It’s Time to Make Business School Research More Relevant
What will it take for academics to actually help practitioners improve the way they manage in the real world? In this piece, the authors argue that to be more relevant, academics must both make their research more widely available to managers, and design studies with input from managers and employees. To achieve this, business schools must evolve the way they evaluate and promote professors. Instead of relying on the number of “A” journal publications a professor has, they should take a broader view of a professor’s scholarly impact. This approach offers a number of benefits: 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. Ultimately, for academic work in the management field to be useful, academics must find ways to more effectively share their findings with the business world.
