METH3B Individual Assignment 4 Research Project

About METH3B Individual Assignment 4 Research Project

In METH3B, Individual Assignment 4 is your main Research Project, where you pull together everything you have learned about research methods and apply it to a real topic of your choice. For this task, you are expected to choose a focused research question linked to your course, explain why it matters, and support it with recent academic sources. You then set out a clear methodology, showing how you will collect and analyse your data (for example, surveys, interviews, experiments or secondary data), how you will select participants or materials, and how you will deal with ethical issues such as consent and confidentiality. The assignment should show that you understand reliability, validity and possible limitations, not just at the planning stage but also when you interpret your findings. You are also expected to present your results in a logical way, using headings, tables or simple charts if allowed, and to relate your discussion back to the original question and the literature you reviewed. By the end of the Research Project, your marker should be able to see that you can design, justify and reflect on a small but structured piece of academic research, using clear written English and correct referencing throughout.

Small Sample of METH3B Research Project

Remote Work Demands, Organisational Support and Employee Burnout in Service Sector SMEs: An SPSS and AMOS-Based Structural Equation Modelling Study

Introduction

Remote and hybrid work have moved from being a special option to a normal way of working in many service businesses. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in areas such as consulting, customer support, online retail and professional services now rely heavily on digital tools to run their daily operations. Staff are often expected to be online, to respond quickly to messages and to manage several tasks at the same time. While this can increase flexibility, it can also create pressure, stress and a sense that work never really ends.

Many owners and managers of SMEs focus on technology, cost and customer service when they introduce remote work. Less attention is sometimes given to how constant connectivity, electronic monitoring, out-of-hours messages and blurred work–home boundaries affect employees. In larger organisations there are usually HR teams and formal wellbeing programmes. In SMEs, these structures are often informal or missing. As a result, employees may feel that they must “cope on their own”, especially when workloads are high.

Employee burnout has become a common concern in this context. Burnout is not just about feeling tired. It can involve emotional exhaustion, feeling distant or cynical about one’s job and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment. When burnout builds up over time it can lead to poor performance, sickness absence and a higher intention to leave the organisation. For SMEs with limited staff, the loss of experienced employees can harm service quality, customer relationships and future growth.

At the same time, research has shown that perceived organisational support – the feeling that the organisation values employees’ contributions and cares about their wellbeing – can reduce negative outcomes. Simple practices such as fair workload planning, flexible scheduling, regular check-ins, mental health support and clear expectations around online availability can help staff manage their work demands. However, many SME managers are not sure which forms of support make the biggest difference in a remote work setting.

This research project focuses on the links between remote work demands, perceived organisational support, employee burnout and turnover intention in service sector SMEs. It uses primary data collected from employees and applies Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) using SPSS and AMOS. By doing this, the project not only describes relationships between variables, but also tests a full measurement model and a structural model to see how these factors work together.

The core problem that this project addresses is the lack of clear, data-driven understanding of how digital and remote work pressures interact with organisational support to influence burnout and employees’ plans to stay or leave. There is a growing body of general literature on remote work and wellbeing, but fewer studies have used SEM in the specific context of service SMEs, where resources are tight and people often perform multiple roles. This project aims to fill part of that gap.

The aim of this research is to examine how remote work demands and perceived organisational support affect employee burnout and turnover intention in service sector SMEs.

The project is guided by the following research questions:

1. How do employees in service sector SMEs experience remote work demands in their daily roles?

2. What is the relationship between remote work demands and employee burnout?

3. To what extent does perceived organisational support reduce burnout in a remote work context?

4. How does burnout influence employees’ intention to leave the organisation?

5. Does perceived organisational support weaken (buffer) the negative impact of remote work demands on burnout?

To answer these questions, the project draws on established models from organisational psychology, collects primary survey data and applies advanced statistical techniques. The use of EFA and CFA helps to check whether the questionnaire items used in the study really reflect the underlying concepts of interest, such as “remote work demands” and “organisational support”. SEM is then used to test the overall model and to estimate the direct and indirect paths between variables.

This research is important for practice because it can give SME managers clear evidence on where to focus their efforts. If the findings show, for example, that remote work demands strongly predict burnout but that high perceived support significantly reduces this effect, then managers can justify investments in communication, training and wellbeing policies even when budgets are limited. For theory, the project extends the use of the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) framework and social exchange ideas in an SME, remote-work setting, using a robust statistical approach rather than simple correlations.

The rest of the report is structured as follows. The next section reviews the key literature on remote work, job demands and resources, perceived organisational support, burnout and turnover intention. It leads to a conceptual model and testable hypotheses. The methodology section explains how the primary data were collected, how the sample was chosen and how SPSS and AMOS were used. The data analysis and results section presents the measurement models (EFA and CFA) and the final structural model (SEM). The discussion section interprets the findings in relation to previous studies and outlines practical implications, limitations and suggestions for future research.