Havard Business Review: It’s time to make business school research more relevant

Originally found at Harvard Business Review by Debra L. Shapiro and Bradley Kirkman

One of the biggest challenges facing management scientists has been the struggle to produce knowledge that is both academically rigorous and applicable to practicing managers. In an Academy of Management Journal editorial, we described two problems that contribute to this challenge.

The first is what we called the “Lost in Translation” problem, which refers to the fact that almost no managers turn to academic journals (publications like the Academy of Management Annals, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, to name a few) for advice on how to improve their skills or practices. Researchers have found that managers tend to be unaware of research-supported management insights reported in academic journals, and that such insights are typically excluded in practitioner-oriented journals. Relatedly, managers tend to hold on to long-held assumed truths that often management scholars’ studies have dispelled. For example, many managers still believe that the errors they make in evaluating their employees can be corrected by training them to recognize the potential errors and suggesting ways to avoid them, while the actual evidence shows that such training can actually increase the number of errors they make.

Continue reading original article at Harvard Business Review.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Debra L. Shapiro, University of Maryland
• Bradley L. Kirkman, University of Maryland
• Hugh G. Courtney, University of Maryland