These Professors Want To Make B-School Research Relevant

Let’s say you’re a business manager and you’re having a problem with evaluating employee performance.

The last thing you’re probably going to do in solving the problem is read an academic journal.

Debra L. Shapiro, a professor of management in the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and Bradley Kirkman, a professor of leadership and department head in the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University, call this the “Lost in Translation” problem.

In their article for the Harvard Business Review, Shapiro and Kirkman argue that business schools need to take a broader approach to assessing what it means to have scholarly impact.

Two Main Challenges

Shapiro and Kirkman cite two main challenges that management scientists face in producing research knowledge that is both “academically rigorous and applicable to practicing managers.”

As noted previously, the “Lost in Translation” problem is simply the fact that no practicing managers turn to academic journals when they’re looking 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,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.

For instance, it’s common for managers to often believe in “long-held assumed truths” that academic scholars have already dispelled in their research.

“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,” Shapiro and Kirkman explain.

The second challenge management scientists face, according to Shapiro and Kirkman, is the “Lost Before Translation” problem.

In their words, it’s the “tendency for academic researchers to design studies without input from managers or employees — the populations that their studies’ results are meant to help.”

These two challenges, Shapiro and Kirkman argue, are what keep academics from truly helping practitioners improve the way the manage.

Certain Promotion and Salary Incentive Practices May Inhibit Research Reach

Shapiro and Kirkman cite the way business schools offer promotions and salary increases as a main inhibitor to making research relevant to practitioners.

“This is because promotions and salary increases at most business schools are primarily based on professors’ number of peer-reviewed, ‘A’ journal publications (or those appearing in journals with the highest impact factor, or frequency of citation-counts),” Shapiro and Kirkman write.

In turn, this type of promotion practice limits the publication outlets that researchers will seek out.

“Counting solely or primarily ‘A’ journal publications when determining rewards, recognitions, and other career advancement-prizes communicates, in essence, that professors won’t advance if they choose to publish in outlets that are more widely read by managers,” Shapiro and Kirkman argue.

Having this practice at business schools, consequently, produces a number of issues such as weakening professors’ ability to pursue activities that “engage scholarship,” incentivizing scholars to produce as many studies as possible without careful consideration of research, and encouraging academics to engage in “questionably ethical” research practices to produce results accepted by certain journals.

Changing How Academics Influences Practice

Shapiro and Kirkman offer three main changes that they say business schools should account for to assess what it means to have scholarly impact.

For one, they believe that business schools should take a “pluralistic approach to scholarly impact.”

“For example, rather than counting up the number of times a professor’s articles have been cited by other academics, we should also be looking at how often the work is cited or used by students, practicing managers, policy-makers, and in articles (e.g., news, periodicals, magazines, podcasts, etc.) that are mass-distributed to these multiple stakeholders,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.

Secondly, they argue that academics should focus on “responsible research.”

“Responsible research has been described as research that balances the interests of shareholders with the social and economic outcomes of companies, uses rigorous research methods to understand puzzling local phenomena, and seeks truth above all else by using ethical research methods,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.

Lastly, they call for all stakeholders—from researchers to journal editors—to work together in a “concerted way to encourage and reward responsible research and move beyond the limited approaches to conducting and disseminating management research that are currently used.”

The results, if these changes are implemented, are plentiful.

“Scholars will use their voice in ways that go beyond merely publishing in top-tier academic journals with very limited practitioner readership; there will be less incentive to engage in questionably ethical research practices, such as only putting their best research findings forward and hiding non-significant findings; and perhaps most importantly, it will lead to more interest in, and perceived legitimacy of, management scholars’ work,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.

Sources: Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management