Is Relevant Research Irrelevant?: On Evaluating the Contribution of Research to Management Practice

Let me admit right now, that I am trained as an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist. For some, this is synonymous with stating that I am interested in research topics that are irrelevant to practicing managers. Although I strongly disagree with this characterization, I thought it important to expose my biases to the reader before you decide to go any further. Having done that, it may also help to present, at the outset, a brief synopsis of this editorial essay. My focus is on the indiscriminate use of the term "relevance" when describing scholarly research in the field of management. As it happens, there is no single definition of relevance that I could locate, nor are there many systematic discussions about what constitutes relevant research, and this, I believe, is what makes the problem so complicated. Since there is no agreed upon definition of relevance, anyone can brand any research paper as irrelevant, based on whatever criteria he or she chooses. This is a serious problem for management research. I will begin, then, by presenting a very narrow definition of relevance--one that is used at times by certain management scholars and practitioners, if not in writing, at least in their discussions of the research of others. I will then argue that this narrow definition of relevance is totally irrelevant to anything of concern to managers, and works at odds with what most scholars would consider good science. Furthermore, I will cite examples of studies that might have been branded as irrelevant, but which, in the long run, produced important and lasting contributions to practice. In the process, I will also try to develop a broader, and I think, more useful definition of relevance that relies heavily upon theory, and which is both more functional and totally consistent with good science as well. A Narrow Definition: What Managers Need Now Oftentimes we hear practicing managers complain about scholarly journals, stating that they deal with topics of little or no interest to them. Instead, they point to publications like The Wall Street Journal, or Business Week, as providing the information they really need to do business. At one level, it is difficult to argue with this--how can one argue that information about the Federal Reserve dropping interest rates is NOT more relevant than a paper on escalation of commitment appearing in a recent issue of JMI (Ross and Staw, 1991)? Some, more senior level managers might read the Harvard Business Review, or Human Resource Planning, but few, if any managers read any more academic publications. Why not? Most managers claim they do not have the time to sift through academic research trying to figure out how it applies to them. They need to make decisions, and they need to make decisions now. Therefore, only "research" which can help them to make those decisions, now, when they are needed, is considered to be relevant. Surely we can sympathize with the busy manager. Studies concerning which definition of environmental munificence best predicts the strategy used by an organization, or studies about which definition of goal difficulty really should be used in goal setting research seem far removed from the manager's need to decide who should be put in charge of the new plant that will be opening. Though appealing, this approach to evaluating the contribution of research is, unfortunately, quite short-sighted and extremely narrow. Research that is immediately applicable to decisions at hand may well be more useful and relevant, but other research, which may not be immediately applicable, can, in the long run, be even more useful and more relevant. Popularized books and articles to which managers do respond positively (e.g., The One Minute Manager) are often simply applications of more basic theories (positive reinforcement in this case). Furthermore, these books may represent only one perspective on the theory, while ignoring other, perhaps even more widely accepted perspectives. …