Effects of Personalized Versus Generic Implementation of an Intra-Organizational Online Survey on Psychological Anonymity and Response Behavior: A Field Experiment

Purpose

In the present study, we sought to investigate the effects of online survey implementation strategies on perceived anonymity and employee response behavior in organizational surveys.

Design/Methodology/Approach

A field experiment was conducted to compare two commonly used online survey implementation strategies (N = 815). One group of employees received a personalized invitation to the survey and a log-in password, while the other group received a general invitation and did not have to provide a password.

Findings

The results showed that the applied implementation strategies had no substantial effects on perceived anonymity. Moreover, there were no significant effects on nonresponse or the responses of survey participants to closed-ended and open-ended survey questions.

Implications

The present study supposes that online surveys are not a uniform phenomenon and that differences in the implementation of online surveys need to be considered. However, the findings indicate that the use of specified-personalized implementation strategies does not necessarily lead to a substantial decrease in perceived anonymity or automatically result in reduced data quality. Thus, in many cases, the investigated online survey implementation strategies are unlikely to cause serious reductions in perceptions of anonymity and quality of responses to organizational online surveys.

Originality/Value

In spite of the frequent use of online surveys in organizations, little is known about the consequences of online implementation strategies for perceptions of anonymity and response behavior. This study is one of the few empirical examinations of the psychological consequences of different online implementation strategies frequently used in organizational surveying.