THE ROLE OF THE IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MANAGEMENT BY MISSIONS (MBM) MODEL

The in-depth interview, as an instrument of exploratory research for collecting primary data, is one of frequently used method for conducting qualitative research in social sciences. Given that the in-depth interview is carried out for collecting data that goes into "depth" of the research, it is considered as a very useful method for identifying some specific problems. Therefore, this method of market research is often used in management research, as well as in the examination of different management approaches, which is the subject of this paper. The purpose of the paper is to examine the applicability of the in-depth interview in assessing the implementation level of the Management by Missions (MBM) model in the case study of the Spanish multinational company in the agricultural sector. MBM is one of a newer management approaches that implies the implementation of company's mission-as the fundamental purpose of the company existence-at all organizational levels, aiming to increase the level of employees' identification with the company they are working for, and consequently to achieve higher levels of organizational effectiveness. Specifically, the paper tries to answer the question of how in-depth interviews can help to assess the implementation level of the MBM model, to identify the problems and challenges the company faces when implementing the MBM and to generate suggestions for improving the implementation process of MBM. This paper presents some of the results of qualitative exploratory research conducted by in-depth interviews on an intentional sample of five employees of multinational company in the agricultural sector, i.e. expert sample. These respondents work in different positions, departments and organizational levels in the company, and thus they have different roles in the MBM implementation process. In this paper, we wanted to find out how conducting in-depth interviews can help in identifying problems that the company may encounter in the process of MBM implementation, with the aim of further improving its implementation. In this case, in-depth interviews proved to be a very good method, as the small sample of respondents enabled us to undertake a deeper analysis of the interviews. Conducting in-depth interviews uncovered some specific challenges in MBM implementation in multinational company in the agricultural sector and solving them would certainly improve not just the implementation of MBM in that particular company, but could serve as guidelines for further development of the MBM model. Ultimately, we summarize the results of our research with concluding comments and discuss its limitations and recommendations for future work.