Good Science-Good Practice 

Marcus W. Dickson Wayne State University

Jamie Madigan Ameren Services

One thing that seems very clear as we peruse major journals and conference programs is that many researchers share our interest in buttressing the bridge between solid, scientific research and pragmatic, immediately useful practice. Sometimes entire sections of refereed journals are dedicated to examining this issue, such as the special edition of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (JOOP) that we discussed in the January 2007 edition of this column. Something similar happened with a recent issue of the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), in which a group of researchers were asked to write a series of essays about “research with relevance.” Interestingly, the series took a slightly different slant on the topic, examining what it means for the kinds of lessons that get taught in management schools and the kinds of research that should be undertaken by academics. Whereas the JOOP articles leaned a bit towards the scientist part of the house (or, if you prefer, the scientifically minded part of any given individual) with discussions of how to value scientific rigor and communicate rigorous research to end users, the AMJ articles seemed a bit more grounded in the context of businesses outside the university and the types of operational and strategic issues they face. There’s significant overlap in the views and issues discussed by both sets of articles, but the differences also add to our understanding and taken together they form a nicely rounded picture.

The first of the AMJ essays is by Anita McGahan and is colorfully entitled “Academic Research That Matters to Managers: On Zebras, Dogs, Lemmings, Hammers, and Turnips.” In it she notes the fact that the kind of research of most interest to many managers is more prescriptive, more specific to their issues, and less tethered by qualifications about conclusions than what is often produced under the conditions of high academic rigor. Nevertheless, she notes that there are five approaches that can marry the two worlds and produce rigorous research of inherently high interest to practicing managers.

The first approach is to show the audience how conventional wisdom has failed them and that a new theory or finding reshapes the field such that new, more productive courses of action are suggested—that isn’t a horse you’ve got, it’s a zebra, and your approach to training a zebra should be different. Similarly and in keeping with the animal theme, the second approach encourages researchers to show their audience that “that dog don’t hunt no more,” meaning that an established practice or even a fundamental paradigm no longer makes sense given changes in the business environment or technology.

On the flipside, the third approach is to show the audience how they’re acting like lemmings when they dive off a cliff in pursuit of new ideologies or practices clearly shown to be faulty by research generated outside of the herd environment. The fourth approach emphasizes the value of research programs either custom built or synthesized from existing lines of research to address specific problems, likening them to building a hammer from scratch to pound in a troublesome nail. Finally, the last approach emphasizes the importance of addressing new but fundamental business problems that are of inherent interest to both managers and academics. And turnips are worked in there, somehow. I’m not sure why.

In the second essay of the series, Freek Vermeulen addresses a more fundamental problem: the danger of a “closed loop” where academics only talk to each other and only draw inspiration and information from their own closed circle of colleagues instead of engaging the larger world of business and organizations. Talking to other, like-minded academics and reading academic journals are laudable activities, of course, but Vermeulen sells the need for a second “loop” of feedback that draws in nonacademic practitioners and moves research from just being rigorous to being rigorous and relevant. The author then goes on to list the ingredients found in his recipe for greater relevance, including direct and two-way communication with practitioners, clinging to the scientific method as a means of differentiating ourselves, and sacrificing time and effort that might otherwise go towards activities that lead more directly to tenure. The author also peppers this whole discussion with specific recommendations for building a second feedback loop: Write teaching cases, teach executive education classes, use your research in the classroom, and writing for nonacademic outlets.

In the third essay, Costas Markides starts his description of the search for “ambidextrous professors” by noting that it’s a shaky proposition at best to change to the way we do research, alter the way that performance among researchers gets rewarded, or to divide labor strictly between academics and practitioners. We don’t, as he says, want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Markides also thoroughly pokes the definition of “managerial relevance” with a stick and notes that perceptions of the gap and its breadth may be exaggerated given that many researchers engage in and communicate lower-key, less attention-grabbing research in the form of class presentations, conference speeches, and executive education classes. He closes the article with four recommendations for “ambidextrous research:” (a) Young, untenured academics should focus on the classroom first, then more traditional outlets for managerially relevant research later in their career; (b) everyone should recognize the existence and value of different types of managerially relevant research; (c) go outside the boundaries of your academic world (i.e., the campus) for inspiration, research questions, and data; and (d) look to the existing research on business ambidexterity for help in this context.

The next essay in the AMJ series, by Tushman and O’Reilly, focuses on using the classroom (particularly the classrooms filled with executive education students) to conduct research that is both rigorous and relevant. This cross-pollination is essential, they argue, to developing ideas that are both done for the sake of understanding the natural world and solving immediate business problems. (They’re also great, we should note, for partnering with business leaders who will let you collect data in their organizations.) The authors conclude by noting that the momentum for operating in this shared space between rigor and relevance should have its origins in the expectations placed on graduate students and junior faculty from the beginning.

The last article in the series, this one by Ranjay Gulati, covers much of the same ground as the previous articles but invokes the term “tribism” to describe the artificially (or in his words, “socially”) created schisms between those in the rigor tribe and those in the relevance tribe. After briefly reviewing the history of the debate (which stretches back a lot further than you may think), Gulati notes that the differentiation between the two camps sometimes spawns from spurious arguments about whose methodology or dependant variables are superior and that this has various detrimental effects on the body of knowledge as a whole, not to mention the careers of the people involved. The author closes out the article by offering five tips for building a research process that spans both rigor and relevance. Many of these steps are, unsurprisingly, similar to those offered by other authors in this series: (a) look to managerial sensibilities in deciding what research programs to pursue, (b) use the classroom to teach scientific theory, (c) don’t neglect the process of proper theory building, (d) look to the intersection of theory and phenomenon for the greatest benefit of your research, and (e) work to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners by translating findings and problems in both directions.

The AMJ articles provide some interesting food for thought about “research with relevance,” especially when taken together. We also want to include a couple of specific empirical pieces, though, as we try to do every issue. This time around, both articles deal with issues of gender in the workplace, though in very different ways.

Larger organizations often face issues related to relocation of managers and other professional staff, and many organizations have experienced difficulties in securing agreement to relocate from selected staff members. This is often especially the case when the selected staff member is female. Baldridge, Eggleston, and Veiga (2006) recently addressed this issue in Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. Their work was particularly interesting because (a) unlike most prior research, it used a comparatively matched sample of women and men; (b) they used a market model to address the issues related to willingness to accept a relocation; and (c) they treated gender as a moderator of the market model predictions, rather than only as a main effect, in their analyses.  Their findings were particularly informative.

The proportion of the family’s income generated by the respondent’s spouse is an important predictor of willingness to relocate. For example, if the respondent generates 85% of the total family income, he/she is more likely to accept a relocation than if the respondent generates only half (or less) of the total family income. Clearly, people pay attention to the total family economic impact in making career movement decisions, and if the primary breadwinner would have to give up his/her job to accommodate a relocation for the secondary breadwinner, that secondary earner is less likely to be willing to accept a move. However, this reduction in interest in relocation is moderated by gender—women seemingly take spousal earnings into account to a greater extent than do men. Similar patterns were found for the presence of preschool children in the home (though not the perceived strength of children’s ties to the community) and for strength of spouse’s ties to the community. In short, women were less likely than men to be willing to accept a re-location, but the various moderating factors help explain this main effect—the findings show that women typically take spousal and childcare concerns into account in making these decisions to a greater extent than do men.

Although these data do provide greater understanding of the factors that affect willingness to accept a relocation, they also confirm a widespread perception: Companies attempting to relocate managers and other professionals are often between a rock and a hard place in that they know that family concerns and other external factors have dramatic effects on their employees’ willingness to accept relocations, and they know that these effects are in general greater for women than for men, but at the same time, companies are not allowed to make their decisions on who to relocate based on these external factors. Although Baldridge and colleagues (2006) help us better understand the dynamics and provide some suggestions about how to make specific relocations more appealing (e.g., ensuring that quality childcare at similar cost is available in the new location for parents with preschool-aged children), the problem remains a sticky one.

Lucero, Allen, and Middleton (2006) took a novel approach to understanding issues of sexual harassment and its escalation over time. Relying on published arbitration differences relating to workplace sexual harassment, they coded the behaviors described in terms of severity, type, duration, and frequency. Their results emphasize the folly in turning a blind eye and hoping a sexual harasser will “clean up his act” (“his” because all cases considered were cross-sex harassment in which males had harassed females). The results of Lucero and colleagues’ study show that individual harassers tend to be pretty consistent over time in the time of harassment they enact (i.e., they have relatively narrow repertoires), in line with prior theory that sexual harassment is goal oriented and that harassers’ goals don’t often change. Thus, it is not surprising when similar reports come from multiple targets of the same harasser. Secondly, the severity of harassment tends to increase over time—rather than going away, it tends to get worse. Although disciplinary action taken by the organization can slow the escalation, these data do not support the idea that discipline tends to remove the problem. The authors distinguished between “unwanted sexual attention” (e.g., making comments about a coworker’s body or appearance in an unwanted and inappropriate way) and “gender harassment” (e.g., demeaning a coworker based on her gender), and found that those people who engaged in both forms of harassment also exhibited the most severe cases of each form of harassment and tended to have prior records of more aggressive behaviors. Placing their work in a theoretical framework through which harassment is seen as  goal-oriented behavior, with different goals motivating different forms of harassment, these results ought to encourage employers to be especially aware of addressing issues of harassment and potential harassment as early as possible.

We’ll wrap up this issue by noting that it has been a while since we have received reader suggestions for articles to include in this column. We do our best to cover a wide range of outlets, but of course, there are things that we miss. So if you’ve recently read (or written!) an article that you think exemplifies this column’s emphasis on research that advances theory while simultaneously providing value to practicing managers and I-O folks, let us know about it! We can be reached at HMadigan@ameren.com (Jamie) and
marcus.dickson@wayne.edu (Marcus).

Until next time, keep going with Good Science and Good Practice!

References

     Baldridge, D. C., Eggleston, K. A., & Veiga, J. F. (2006). Saying ‘no’ to being uprooted: The impact of family and gender on willingness to relocate. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 79, 131–150.
     Gulati, Ranjay (2007). Tent poles, tribalism, and boundary spanning: The rigor-relevance debate in managerial research. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 775–782.
     Lucero, M. A., Allen, R. E., & Middleton, K. L. (2006). Behaviors, motives, and change over time. Sex Roles, 55, 331–343.
     Markides, C. (2007). In search of ambidextrous professors. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 762–768.
     McGahan, A. (2007). Academic research that matters to managers: On zebras, dogs, lemmings, hammers, and turnips. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 748–753.
     Tushman, M., O’Reilly III, C. (2007). Research and relevance: Implications of Pasteur’s quadrant for doctoral programs and faculty development. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 769–774.
     Vermeulen, F. (2007). “I shall not remain insignificant”: Adding a second loop to matter more. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 754–761.