Data Collection

Before the interviews, we informed our respondents about the rough topic of the interview – women in leadership positions and promotion – and the timeframe of about 45 minutes that we had set. Furthermore, we briefed them that we were interested in their personal accounts, experiences, stories, examples and anecdotes so they would be prepared for the style of the interview. We deliberately did not send them our interview guide beforehand, because we wanted to avoid pre-fabricated answers, but rather aimed at a spontaneous, personal exchange with our respondents.

Overall, we interviewed eleven employees, five from Organization A and six from Organization B. Nine respondents were female, two were male, one from each organization.

The work experience of our respondents ranged from nine to 26 years and everyone except

one respondent held a leadership position. On average, our respondents were 44 years old,

ranging between 29 and 50 years. The interviews lasted between 35 and 70 minutes, with an

average of 50 minutes. All but two respondents had work experience in HR. However, only seven respondents were currently working in an HR-related field such as talent acquisition, culture and diversity, employer branding, executive management or workforce planning. The other four respondents worked in internal audit, group strategy, controlling and the corporate client business.

All interviews were conducted in German. We chose to do so in spite of potential extra effort regarding transcription and translation of quotes in the following analysis. As German was the respondents’ native language, we chose it as the language of our interviews to better be able to gain authentic, spontaneous answers from our respondents. Even though the majority of our respondents was proficient in English, we did not see any advantages in conducting the interviews in English, as languages always serve as a carrier of ideologies, which differ among the different languages (Tietze, 2004). By speaking German, we therefore intended to gain real-life accounts from our respondents’ business life – which predominantly took place in Germany.

The interviews were recorded using our phones, which all respondents had earlier agreed to.

We furthermore promised anonymity, to further encourage them to speak freely and not be constrained by what they might think appropriate to share about their organizations. All in all, we did not have the impression that the recording hindered interviewee transparency, illustrated by multiple examples of the respondents criticizing their employer rather openly.

We took additional notes during the interviews and wrote down impressions that advanced our thinking for follow-up questions during the interviews and enabled us to capture communication by our respondents that could not simply be recorded.

Something we learned for our next research was the importance of location for conducting

the interviews. At Organization B, each interviewee arranged a room for our interview by

herself. In contrast, it was very convenient that our contact person from Organization A had

reserved a conference room for us where we could stay the whole day. This small side effect

made it easier for us to create a comfortable and inviting environment, by providing coffee

and water for our respondents. This was not so easy for us at Organization B, as we had to

find the reserved room before each interview and set up anew. This led to slightly less

convenient environments for the interviews, as for example one interview which we

conducted in the canteen, which was very busy and loud and at lunchtime. However, despite

the sometimes bare surroundings, all respondents shared very intimate experiences with us and did not seem bothered by the circumstances.

Our interview guide can be found in Appendix A. We chose not to design our questions around existing theory and terminology to avoid missing “a key aspect of [our respondents’]

sensemaking by imposing our preordained understandings on their experience” (Gioia et al., 2012, p. 17). Furthermore, we designed our questions carefully to avoid leading questions and to cause our respondents to speak a lot and provide us with as detailed experiences as possible.

While our research focuses on communication, we deliberately chose not to formulate questions that asked for specific communicational processes or instruments. This decision goes along with our understanding of communication as a complex process of meaning negotiation, not as a mere instrument for information transfer. We therefore rather formulated questions that aimed at stories and anecdotes, so that we were able to identify communicative patterns in our data later on. Our interview guide in fact included one question that explicitly mentioned communication. However, the answers we got in response to this question endorsed our decision to gain data about communication in an implicit way. This was due to the fact that our respondents actually seemed confused by the question containing the wording “communication” and had difficulties understanding what we meant by it.

Over a period of several weeks and in parallel with the reviewing of potentially relevant literature, we collected all kinds of questions on a wide range of topics from general promotion issues to women in leadership positions and diversity. In the preparation of our interview guide, the questions were divided in three thematic blocks: 1) personal career development, 2) promotion processes in the organization, and 3) diversity strategy. With this structure, we intended to start with a focus on the respondent herself, get to know the person and set the ground for an open personal interchange.

Subsequently, we wanted to get to know the processes of the organizations. This second

block of the interview turned out to provide us with quite an amount of technical knowledge

about the organizations, which was essential for our understanding of Organizations A and

B, and their respective industries in order to contextualize our respondents’ individual

experiences later on in the process of our analysis. However, these facts turned out to lack

theorizable content, as their focus did not concern our respondents’ personal experiences. We

reacted to this circumstance by asking the questions that caused these technical descriptions only to the first few respondents from each organization. For the subsequent interviews, we concentrated more strongly on the questions aiming at personal experiences, anecdotes and experiences.

Altogether and in line with the method of conducting semi-structured interviews, we only adjusted our questions slightly along the way, only skipping questions if our respondent had already answered the respective question in the course of another answer. We frequently asked our respondents individual follow-up questions, not pre-determined in our interview guide to gain even more insights about their experiences they had just shared with us.

However, we had two exceptions from our normal interview procedure: One respondent was only able to make time for a 30-minute interview, so we spontaneously decided on the questions which seemed most important in her specific case. Secondly, our last respondent held the special position of Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) at Organization A. In this given situation, we saw an opportunity for specific insights and new knowledge. This caused our questions to deviate considerably from our protocol. However, as it turns out, similar themes as with the other respondents came up even in the interviews with slightly different questions.

Overall, the sequence of our three interview blocks proved very appropriate. In the majority of interviews the conversation went naturally from one topical block to the next, without requiring us as researchers to interrupt the interview with a new, unexpected topic.

In this context, it is essential to note that we changed the formulation of the interview questions on the basis of our respondents. This even affected our entire research topic. In the beginning, we often used the word ‘promotion’, but we quickly switched to ‘career development’ to refer to the process workers pass through during their professional life. Most of our respondents commented on how outdated the concept of promotion seemed to them.

‘Career development’ was instead seen as more appropriate and introduced as the most popular and frequently used term in our case organizations.

Another interesting reflection can be made about the language our respondents used.

Although our respondents were all familiar with the topicality of diversity and affirmed their

endorsement for the issue, we observed that most of them did not use gender-neutral

language, but instead applied the generic masculine form. Regardless of this being a

conscious or unconscious decision, the exclusive use of the male form surprised us and

indicates that this practice is widely applied in the organizations as a communicational norm.