A HIERARCHICAL APPROACH FOR DEFINING AND CLASSIFYING CONSTRUCTS IN MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING RESEARCH: EXAMPLES FROM THE FIELD OF DYSFUNCTIONAL BEHAVIOR

Purpose - Construct clarity and overlapping problems are obvious in management and marketing literatures. Moreover, they cause serious methodological problems. It is vital to provide meaningful definition and classification procedures for management and marketing phenomena. Current paper argues that defining and classifying constructs using hierarchical approach can provide clear and practically meaningful construct definitions and classifications. Methodology - Current paper reviews construct definition articles in the fields of management, marketing and psychology in order to provide hierarchical construct definition and classification procedure. Authors also apply this procedure in the field of dysfunctional behavior, which has seriously suffered from construct definition overlaps. Findings- Although previous literature tends to classify constructs dichotomously (latent constructs and observable variables), our literature review discovers more than two levels in the hierarchical abstraction-generalizability continuum, such as umbrella and bridging constructs. Conclusion- Current paper concludes that using hierarchical criteria map for defining and classifying constructs may cause meaningful, distinct (but not disconnected) construct definitions, which clearly target real world phenomena.

Keywords:

Construct definition, dysfunctional behavior, construct clarity umbrella constructs, bridging constructs,

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