This paper is a Critically appraised topic where you have to answer to You have just taken a job as an analyst in the Department of Work and Pensions, a very large government department. Shortly after joining you get an email from the new HR Director:

Welcome to the Department of Employment. I hope you’re settling in. We need your help with an important assignment. Let me give you some background.

For over 15 years we’ve been running an annual employee survey which asks our employees a range of questions about their attitudes towards their work and the Department. It’s expensive to run and we’re not convinced that it’s that useful for us. One of the things we measure in the survey is job satisfaction as there is a widely-held view that more satisfied employees perform better. We are planning to look at our own organizational data to see if this is the case but also want to know what the scientific evidence looks like. We would therefore like you to conduct a mini-CAT which answers this question: What is known in the scientific literature about the cause-effect relationship between job satisfaction and employee performance? We will feed the results of your mini-CAT into our decision-making about whether or not to continue measuring job satisfaction. We have appointed an external advisor, Professor Rob Briner at QMUL and the Center for Evidence-Based Management, to provide guidance and advice as we don’t have much experience conducing mini-CATs. Please direct any questions about the mini-CAT and what we need to him.

question above but with a specific background and scenario.
Here are the instructions. You have just taken a job as an analyst in the Department of Work and Pensions, a very large government department. Shortly after joining you get an email from the new HR Director:

Welcome to the Department of Employment. I hope you’re settling in. We need your help with an important assignment. Let me give you some background.

For over 15 years we’ve been running an annual employee survey which asks our employees a range of questions about their attitudes towards their work and the Department. It’s expensive to run and we’re not convinced that it’s that useful for us. One of the things we measure in the survey is job satisfaction as there is a widely-held view that more satisfied employees perform better. We are planning to look at our own organizational data to see if this is the case but also want to know what the scientific evidence looks like. We would therefore like you to conduct a mini-CAT which answers this question: What is known in the scientific literature about the cause-effect relationship between job satisfaction and employee performance? We will feed the results of your mini-CAT into our decision-making about whether or not to continue measuring job satisfaction. We have appointed an external advisor, Professor Rob Briner at QMUL and the Center for Evidence-Based Management, to provide guidance and advice as we don’t have much experience conducing mini-CATs. Please direct any questions about the mini-CAT and what we need to him.