Literature review in your dissertation proposal: guidelines

For literature review in your dissertation proposal, try to focus on:

How your chosen academic concepts and theories [in bolded words] are employed:

1.  in formulation of your research objectives as major variables, e.g. to  examine how the poor organization atmosphere affects the employee morale of ABC Ltd.

2. in analyzing the management concerns that you study as a major evaluation approach, e.g. to examine managers' difficulties encountered in a work setting using role theory.

3. in justifying the academic and practical values of your research objectives, e.g., to use management competencies framework to evaluate on managers' difficulties and inform how to make proper human resource development recommendations based on the management competencies framework.

4. in establishing the academic value [as well as practical value]  of your research objectives, e.g., by studying how poor organization atmosphere due to upcoming organizational outsourcing at ABC Ltd affects employee morale, the dissertation project  improves our intellectual/ practical understanding of how to make use of the concept of organization atmosphere to assess its organizational impacts, notably on the organizational behaviour of the organization under investigation. As such, this increases our conceptual understanding of the organization atmosphere topic.

In summary, the key focus of literature review for dissertation proposal writing is on (i) major variables as part of the research objectives, (ii) approaches for evaluation, (iii) approaches for making recommendations, and (iv) academic/ practical value determination.

In your literature review [in writing up your dissertation proposal], you need clear referencing; ability to identify and justify usage of specific concepts and theories from specific writers is also much appreciated.