instructor.

Now, there was no bigger difference in an HRM proposal than any other, it was almost the same. The thesis proposal helps the researcher to stay on track, it saves them from getting lost in the various direction of your research.

Bonus tips! 

Other than the discussed structure, the following tips could help you in writing an effective HRM thesis proposal same like one of those best thesis writing services – The Research Guardian. Take good hold of them!

Study the environment of different organizations:

This tip will help you in setting the boundary to your expectations when you are willing to solve a problem through your thesis. The broader your knowledge about the organizational environments the lesser biasness in opinions occurs.

Make one Multinational company your ideal!

Multinational companies are supposed to have one of the most effective HR departments. Read about them and learn their strategies of coping up with their employees. 

In the end, your thesis proposal for an HRM challenges your knowledge about your field. Thesis proposals are not hard to write, with proper guidelines and information, it becomes an easy task.

Author Bio:

I am Olivia Lauren and I am a PhD in human resource management and a research supervisor. Seeing my students’ struggles with the research proposal, I decided to write this blog to help the students write better research proposals for their HRM thesis.

Author’s note: This post covers what I teach my students in class when briefing them on how to write a research proposal and since, I have started giving them these points, I have observed the quality of their proposals have gotten better.