Assignment Requirements

(Title: Project team motivation)

Assignment details
The purpose of the assignment is to ensure that students have developed an understanding and some relevant knowledge of the literature related to their dissertation topic, as well as assessing their ability to: conduct a literature search, summarise and critically assess journal papers and apply their literature findings to their own specific project.
There are 4 sections to the assignment plus references. Please note that marks will not be given for any content on pages exceeding the maximum number of pages stipulated for each section.
1. A working title, synopsis (including beneficiaries) and aim & objectives (1 page maximum, 15 marks)

Your project topic may change a little as the work develops but at this stage you should give your ??working title’. Its purpose is to give the reader a broad indication of the topic of the assignment. The synopsis is a short summary, outlining the importance and significance of the topic you are proposing to investigate in your dissertation. It should state the nature and purpose of the research and who the potential beneficiaries will be. The aim and objectives outline your intended area and focus of research and help the reader to get a more detailed picture of your proposed project as well as some indication of its structure (there are more details on aim and objectives in the ??critical concepts’ tab in Blackboard). The aim and objectives should be in the form of a list. It is appreciated that, at the moment, the focus of the research may not be established and so this section may still be quite broad. That is fine at this stage, although clearly the research will need to become more focused later.
References should be used in this section if appropriate. The list of references should be included in the references pages at the end of the coursework and need not be included in the one page allocated to this section. The requirements for references are explained later in this document.

2. Search strategy (1 page maximum, 10 marks)
In this section you should set out the search strategy you have used to find appropriate journal papers – this should include such aspects as key words (and why these are relevant) and search engines used. You should include explanation of how you selected the 4-6 core papers that you chose to include in your review i.e. How did you judge their importance/relevance? It should also include an explanation of how and why you selected any other papers and additional sources of information. Other sources of information include web-sites, industry reports etc.
3. Brief Literature Review (3 pages maximum, 60 marks)

Your brief literature review should provide a background and critical analysis of a particular area of academic research related to your dissertation topic. It is up to you to decide which area you wish to focus on and you may wish to discuss this with your supervisor. You may take a broad approach or a very narrowly focused one – this is up to you.
You should summarise the key findings from the 4-6 core papers1 that you have selected (including how the papers came to their conclusions). Your core papers must be peer reviewed journal papers. The review should be primarily based these 4-6 core papers and should include critical comparison and evaluation. It is appreciated that it is often very difficult to critique a refereed journal paper which has already been through a rigorous evaluation process. So the ??critique’ may focus on the scope and limitations of particular papers or areas/approaches that you propose this area of research should focus on. You may use additional papers to help critique or provide context for your review. We recommend that the total number of papers you use does not exceed 12. This suggested limit is given in order to assist you in giving an in-depth account of the literature in the space permitted. You may also use ??additional sources’ such as: websites, industry reports, newspaper articles etc (i.e. any source that is not a peer reviewed journal paper) if you wish.
Asking yourself the following questions may assist you in developing your brief literature review:
Asking yourself the following questions may assist you in developing your brief literature review:
o What are the key findings of the paper and how have the conclusions been arrived at?
o Does the work described in one paper build on the work described in another paper?
o Do the papers arrive at the same conclusions or different conclusions?
o If the papers contradict each other, why, and which conclusion has most validity/applicability to your area of research?

Conclusions from the literature review, implications for your own project and next steps (1 page maximum, 15 marks)
You should summarise the key findings from your literature review (including relevant critical comparison) and discuss how these relate to your own project. You should outline and discuss the implications from the literature review for your own project (this could include, for example: the implications for the focus of your research, your methodological approach, your conceptual/theoretical framework, the relevance of the project to industry etc). You should indicate the next steps for your own project which result from your findings.
References
You must provide a full bibliographic reference for all of the sources cited in your submission at the end of your coursework (not just the url/weblink). References for your core papers must be given on a page titled ??Core References’. Additional references (journal papers and other sources) must be included on a separate page(s) titled ??Additional References’. The pages of references do not count towards the page limits set for each component of the assignment.
Summary of contents and page allocation for assignment
Page 1: A working title, synopsis (including beneficiaries) and aim & objectives
Page 2: Search strategy
Pages 3-5: Brief Literature Review
Page 6: Conclusion
Page 7: Core references
Pages 8- end: Additional references
I also need in citation references, and all in Harvard style please.
1 In selecting which papers to review, the ideal approach would be to select papers which have some overlap of the subject matter but with different approaches rather than dealing with separate aspects. For example, if your topic was Outsourcing, you may select 4-6 papers which deal with the management of risk in outsourcing. However, it is appreciated that this may not be possible, so instead you may choose to select 4-6 papers which deal with different aspects such as HR, cost reduction, managing relations etc. If the nature of the topic means that it is impossible to find refereed journal papers, then other articles (or reports) may be reviewed instead but the search strategy must indicate and clearly justify why what is being reviewed is not a refereed journal paper. If you use non peer reviewed papers and do not justify this, section 3 may be awarded a mark of zero.