Qualitative Research Inquiry to Explore the Corporate Leaders in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 has influenced the business organizations’ performance and behavior in numerous ways. Based on the pressing need to respond to this pandemic researchers have to play a significant role in uncovering the possibilities for business organizations to adapt to this uncertain situation. Therefore, it is important to pay attention on the corporate managers’ and entrepreneurs’ contextualized experiences and their meanings attributed to COVID-19 in order to mitigate failures and to learn to be sustained. This requires qualitative research which can be helpful to capturing the deeper understanding of lived realities of the corporate leaders who are affected by the pandemic. The qualitative researchers can adopt five types of approaches including narrative inquiry, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study to uncover these lived experiences of corporate respondents and to make sense of those experiences for the benefit of various stakeholders. Each of these five approaches to qualitative inquiry can be utilized for researching different facets of the corporate leaders at the time of pandemic. The in-person interactions need for qualitative inquiry to look into the corporate leaders’ lives is challenged by the social distancing generated by the new normal behavior. However, the evolving nature of the modern technology has ended this challenge with its novel initiatives.