The Qualitative Study: Data Collection and Data Analysis

The purpose of the qualitative study was to understand ethical leadership, OCB, deviance behaviour, and customers‟ relationship building situated in the Indonesian ICT cultural and industrial context. This understanding was used to inform the model of the effect of ethical leadership developed based on the systematic literature review reported earlier. As noted, findings informed the subsequent quantitative study, including the design of questions in the survey instrument.

3.3.2. Participant Selection

Participants in the qualitative study were selected to represent a group of supervisors, account managers and customers who could provide diverse perceptions of the ethical matters under investigation. Therefore, a purposive sampling technique was used (Creswell 2014). The first six participants of this study comprised one account manager, four supervisors and one customer. All supervisors and account managers who participated in this interview work for an ICT company.

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Access was negotiated by phone on approval of the senior manager in the company. All interviews took place at the participants‟ office or in their working space. The rest of the participants were recruited via managers who participated in the first stage. In total 18 participants were interviewed.

3.3.3. Interview Tools

This qualitative study employed interviewing technique in which for the first interview general questions were used and subsequently followed by more specific questions based on the participants‟ responses (Dick 2012). The following questions were used as the general questions in the interviews:

For Account Managers and Supervisors:

 Describe your activity in customer relationship building.

 What factors do you think positively influence customer relationship quality?

 What factors do you think negatively influence customer relationship quality? For Customers:

 Describe your role in the company.

 Describe how an account manager deals with you.

 What factors do you think could influence your perception towards account managers?

The distinction between positive and negative influence toward customer relationship quality were identified in the data analysis. Stages of data analysis are explained in the subsequent section.

In interview person of the Qual study, the person interviewed represented a business customers. This person was the main contact of the account managers in the customers' organisation. Such a role could be administrative or technical and were the contact person who frequently interacted with account managers. All interviews were recorded and transcribed in Indonesian. The researcher transcribed the audio recordings into Microsoft Word® documents. The accuracy of the transcription was checked by the researcher‟s colleagues who are competent in Bahasa Indonesia and had taken coursework on qualitative research at doctoral level. Thematic analysis was used to categorise narratives from the interview transcriptions as elaborated in the subsequent subchapters.

3.3.4. Thematic Data Analysis

Thematic analysis was used to identify main themes of the interviews. Thematic analysis can be viewed as a core process of qualitative analysis embedded in a larger method such as grounded

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theory, a tool used in many epistemological approaches in dealing with qualitative data, or a method by itself (Boyatzis 1998; Braun & Clarke 2006). Key characteristics of thematic analysis as a method are: (1) it is a flexible method that can be used either as a realist or constructivist approach; (2) it has six recursive stages: (a) establish familiarity with the data, (b) create initial code, (c) search for themes, (d) review themes, (e) define themes, (f) write-up report; (3) it has a checklist of good practice including that detailed transcriptions have been checked for accuracy, coding has been inclusive and comprehensive, it provides good balance between analytic narrative and illustrative extract, and it is explicit about assumptions being made (Braun & Clarke 2006).

In this study the following items characterise the approaches used for the thematic analysis:

1. What constitutes themes: occurrence of variables in the research questions and other dominant items mentioned by at least two groups of participants

2. More deductive or theory-driven themes, but allows for inductive themes 3. Language conveys meaning and also considers meaning as a social construction 4. More latent approach to themes and attempt of theorising or interpreting were made 5. More detailed explanations of variables and gaining the richness of the data

3.3.5. The Use of NVivo 11 Software Package and Coding Process

NVivo 11 was used to manage interview transcriptions and conduct the thematic analysis. The use of a software package in qualitative data analysis enhances the quality of the process (Richards 2015; Seale 1999). All of the interview transcriptions were exported to NVivo 11 alongside the participants‟ demographic information. The original transcripts were in Bahasa Indonesia, and the coding was in English. A report was producedat the end of the qualitative analyses that consists of the main themes and related quotes. The report including the NVivo outputs of the node structure was checked and discussed with supervisors.

Three stages of coding were conducted iteratively: descriptive coding, categorisation of coding and themes identification (Bazeley 2013; Richards 2015). Descriptive coding is a process of tagging short keywords for each part of the interview transcription. At least one code was tagged for each participant‟s response to a question, providing at least ten codes for each interview transcription. The compilation of these initial codes was then further clustered and grouped relating to the main variables investigated in this study. Codes which did not belong to any specific variables were grouped into a single “other” category. The process of descriptive coding and categorisation of coding was conducted mainly in NVivo 11.

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Themes were selected based on dominant categories. Themes were then positioned towards the topic investigated. Three possible positions were elaborated: illustration, confirmation, and contradiction (Bazeley 2013; Bazeley & Jackson 2013; Braun & Clarke 2006; Creswell 2014; Plano Clark & Ivankova 2016; Richards 2015). An illustrative theme is providing “the story” of how variables in the model are presented in the Indonesian B2B context. The confirmation theme is providing affirmative evidence of the existence of the variables under study, while the contradiction themes serve as counter-explanations of the phenomena.