To what extent (and why) is it possible to decide which approach is ‘superior’?

Jake was a part-time student working for an NHS Trust in its HR Department. The organisation was concerned that it was losing a significant number of nurses and that its retention rates were lower than others in the region. Anecdotal evidence led Jake to be concerned about the way nurses were being managed and supported by their line managers and that morale in general was very low with weak levels of employee engagement. For his research project Jake decided to measure a number of variables including employee engagement, organisation citizenship behaviour, intention to leave and supervisor–subordinate relationships. He achieved this through the adaptation of existing scales and particularly the work of Shacklock and Brunetto (2011). Jake set out to gather and analyse data from a range of nurses from across the Foundation Trust via a self-completion questionnaire, in order to provide generalised conclusions around some of the key factors associated with turnover.