I-O Psychologists at the Leading Edge of Evidence-Based Management
Denise M. Rousseau*
Carnegie Mellon University
* denise@cmu.edu
I heard a story last week that makes me think that “evidence” is in the air. After a storm blew a tree over, a local horticulturist came by to take a look. She noticed a broken branch and said it should be sawn off. But don’t paint over the “wound” like home gardeners sometimes do, she said. Studies indicate that it can harm the tree. Well, it looks like people who care for trees can use evidence, so perhaps it is not too far-fetched that anyone working with people might too.
At our 2008 convention in San Francisco, President Gary Latham announced SIOP’s initiative to promote evidence-based management (EBMgt). First I will tell you about EBMgt, its role in the 2009 meetings, and then other EBMgt activities at SIOP.
For the past 2 years, academics and practitioners, including SIOP members, have participated in an informal Evidence-Based Management Collaborative to develop and promote evidence-informed practice in the fields of management and organizational psychology. (The Collaborative includes Richard Adams, Jason Azuma, Jean Bartunek, Tima Bansal, Gerard Beenen, Rob Briner, David Denyer, Judith DePalma, Jody Goodman, Darlene Houle, Mark Fichman, Michael Frese, Bob Ford, Andy Garman, Bob Greene, Severin Hornung, Gary Latham, Ravi Madhavan, Pietro Micheli, James O’Brien, Jone Pearce, Denise Rousseau, Sara Rynes, Sim Sitkin, Jayne Speicher, Christopher Woock, John Zanardelli—and is always open to new participants.) The Collaborative has worked to develop a shared understanding of EBMgt and its implications for the three critical constituents: practitioners, educators, and scholars. Evidence-based management (EBMgt) means making organizational decisions based on scientific and practice-informed facts, in conjunction with professional judgment and ethics. For practitioners, it involves learning how to obtain and use the best available evidence to inform their decisions and develop effective organizational practices. For educators, it entails building courses and a broader curriculum around up-to-date scientific knowledge, emphasizing validated principles rather than war stories, conventional wisdom, or I-O psychology’s version of Piltdown Man, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It means preparing students for the activities required of them throughout their careers to master evidence-based principles and to keep their knowledge current as new scientific developments emerge. For scholars, it means working with practitioners and educators to identify critical questions and conduct systematic reviews to assemble the full body of relevant research in order to provide evidence-based answers and guides to implementation.
EBMgt: The Thursday Theme Track in New Orleans
The first visible sign of SIOP’s EBMgt initiative is our next conference’s Thursday Theme Track on April 2, 2009, a full day of EBMgt-related presentations, tutorials, and panel discussions. Along with others in the design committee, Rob Briner, Jodi Goodman, Bob Greene, James O’Brien, John Scott, Jayne Speicher, and Sara Rynes, I want to encourage your participation in this highly interactive EBMgt conference within a conference. Joining us at SIOP on Thursday is a great way to become involved in this emerging movement engaging scholars, practitioners, and educators in closing the research–practice gap. I-O psychology, with its large placement of discipline-trained professionals in industry, has long been an exemplar of how science can influence management practice. Nonetheless, more work still is needed to promote the broader use of scientific evidence in organizational decision making. Moreover, though researchers in SIOP are largely engaged in applied psychology, practitioners and educators do not always know what the research says and how it might relate to their decisions or teaching. It is not clear that this is just a communication or access problem. One issue we will address are how to promote more science-informed management education and practice. Improving the uptake of science in organizational practices is more than a communication problem of how scientists talk with practitioners. It requires a fresh approach that links scholars, practitioners, and educators in new ways.
Anthony Kovner provides the opening keynote as an influential founder of the evidence-based management movement. He will help us understand how I-O psychology can learn from the experience of other evidence-based movements. John Boudreau with his deep knowledge of management decision-making practices then describes how principles of I-O psychology can be inculcated into the decision models and concepts contemporary managers already use. Evidence-based practice is more than benchmarking and best practices, it means mindful decision making to design effective processes for recurring and novel decisions managers and other practitioners make. John Boudreau will describe some of the recurring decisions where I-O psychology has the broad opportunity for informing and improving practice along evidence-based principles. Practitioners extend the issues raised in these keynotes from the perspectives of their own consulting work. These participants include Robert Greene, Reward$ystems; Jayne Speicher, Pradeo; Marcus Champ, Main Roads; and others. Rob Briner and David Denyer will provide a tutorial on how to conduct synthetic reviews. EBMgt practices depend on access to and dissemination of cumulative evidence. Synthetic reviews play a central role in evidence-based practices. Related to, but not to be confused with meta-analyses, synthetic reviews are a means of summarizing a body of scientific evidence to answer a practice question. Synthetic reviews go beyond meta-analyses, including studies using diverse methods (qualitative and quantitative) to address conditions of use, contextualization of findings, and future applications. Teaching I-O psychology and related management topics from an evidence-based perspective has a distinct paradigm, based upon extensive research on learning and transfer. Experienced EBMgmt teachers, including James O’Brien, Jodi Goodman, and myself, will address effective approaches to teaching I-O psychology and organizational behavior via development of critical thinking, learning goals, and their evaluation, focusing upon key research-based principles and active practice. Lastly, a special keynote address by SHRM President Laurence (Lon) G. O’Neil, describes the implications of EBMgt as seen from the world’s largest human resource management association (250,000 professionals in 130 countries).
Science You Can Use: A New SIOP Annual Series
SIOP will begin publishing an annual series, Science You Can Use, planned for 2010. The practitioners and students in professional programs are the intended audience. Science You Can Use seeks to promote informed uses of evidence by practitioners who know that evidence comes from a body of research, not a single study. Each chapter written in plain language reflects the findings of existing meta-analyses or other systematic treatments of findings from a body of studies. Know that evidence comes from a body of research, not a single study.
Chapters are both solicited and based on proposals authors submit. Each individual chapter in Science You Can Use will include the following:
- A question or set of questions of interest to practitioners
- Answers based upon existing meta-analyses or other evidence-based summaries of all relevant research. These answers may typically take the form of scientific principles, that is, general statements of knowledge that are widely applicable.
- Action guides advising how these principles might be applied and conditions of their use, including task strategies, performance routines, and protocols with demonstrable effectiveness in an applied setting. These guides provide procedural knowledge that can be aid users in their own actions and in designing solutions appropriate to their particular settings and circumstances.
- Illustrations of successful and nonsuccessful use that can inform change strategies and supporting critical-if-neglected conditions to ease the uptake of evidence-based practices (or counterindicators).
- Plain language writing.
- We also invite authors to contribute systematic reviews that detail the features above but include a full-scale comprehensive review of a body of evidence in answering a practice question.
- Typical chapters are approximately 25–30 pages of text. Review syntheses are longer.
Scientific knowledge typically reflects discoveries of fact, general truths broadly evident (sometimes called declarative knowledge). It also can include procedural knowledge, task strategies that aid the successful application of declarative knowledge. Scientific facts are uncovered, procedural knowledge is created. It comes from learning what works and what doesn’t in particular environments and conditions of use. I-O psychology research in some cases actually creates procedural knowledge. Justice research is a case in point, particularly in its focus on strategies for promoting fairness in the workplace via procedural, information, and interactive justice. Basic justice principles related to equity were established decades ago, allowing attention to actual implementation. As other domains in the field mature, we can expect an expansion of research that creates procedural knowledge. One goal of this series is to encourage attention to and dissemination of procedural knowledge helping practitioners put scientific evidence to use.