Master Thesis : ECG - Engagement Compliance Grid. Development and expert-based validation of a control-autonomy matrix with personas and improvement pathways for organizational practice

Abstract

This master thesis develops and validates an organisational framework built around the intersecting dimensions of “control-compliance” and “autonomy-engagement”. The proposed model combines these two conceptual axes with nine personas positioned within this matrix, and 16 improvement pathways that describe how movement between personas could occur in practice. This study aims to evaluate whether these elements are conceptually coherent, sufficiently clear and distinctive, and practically meaningful to be used as a diagnostic tool in organisational context. An expert panel assessed the content validity and practical usability of the full model. For full persona set has been evaluated on 5-point scales for clarity, relevance, distinctiveness, positional appropriateness and usefulness, alongside item-level content validity on 4-point scales. The results clearly indicate that the persona set is strongly supported with consistently high median scores and averages largely falling between 4.07 and 4.87. The overall persona set validation reaches an average of 4.20 with 93% of all ratings in the 4-5 rating range. In addition, all persona-level content-validity indices meet or exceed a priori thresholds, which indicates that the selected attributes are considered to be relevant and clearly formulated. When analysing individual personas, some clear patterns emerge. Clarity, relevance and positioning are particularly strong across all nine personas, indicating that experts broadly recognise the logic behind the matrix and the locations of profiles inside it. The strongest agreement is observed with clearly distinguishable personas, in particular Innovative and Empowered, which combine very high average scores with very limited dispersion. The mid-region personas (e.g., Fulfilled, Harmonized and Diligent) remain well supported, but present slightly more variation on distinctiveness and usefulness, which indicates they are meaningful yet somewhat more sensitive to nuance and contextual interpretation. The pathway layer offers a more mixed but still valuable validation. Across all 16 pathways, median scores remain positive (typically at 4), but average scores and levels of agreement vary more substantially than with the persona layer. This was anticipated as pathways correspond to possible mechanisms of “persona movement” and therefore induce more debate than the relatively static persona descriptions themselves. Certain pathways (e.g., Involvement, Initiative, Discipline, Alignment and Precision), however, still show comparatively strong support across plausibility, feasibility, appropriateness and meaningfulness. Other pathways (e.g., Delegation, Proactivity, Balance and Synergy) receive lower ratings with higher deviations, suggesting that they should be treated more cautiously as conditional or exploratory considerations. The two underlying orthogonal axes are very strongly validated and can be considered as the conceptual backbone of the model. Both axes obtained uniformly high ratings on clarity, relevance, distinctiveness and usefulness, while their content-validity indices reached the maximum value reported in this study. At the level of the model as a whole, experts validated the concept to be clear, appropriate, meaningful and suitable for the field as all overall average scores remain above 4.20 and the almost all indicators receiving unanimous favourable ratings. Taken altogether, these findings support the conclusion that the proposed new model offers a credible and practically relevant way of interpreting organisational behaviour through the combined perspectives of control, compliance, autonomy and engagement. This thesis therefore not only contributes with a validated conceptual structure, it also offers a common language for discussing how organisations can recognise different behavioural profiles, and which supportive levers could support transitions towards more desired attitudes. At the same time, the results show that not every pathway is equally robust, and this nuance is important: the framework is strongest when used as a structured interpretative and developmental guide, instead of a strict predictive model. In that sense, this study offers a grounded, yet flexible contribution that can support further research as well as reflective tool professional, multi-discipline application.