Results
Emergent Themes Analysis
For the ETA, major goals and objectives were grouped into related themes to
form a model of promotion decision making within the company. As explained
earlier, this was done by first reviewing the transcripts for categories of events that
may have occurred based on identifiable goals. For example, all transcripts contained
evidence of senior managers verifying their expectations during the assessment
process. Thus, the goal of verification was further investigated by highlighting
all the related statements across all transcripts. These statements were subsequently
organized into groups of more closely related themes. This process was
repeated for each identifiable goal. The resulting macrocognitive model of how
experts make promotion decisions, illustrating the six central themes, is shown in
Figure 3.
The model shown in Figure 3 includes various reasoning processes, such as
recognition-primed decision making, refinement cycles, hypothesis testing, situation
assessments, and prediction forming. For example, the recognize early potential
theme determined by the ETA is akin to recognition priming, in which the