Hi,
My thesis concerns functional diversity within teams, which is is defined as differences in knowledge and perspectives that members bring to a group/team through their functional backgrounds - for instance, you may have a number of engineers, economists, and lawyers all belonging to the same team, providing different inputs to achieve a teams' objectives.
In broad brush strokes, the thesis focuses on the relationship between such functional diversity within teams and a team member's trust of a particular work group/team that they are a member of. One of the main aims of the thesis is to show that these relationships will be moderated by a team members beliefs in relation to functional diversity (For example, a respondents' beliefs that functional diversity will be of benefit to a team may consequently lead to high respondent levels of trust with regard to their particular team).
The two hypotheses that I'm concerned about are :
Hypothesis 1: There will be a direct correlation between the level of functional diversity (0 being lowest diversity, 1 being highest) within a respondents team and the level of trust that the respondent has for that team.
Hypothesis 2: The relationship between team functional diversity and trust of the team will be moderated by respondents "Beliefs" about functional diversity (i.e. whether they see it as being a good or a bad thing)
My main questions in relation to the above hypotheses are the following:
I have found no significant relationship between functional diversity and trust. If there is no significant relationship between the two of these, can I still test hypothesis 2, or should I just discard hypothesis 2 based on the fact that there is no direct relationship between functional diversity and trust (hypothesis 1).
Another concern I have is that the responses for "Functional Diversity beliefs" are negatively skewed. Practically all (142) of the responses that I received range from "undecided" (only a few of these) to "Strongly Agree" on a 7 point Likert scale, with only 3 responses on the "Disagree" side of the scale. I wonder will this affect my results badly, or will I need to "transform" the responses to this scale to make it more "normal" and also to check for direct correlations.
Also, please note that all of the scales mentioned above are 7 point likert type scales.
thanks,
Ken
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