NINETEEN
Counterpoint
Now Is a Great Time for Conducting Relevant Research!
ALTHOUGH I DO NOT WISH to minimize the challenges for researchers who wish to create research that is useful to both theory and practice (as outlined by Cummings in Chapter 18, How Business Schools Shape (Misshape) Management Research), I would like to take a slightly different tack by offering several pieces of evidence suggesting that the type of research championed in this book is not only highly valued now, but is likely to become increasingly valued in the future.
Evidence of the Scholarly Value of Rich Field Research
I first got interested in the usefulness of research for practice through my interaction with a (then) graduate student, Brian McNatt. Brian was motivated to get a PhD because after several years of working in public accounting firms, he had observed and experienced many dysfunctional management practices and thought there just had to be a “better way.” He wanted to discover something about this better way through study and research, and then to disseminate what he had learned to managers and students through teaching. He was also highly motivated to examine his ideas in field settings (e.g., McNatt & Judge, 2004; McNatt, 2010) despite the challenges of doing so.
Discussions with Brian about his interest in producing useful research evolved into my first two publications pertaining to the academic-practice interface. In Rynes, McNatt, and Bretz (1999), my colleagues and I examined the origins, processes, and outcomes of 141 studies in four top-tier journals1 that could not have been conducted without at least minimal collaboration between the authors and one or more organizations. “Collaboration” was rather broadly defined for purposes of this research, ranging from (at a minimum) organizations giving permission for researchers to use archival databases to fully collaborative ventures where researchers spent months on-site collecting data.
The most interesting findings from this study concerned differences in outcomes based on the number of hours academics spent at the organizational research site. Specifically, academics who spent more time at the research site reported greater personal learning from the experience. Moreover, spending more hours at the research site was also associated with higher subsequent citations by other researchers. These findings left a big impression on me and influenced my subsequent beliefs about what constitutes “good research”2—an attitude shift that I put into action when I later become a journal editor. The second study (Rynes & McNatt, 2001) also produced some reason for optimism about academic-practitioner collaboration in producing top-tier research: 24 percent of the top-tier articles included in our study had been initiated by organizations rather than academics, and another 26 percent resulted from organizations that responded favorably to cold calls from academics.
My early experiences as incoming editor of the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) further solidified my growing enthusiasm for the types of research described by other authors in this book (e.g., Chapter 2, Crossing Boundaries to Investigate Problems in the Field; Chapter 4, A Ten-Year Journey of Cooperation; Chapter 10, Academic-Consultant Collaboration). Specifically, in preparation for the editorial role, I conducted a survey of incoming AMJ board members. Results revealed that the number one suggestion for improving the Journal was to “accept more innovative, less formulaic research” (Rynes, 2005, p. 12).3 Similarly, a second AMJ survey (Bartunek, Rynes & Ireland, 2006)—in which board members were invited to nominate up to three empirical articles from any academic journal or book that they regarded as “most interesting”—revealed that approximately half the articles nominated consisted of intensive field studies of either one or a small number of organizations (e.g., Barley, 1986; Dutton & Dukerich, 1991; Eisenhardt, 1989). This result is way out of proportion with the (small) overall percentage of case or multiple-case studies published in top-tier management journals (see, for example, Rynes, 2007b).
Moreover, there is other evidence that interest in intensive “small-n” field research is very high. For example, Eisenhardt & Graebner’s (2007) essay on how to build theory from case studies has already been cited 224 times according to the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) Web of Science and 708 times based on Google Scholar, making it by far the most-cited AMJ paper for that year. In addition, attendance at Academy of Management (AOM) professional development workshops (PDWs) on topics such as conducting “rich” research (such as The Power of Rich PDW in 2006; see Rynes, 2007a) or research that is useful to practice (Antonacopoulou & Yu, 2009) often leave standing room only and participants flowing into the hallways. In a similar vein, examination of AMJ’s “best paper” award reveals that a high proportion of the recent winners have been either single or multiple-case field studies (e.g., Elsbach & Kramer, 2003; Ferlie et al., 2005; Gilbert, 2005; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Plowman et al., 2007).
Additionally, many “management laureates” (e.g., Bedeian, 1992, 2002) have written at considerable length about how their academic careers—both as researchers and teachers—have been enhanced by close engagement with practitioners and their real-world problems. Finally, many of the authors in this book have received awards for doing the kinds of research discussed in this book. For example, Ruth Wageman won the Paper of the Year Award from the Organization Behavior Division of AOM for her work at Xerox on interdependence and group effectiveness (Wageman, 1995), Amy Edmondson won the Early Career Achievement Award from the OB Division for her excellent programmatic work on teams (e.g., Edmondson, 1999; Edmondson, 2002; Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001), Andy Van de Ven’s Engaged Scholarship (2007) won the AOM’s Terry Book Award, and several of the authors in this book have won the prestigious Michael J. Losey Award for career contributions to human resource research and practice (e.g., Ed Lawler, Michael Beer, Gary Latham, and Wayne Cascio).
In short, the type of collaborative field research discussed in this book is disproportionately represented in terms of best paper awards, career achievement awards, and citations by other authors—not to mention that such research is almost certainly more likely to result in findings that are applied in real organizations (e.g., see Chapter 8, Making a Difference and Contributing Useful Knowledge; Chapter 4, A Ten-Year Journey of Cooperation; Chapter 17, Practitioner Perspectives; Chapter 10, Academic-Consultant Collaboration). Moreover, I believe that the value of this type of research will only increase in years to come, as discussed in the following section.
Why the Value of Useful Research Will Increase
I fully agree with Tom Cummings’s point (Chapter 18, How Business Schools Shape (Misshape) Management Research) that business schools have become more market-driven, and I am on record as sharing a number of his concerns about the implications of an excessively market-driven focus (see, e.g., Rynes & Trank, 1997, and Trank & Rynes, 2003). However, with respect to the prospects for valuing high-quality research that is simultaneously useful to practice, I believe that the increasingly market-driven focus of business schools is primarily a positive development. Indeed, I believe that several features of the current research value system that some of us find troubling—for example, excessive and sometimes inappropriate emphasis on theory (Hambrick, 2007; Locke, 2007), fixation on ever-more esoteric quantitative methods that require stringent (and often unmet) assumptions about data (Starbuck, 2006), and empirical contributions of low practical importance (Oviatt & Miller, 1989)—are the result of business schools having become too isolated from market pressures, thus enabling them to indulge in self-serving, insular activities. Indeed, it was a public perception of business schools as not being responsive to markets (i.e., students, taxpayers, and employers) that led to instigation of the Business Week rankings in 1988 and the host of subsequent followers (e.g., Financial Times, Forbes).
Although it is possible that business school rankings may have increased the emphasis on producing quick top-tier “hits,” there are a number of countervailing forces. First, the main emphasis of the rankings (particularly the highly influential Business Week rankings) has been to increase the voice of business recruiters and students. This is no bad thing in the present context because both groups would rather have business professors producing and disseminating (via teaching) research that is useful and important, rather than esoteric or trivial. In addition, various popular press rating schemes tend to “count” journals that focus more on management journals (versus the specialized disciplinary journals that Cummings is concerned about; see also Judge, 2003) and also bridge journals such as Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, and Human Resource Management Journal.
Second, over the past few years, I have detected a shift in the deliberations of promotion and tenure committees from simply “counting” the number of top-tier publications to factoring in the scope, importance, and impact (or expected future impact) of a scholar’s work via citations (Judge et al., 2007; Adler & Harzing, 2009).4 This shift has almost certainly been facilitated by the emergence of databases capable of producing early estimates of impact. Moreover, in a world that values speed and globalization, assessments of academic impact are moving away from sole emphasis on the relatively narrow citation base represented by ISI’s Web of Science to also include faster, more inclusive sources such as Google Scholar (GS) and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Comparisons of citation counts for the same individuals across ISI and GS reveal that GS generally produces much higher impact scores for academics who (1) write books (which tend to be based on longer-term efforts than journal articles); (2) write for more general audiences (since citations are not restricted only to top-tier journals), and (3) contribute to new journals (since it takes a minimum of six years before a new journal receives an impact factor calculation from ISI, and at least three years before its articles are included in the ISI database; Adler & Harzing, 2009). As members of the academy begin to use SSRN and GS more frequently for their speed, breadth, global reach, and ease of use (see Harzing, 2008; Harzing & van der Wal, 2008), the payoff to researchers for conducting more important, more generally accessible, and more interesting types of research is likely to correspondingly increase.
Finally, after nearly four decades of declining public investment in higher education, business schools have become increasingly dependent on the private sector for resources (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997).5 This development further increases the value of faculty members whose research can be highlighted on school websites and featured in university fund-raising ventures. Even a casual glance at the webpages of major business schools reveals that the featured researchers are those who are studying topics of obvious importance to business and/or society. In short, the increased financial dependency of educational institutions on the private sector broadens the number of ways in which faculty members can—and really must—contribute value to business schools (and other university entities) and, in the process, lends support to the kinds of research championed by this book. (For an excellent discussion of how different types of research and faculty members can contribute to business schools, see Susan Ashford’s essay in Walsh et al., 2007.)
Growing Restlessness for Change
Criticisms of business schools and the research they are producing have escalated dramatically over the past ten years, not only from those outside the academy (Crainer & Dearlove, 1999) but also among prominent academic insiders (e.g., Garten, 2006; Hambrick, 2007; Khurana, 2007; Mintzberg, 2005). Moreover, some of these critiques have received substantial attention. For example, according to citation counts on GS, Sumantra Ghoshal’s (2005) “Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices” has been cited 865 times; Pfeffer and Fong’s (2002) “The End of Business Schools? Less Success than Meets the Eye” has been cited 577 times; and Bennis and O’Toole’s (2005) “How Business Schools Lost Their Way” has been cited 545 times. All three of these articles criticize the movement of business school research away from the context and concerns of ongoing organizations, the marginalization of stakeholders other than owners, and the reification of theories based on untenable assumptions that favor certain types of decisions and behaviors over others.
At the same time, the number of special forums calling for increased attention to the intersection of research and practice has increased dramatically over the past ten years (e.g., Burke, Drasgow, & Edwards, 2004; Gelade, 2006; Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001; Rynes, Giluk, & Brown, 2007; Stone, 2007). Attempts to bridge the gap have also emerged in HR Town Hall Meetings at the Academy of Management, best practice DVDs produced by Wayne Cascio and the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation, and a series of Practice Guides offered on the SHRM website. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) has also responded to the gap with its Science You Can Use collaboration with SHRM, as well as the recent introduction of Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, a new journal that publishes “state of the science and/or practice” essays, followed by short commentaries by both academics and practitioners. Recognition for research that is useful to practice has also come in the form of awards, such as AOM’s Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner award, SIOP’s M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace, and a variety of division-specific AOM awards.
Research that is useful to both science and practice is also being supported by new sources of funding that emphasize the necessity of working with and speaking to both communities. One such source is the SHRM Foundation, which funds individual studies up to $200,000 and has funded more than $2.5 million in research over the past ten years. Another generous source of applied research funding is the Management Education Research Institute (MERI), the foundation arm of the Graduate Management Admissions Council. MERI gives $50,000 fellowships and grants of up to $100,000 for individual studies designed to improve the process of getting management research into the hands of practicing managers through education. The National Science Foundation, too, emphasizes studies that are expected to yield important advances in principle-based understanding of organizations, as exemplified by their Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) and Science of Science and Innovation Policies (SciSIP; http://www.nsf.gov/funding). Of course, the sums mentioned here are not as eye-popping as the £1 million offered to individual researchers by the United Kingdom’s Advanced Institute of Management (the type of grant that jumpstarted Lynda Gratton’s research program, described in Chapter 4, A Ten-Year Journey of Cooperation), but they are nevertheless effective vehicles for encouraging research that is likely to be useful to practice.
Journals Are Changing
A variety of authors in many fields have noted the increasing importance of citation rates to the fate, not only of individual scholars, but also of journals (Christenson & Sigelman, 1985; Garfield, 2006; Johnson & Podsakoff, 1994; Judge et al., 2007). Citation rates and impact factors are indeed issues of growing importance to journal editors, and I sympathize with editors of new journals or those that presently do not have high citation rates.
At the same time, I think it is important to look at where the most-cited articles have been coming from recently in management and the organization sciences. For example, the previously mentioned articles by Ghoshal (2005), Pfeffer & Fong (2002), and Bennis and O’Toole (2005) were all published in bridge journals—specifically, the first two in the Academy of Management Learning and Education and the last in Harvard Business Review. In addition, they were not empirical articles, but rather “thought pieces” by well-known, respected academics.
Similarly, some of the most widely cited articles in AMJ in recent years have come from essays published as part of editors’ forums, rather than from the peer-reviewed research found in later pages of the journal. Examples include Eisenhardt and Graebner’s (2007) piece “Theory Building from Cases,” referred to earlier; Nicolaj Siggelkow’s (2007) “Persuasion with Case Studies” (91 cites according to ISI and 267 via GS); and Roy Suddaby’s (2006) piece on “What Grounded Theory is Not” (71 ISI citations and 228 via GS). In other words, many of the recent articles that are getting the most “buzz” in management journals are those that either address the state of the field (which is frequently argued to need more of the type of contextualized field research championed in this book) or that provide “how to” guidelines for researchers who wish to design research with the kind of impact produced by Steve Barley, Jane Dutton, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Richard Hackman, Ed Lawler, C. K. Prahalad, Michael Tushman, Ruth Wageman, and others. I believe these patterns suggest there is a great yearning among management scholars to do research that “matters” (see also McGrath, 2007; Vermeulen, 2007).
In addition, there has been a broadening of the types of research considered appropriate for publication in several journals—all in ways that are favorable to the types of research discussed in this book. For example, in addition to the broadening of publication criteria by AMJ, the Journal of Organizational Behavior (JOB) has increasingly emphasized the importance of contextualization in management research since Denise Rousseau’s editorship (e.g., Johns, 2001; Rousseau & Fried, 2001). Johns (2001) argues that greater emphasis on context contributes to storytelling, makes an article more interesting, and supports active processing by readers: “As long as (authors) have fairly described the institutional and organizational context of their research, readers are free to make their own interpretations about their impact” (p. 33)—something that both practitioners and academics do all the time (Czarniawska & Sevon, 2005; Rousseau, Manning, & Denyer, 2008).
Even the Journal of Applied Psychology, a top-tier psychology journal with a strong experimental foundation, has indicated its willingness to entertain “research that is based on content analyses, case studies, observations, interviews and other qualitative procedures” (Zedeck, 2003, p. 3). Another positive development is the recent special issue on qualitative research in Organizational Research Methods (Easterby-Smith, Golden-Biddle, & Locke, 2008), which was commissioned in part to help educate authors, reviewers, and editors about what constitutes “quality” in qualitative work and how such work is evaluated by reviewers and editors.
There is also recent research suggesting that some of these developments have made a difference in terms of researchers paying more attention to practitioners in discussions of their research findings. Specifically, Jean Bartunek and I recently conducted a study (Bartunek & Rynes, 2010) to determine whether or not discussion sections in five top-tier journals (AMJ, JAP, JOB, OS, and PPsych) have become more likely to include implications for practice (IFPs) since the early 1990s. Our rationale for comparing recent years (2002–2007) with the early 1990s was that the early nineties were a time of considerable activism in championing greater collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Examples include Dunnette’s (1990) robust defense of the scientist-practitioner model; Murphy and Saal’s (1990) book on integrating science and practice in psychology; the emergence of Organization Science as a journal founded, at least in part, to “enhance research relevance . . . encourage the joining of theory to practice, and anchor organization research in relevant problems” (Daft & Lewin, 1990, pp. 2, 9); and Hambrick’s (1994) notable AOM presidential address, “What If the Academy Actually Mattered?” Our idea was that if these developments had made a difference, recent published research would pay more attention to practitioner concerns than research published prior to Hambrick’s (1994) address.
Our comparison of discussion sections from the 1990s and mid-2000s revealed that in four of the five journals, the proportion of discussion sections including IFPs has notably increased. The biggest increase was in Personnel Psychology (from 34 percent in 1990s to 79 percent in 2000s), followed by JAP (30 percent to 58 percent), AMJ (27 percent to 55 percent), JOB (40 percent to 58 percent), and OS (46 percent to 47 percent). Although simply including implications for practice does not insure that research articles are useful to (or used by) practitioners (see, for example, Kieser & Leiner, 2009), it certainly is a step in the right direction.
In sum, at the same time that much top-tier management research has continued to get increasingly esoteric, there also are trends in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, more can be done, particularly in supporting research that addresses important and interesting questions (Bartunek, Rynes, & Ireland, 2006; McGrath, 2007) even if—or perhaps especially if—they don’t fit neatly into already-existing theoretical frameworks (e.g., Hambrick, 2007; Locke, 2007). As Tsui (2007) observes, a “theoretical fixation tends to homogenize our research, burying potential gems of insight in a quest to integrate emergent or unfamiliar phenomena into the perspective generated by previous theory building” (p. 1373). Other actions might be to give relatively more weight to implications for practice (Bartunek & Rynes, 2010) or to create separate sections in top-tier journals for collaborative or action research (e.g., PPsych has long had a “practice” section, which more top journals might emulate).
Young Academics Want to Do Relevant Research
Another reason that I am optimistic about the future of research that is jointly relevant to academics and practitioners is that doctoral students tend to be particularly interested in creating research that “matters” to the broader society. In the six-plus years that I attended countless “editors’ forums” at AOM, SIOP, and individual universities, I observed a real yearning among young scholars (such as Brian McNatt) to make a difference both inside and outside academia. The same is also true in our doctoral program at the University of Iowa; because many students now enter doctoral programs with considerable experience under their belts, they tend to be motivated by a desire to improve practice through their research and teaching as much—or perhaps more—than anything else.
Vermeulen (2007) expresses this longing well: “I remember (my doctoral student days) with fondness. I had already chosen to be an academic, while my friends went off to have well-paid jobs in banking, consulting, and industry. I was going to be a poor yet noble academic, not driven by money, job status, or security, but dedicated to a quest for knowledge and understanding that would enable me to help others understand and improve the workings of their organizations. I think many management scholars start out with this feeling . . . However, over time . . . we learn that the legitimate way to frame our academic identity is in terms of a theoretical tradition and a stream of research. And there is nothing wrong with that, unless these goals have completely replaced our desire and quest for true knowledge and understanding” (p. 754).
Vermeulen (2007) describes some of the ways that he has tried to remain true to his dream of being relevant to practice while conducting rigorous research. First, quoting March (2006), he says, “No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation. What an academic can do is say some things that, in combination with the manager’s knowledge of the context, may lead to a better solution. It is the combination of academic and experiential knowledge, not the substitution of one for the other, that yields improvement” (p. 85). Thus, Vermeulen aims to tell practitioners about his research through teaching and consulting, and considers himself successful when “some of these people feel they have gained an insight they did not yet have . . . that enables them to make better decisions regarding their own specific company situations” (2007, p. 75).
Another thing Vermeulen (2007) does is to force himself to “smell the beast”: that is, to stay close to practitioners and the world of practice. He does this by consulting, interviewing practitioners, writing teaching cases, and evaluating future research possibilities by asking whether the managers of his “case companies” would be interested in the question. In other words, by beginning all his research projects with both extant research and practical problems in mind, he tries to build both rigor and relevance into his research projects.
While Vermeulen (2007) focuses on things young academics might do to produce more relevant (but rigorous) research, McGrath (2007) focuses on what senior faculty can do to pave the way and support them. She, like Tom Cummings, believes that borrowing from other disciplines (e.g., sociology, economics) comes at a cost to the emerging discipline of management, as well as to its interest in real-world managerial problems. However, unlike Tom, she believes that the current state of business schools is on the verge of deinstitutionalization—in large part because of the disproportionate value placed on top-tier academic research over everything else in academic reward systems. As such, McGrath is more optimistic than Tom that now is a very propitious time for taking the types of actions suggested in his paper and in the following section.
Making It Happen
As is apparent by now, I am optimistic that there is a bright future for research that advances both the science and the practice of management. Like McGrath (2007), I believe that conditions are aligned to give tremendous advantages to schools and researchers that blend the best of scientific thinking with examination of significant real-world problems. After all, this is currently the type of research that garners the greatest amount of respect, citations, awards, and influence, and I see no reason for this to change.
So, how can young scholars get started down the path toward having both academic and practical impact? The following are a few research-supported ideas:
Find a niche that suits you. Eden (2008) advises young researchers to find their own personally meaningful niche: “an identifiable, circumscribed area of scholarly inquiry that can provide a good match with an individual’s qualifications, interests, and career aspirations. Within these niches, individual scholars can thrive. There a newcomer can find colleagues with similar interests, form partnerships, exchange information, and in general, derive support for a career” (p. 733). With the emergence of the Internet, finding a niche—and a group of supportive colleagues with whom to share it—has never been easier.
Be optimistic, set goals, and have positive expectations. Dozens of laboratory and field experiments have shown that people perform better when others have high expectations of them (Eden & Shani, 1982; McNatt, 2000) and they have high expectations of themselves (Eden & Kinnar, 1991). Similarly, people attain higher performance by setting difficult but attainable goals, a result discovered through “more than 1,000 studies conducted by behavioral scientists on more than 88 different tasks, involving more than 40,000 male and female participants in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America” (Latham & Locke, 2006, p. 332). Having a positive attitude is also reliably related to job performance (Kaplan et al., 2009) and, happily, positive affect can be acquired through practice (Fredrickson, 2009). So even though there is some truth to the concerns raised in Tom Cummings’s chapter, young scholars will do better to focus instead on the wonderful research that others in this book have brought into being through optimism, persistence, and commitment to make a difference (see also Eden, 2008).
Don’t go it alone. As a general rule, I also recommend co-authoring research papers rather than going it alone. Co-authoring improves project quality through the give-and-take of ideas, permits the melding of complementary skills, speeds the process, and provides much-needed social support through the often arduous process of bringing research to publication. For some great ideas on writing for scholarly publication and working with co-authors, see Huff (1998).
Find supportive—and productive—mentors and co-authors. Research on supervisory support and leader-member exchange has clearly demonstrated that people with supportive supervisors display higher job performance (Gerstner & Day, 1997; Liden, Sparrowe, & Wayne, 1997). Moreover, we know that positive emotions are contagious (Barsade, 2002), and that positivity is associated with higher energy, greater creativity, and better performance (Frederickson, 2009). Finally, research shows that productive faculty supervisors beget productive early-career scholars (Williamson & Cable, 2003). So, in choosing mentors and co-authors, think “positive, productive, and supportive.”
Together, ask big, messy, exciting questions. Daft, Griffin, and Yates (1987) examined characteristics of research questions that most differentiated between scholars’ “most-versus-least significant” pieces of research (where significance was self-assessed, but then verified via independent ratings and citation counts). Studies that were most significant tended to be substantively rather than methodologically driven, and to be “characterized by less clarity and more uncertainty during the beginning stages than not-so-significant research . . . (and also) by high levels of excitement and commitment through the life of a project. . . . However, significant research projects tended to be more certain, clear, and orderly in the final publication stage than not-so-significant research projects” (p. 782, emphasis added). Now, doesn’t this sound just like the kinds of research projects described in this book? And lest the idea of “big, messy questions” seems too daunting, remember that big, messy questions can be broken down into smaller pieces, and studied via multiple methods over many years (see, for example, Fredrickson, 2009; or Locke & Latham, 2002).
Pursue multiple projects simultaneously. Soon after I took my first job at the University of Minnesota, Herb Heneman Jr. (for whom the AOM’s Heneman Career Achievement Award in Human Resources is named) advised me that the secret to success in publishing was to “throw a lot of stuff at the wall, hoping some of it will stick.” Although I suspect it is possible to throw too many things at the wall, Herb’s folksy advice has been empirically confirmed in the management discipline (Taylor et al., 1984). Because studies that make solid contributions to both research and practice are more likely to be “big” studies that take a lot of time, it seems wise to balance them out with other, smaller (and where possible, related) studies. The nature of the academic publishing process is such that each individual study undergoes a lot of “down time” (e.g., waiting for human subjects approval, waiting for reviews), but with multiple projects, one study’s downtime can become another’s surge to completion.
Don’t forget to get out of your office. Campbell, Daft, and Hulin (1982) found that significant research projects often emerge from the chance convergence of different inputs, that is, researchers from different disciplines, people from different lines of work (e.g., management versus academics), or discrepant accounts between scientific and popular media. Both Tushman and O’Reilly (2007) and Vermeulen (2007) report that they get many of their research ideas from interactions with the people they teach, particularly those in executive education. The odds of discovering something truly new increase when beliefs based on current research findings butt up against contrary evidence, or practitioners ask a question to which there is no good research-based answer. Every researcher can increase her chances of finding important research questions by choosing to partake of these other experiences. So, socialize, consult, teach, and read something other than research journals.
Conclusion
Those of us who have chosen academic careers are truly blessed by being able to, far more than most employees, create a path of our own choosing (Frost & Taylor, 1996). Particularly after being granted tenure, we are far more able than people in most other occupations to do the kind of work that seems most important to us and that most deeply satisfies our souls. In this, I agree with Dov Eden (2008), who recently said: “Who but academicians do what they want to do, are free to determine where they spend their days and hours of the day, and get so many paid vacation days? Which other type of gainful employment grants so much freedom? . . . No one should be deterred by the stress and strain of an academic career. Compared to most careers, it’s a piece of cake” (p. 739). Similarly, McGrath (2007) said: “Although academics moan about being busy, we have the luxury of being able to mull over questions for years, if we so please. Unlike our colleagues in the world of consulting, our ideas do not have to be immediately billable, and so can extend over longer time horizons. Academics can thus bring the potential for reflection and deeper ‘sensemaking’ to practical problems” (p. 1371). So, what are we so afraid of?
It seems to me that more than any other factor, producing important research that is useful to practice depends on the desire, will, and commitment to do so. Let’s put on our Nikes and just do it. The time is right.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara L. Rynes is the John F. Murray Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Iowa. Her research interests are in human resource strategy, compensation, staffing, academic-practice relationships, and management education. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Management Education Research Institute, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. She received the Academy of Management’s Herbert G. Heneman Career Achievement Award for Human Resource Management in 2006, was Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Journal from 2005 to 2007, and was Chair of the Department of Management and Organizations at the University of Iowa from 1999 to 2004. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin.