t h e n ew no rma l
| 2 01 2
65
The survey’s aim was to identify the current issues at
the forefront of New Zealand Chief Executives’ minds.
To our knowledge, no other New Zealand survey of this
scale has been conducted, so the results provide a unique
snap shot of Chief Executive opinions.
Overview
This survey was conducted by Dr Ann Hutchison of The University of Auckland Business
School, in collaboration with Kensington Swan, which commissioned the research.
The data were collected between June and August 2012.
The survey comprised a series of multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions.
In the multiple-choice section, respondents were presented with a list of challenges
and a list of risks. They were asked to work through each list and rate each item in
terms of its intensity using a Likert scale. Respondents were then asked to comment
on whether any challenges / risks were missing from that list. This was followed by a
series of open-ended questions, prompting respondents to elaborate on issues that
concerned them.
The items were presented in two separate lists – challenges and risks – purely to
make the survey easy to complete. What we were most interested in, however,
were the issues at the forefronts of Chief Executives’ minds. The results are presented
with this in mind, focusing on extracting key issues rather than separating ‘risks’
from ‘challenges’. Chief Executives, in fact, used the words ‘risk’ and ‘challenge’
interchangeably in the open-ended questions, so combining the risk and challenge
data to come up with general issues was the most sensible approach.
Analysis of results
The results were analysed by the Business School by taking each item on the list, and
calculating the percentage of Chief Executives who rated that item as a top risk /
challenge. For challenges, the percentage of Chief Executives who rated each challenge
as ‘among the top three to five challenges faced by my organisation’ was of
interest. For risks, it was the percentage of Chief Executives who rated each risk as
‘
one of the riskiest issues faced by my organisation’. Using percentages in this way,
it is easy to identify which issues are most commonly of concern to Chief Executives.
The qualitative and quantitative data were consistent with each other, the qualitative
data playing an important role in ‘bringing to life’ the numeric responses.
Sample
The sample comprised 135 Chief Executives from the Private sector, 62 from the
Public sector and 68 from the Not-For-Profit sector, giving a total of 265. The sample
was obtained by sending 1,000 surveys to New Zealand’s largest organisations.
methodology