Multilevel Research in Management: Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological Issues in Level of Analysis
Author
Abstract
Since around the 1930s, prominent scholars in social psychology and sociology time and again appealed for understanding human behaviors from multiple angles to consider structural factors in the environment besides human characteristics. Taking a similar perspective, management scholars gradually recognized that organizational phenomena are inherently multilevel in nature such that behaviors at any level are very likely a result of elements at various levels interacting in various forms. For example, it is now commonly accepted that individual cognitions are influenced at least in part by the context in which they work and departmental operations are affected by organizational strategy. Similarly, actions at the organizational level such as alliance and merger will not take place unless key persons in the organization (e.g., the CEO or the top management team) perceive such a need and determine to put the need into action. Nonetheless, the empirical studies in organizational science today are mostly single-level analyses, reflecting the fact that research practice lags behind concepts and theories in the management community. Understanding multilevel phenomenon from a single level will result in biased interpretation, and worse incorrect knowledge accumulation.
The interest in multilevel research has just started in Taiwan. The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we want to familiarize readers interested in multilevel research and or in level of analysis issues with concepts, theories, and methodologies pertaining to multilevel research perspective. It is our hope that this paper would provide readers with preliminary guidance when they feel the need to quickly get hold of those issues. Second, we want to make this study resourceful to our readers in such a way that, from this paper they find it relatively convenient to locate pioneering and or influential works as well as statistical packages in multilevel enquiry.
We began by elaborating issues dating back in the late 1930s with regard to the fallacies resulted from level misspecifications. While ecological fallacy is committed when researchers interpret macro level correlations as micro level relationships, atomistic fallacy occurs when researchers use micro level correlations to explain macro level phenomena. Organizational scientists have most commonly committed this later fallacy. This section includes our opinions on these wrong level fallacies and their implications.
Next, we summarized and commented on the development of multilevel concepts, theories, and analytic techniques over the last several decades in the West. This study identified two lines of clues: conceptual and analytical. Conceptual development involves the process with which researchers with a single level mindset gradually turn to accepting multilevel thinking. It also sketches how researchers believe multilevel model should be logically constructed and how lower level data can be aggregated to upper level. Pioneers in this stream include Denise Rousseau and Williams Glick. The other clue involves the development of analytical criteria of the conditions under which we determine data aggregation is theoretically sound and statistically robust. Lawrence James and Fred Dansereau, among others, are major contributors in this regard. We argued that it takes both types of development to drive the emerging paradigm shift moving from single to multilevel thinking.
Citing some important works in the literature, we then address issues with regard to multilevel model construction by elaborating three types of models (single-level, cross-level, homogeneous multilevel) as well as four types of constructs (global, configural, shared, and formative). As we addressed the distinctive characteristics of these model and constructs, we provide guidelines for data collection, data conversions and validation. It is stressed that a good understanding of these issues is essential in making appropriate model specification, which in turn is a building block for sound research design and logical data interpretation to avoid potential fallacies.
In the section that follows, we presented an empirical study employing three approaches to examine the relationship between psychological contract breach and objective performance with group cohesiveness as a moderator: individual, group level (both of them single level analyses) and cross level. The results not only demonstrate a case where model misspecification leads to wrong conclusions and exemplify how the organizational phenomenon of interest can be dealt with by research design and data analysis that are explicitly multilevel.
In the concluding section, we emphasized again the importance of multilevel thinking in understanding organizational phenomena. Stressing that theoretical basis dictates research design and data analysis, we argued the popular software HLM is not equivalent to MLR. It is our hope that this paper will encourage more serious organizational scholars to devote their future efforts in MLR.
Key Words
Multilevel Research, Level of Analysis, Aggregation, HLM, Paradigm Shift.
