How to Do Relevant Research: From the Ivory Tower to the Real World 1788119398, 9781788119399

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HOW TO DO RELEVANT RESEARCH

HOW TO DO RELEVANT RESEARCH FROM THE IVORY TOWER TO THE REAL WORLD

PHILIP H. MIRVIS

Senior Research Fellow, Global Network on Corporate Citizenship and Lewis Institute for Social Innovation, Babson College, USA

SUSAN ALBERS MOHRMAN

Senior Research Scientist, Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California, USA

CHRISTOPHER G. WORLEY

Research Professor of Management, Department of Management and Organization Theory, Pepperdine University, USA

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Philip H. Mirvis, Susan Albers Mohrman and Christopher G. Worley 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944951 This book is available electronically in the Business subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781788119405

02

ISBN 978 1 78811 939 9 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78811 940 5 (eBook)

‘How to Do Relevant Research shows how to achieve both rigor and relevance by building a solid bridge between academics in the ivory tower and practitioners in the world. It inspires meaning, purpose and action in a community of scholars where research is often void of societal relevance and filled with instrumental careerism. It provides a compelling explanation of why sweet spot research is responsible research, why it is good for everyone, and how it can inspire a collective dream of making the world a better place for all people. This book is a wonderful gift to all current and aspiring scholars, not only those in management but in all professional disciplines.’ – Anne S. Tsui, Co-founder, Responsible Research in Business and Management (www​.rrbm​.network); 67 President, Academy of Management (www​.aom​.org); Founding President, International Association for Chinese Management Research (www​.iacmr​.org) ‘If you want to make a difference to practice and theory, How to Do Relevant Research by Mirvis, Mohrman and Worley is on target. I wish I had the wisdom in this book when I was a doctoral student or in early career – it would have helped me accelerate my contributions to theory and practice.’ – Michael Beer, Harvard Business School; Co-founder TruePoint; Co-Founder Center for Higher Ambition Leadership ‘This is an indispensable guide for scholars and practitioners. Mirvis, Mohrman, and Worley offer decades of exceptional experience. Their practical frameworks and vivid examples show practitioners how to tap the vast trove of useful evidence produced by scholars, and show scholars how to connect and ground their research in the pivotal issues, values, and decision frameworks used by practitioners.’ – John Boudreau, University of Southern California, USA ‘An important and engaging contribution to doing research that enhances practice. More than a “how to” guide, Mirvis, Mohrman, and Worley’s years of experience in engaged research compel us to pay attention to the necessity of relevant scholarship. If you aren’t already doing and communicating useful, relevant research, this elegant book should inspire you to act. And if you are, then this exploration should energize you to build and connect.’ – Gavin M. Schwarz, University of New South Wales Business School, Australia ‘At a time when executives seek evidence-based insight into effective practice, academics pursue opportunities for thought leadership, and accrediting bodies and funding agencies call for greater impact from research, this book guides scholars about how to best balance theory, rigor, and relevance. I strongly recommend this book to practitioner scholars and academics who are seeking to elevate their engaged scholarship and potential impact.’ – John Mooney, Pepperdine University, USA ‘This is an important book on relevant and useful research that should be read by any scientist who is interested in making a difference to both practice and the academy. Based on decades of work, Mirvis, Mohrman and Worley provide a coherent roadmap for the complex and exciting journey into the borderland between academy and industry.’ – Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, California Polytechnic State University, USA and Co-Author of Collaborative Inquiry for Organization Development and Change

‘Many organizational scholars, including Presidents of the Academy of Management, have urged us to do research that is both rigorous and relevant. This book shows us HOW to do this – at all academic career-phases. Coming from world-renowned scholars who have done this (and still do), this book’s refreshingly reflective and authentic tips promise to inspire and enable more organizational scholars to rigorously conduct relevant research thereby exponentially increasing the reach and impact of organizational science. This is needed now more than ever!’ – Debra L. Shapiro, University of Maryland, USA and Past President, Academy of Management (2016) ‘This excellent book is must reading for anyone who wants to conduct relevant research that advances knowledge for theory and practice. It finds the sweet spot between contributing to theory and producing knowledge relevant to the problems faced in management and organizational practice. It suggests practical and proven ways to engage in a network of activities and relationships that enable relevant research.’ – Andrew H. Van de Ven, University of Minnesota, USA ‘A most welcome and well written guide to practical scholarship that is both rigorous and useful. For those stuck in the ivory tower, it’s also a liberatory call to action research!’ – Hilary Bradbury, Editor in Chief, Action Research Journal, Curator, Foundation AR+ ‘This book offers a time-tested methodology on how to execute research that delivers relevant knowledge for practice. It resonates with the CEEMAN Manifesto on excellence and relevance in education and research and answers the question of professors and their doctoral students: “How do you do it?!”’ – Danica Purg, President of IEDC-Bled School of Management, Bled, Slovenia, and President of CEEMAN, The International Association for Management Development in Dynamic Societies ‘This book is timely given the current global crisis and potential ones that businesses will likely face. Social science researchers have a role to play in solution making but are often missing from the solution making space occupied by managers. Mirvis, Mohrman and Worley provide concrete guidance to researchers to get to the “sweet spot” where knowledge produced is both relevant and rigorous. They ask us to reflect on our research paradigms and professional identity, and to find inspiration in the many examples of research–practice collaborations that they share in the book. A must-read for researchers at any stage of their career seeking to produce research insights that impact practice.’ – Garima Sharma, Georgia State University, USA ‘This book is long overdue. With examples of relevant research all over the world, it enables scholars to smell the aroma of practice and practitioners to taste the cooking of academics. I recommend this work to academics around the globe. For practitioners who are venturing into the scholarly world (i.e., getting doctoral degrees), this is must have book.’ – Baniyelme D. Zoogah, President, Africa Academy of Management; Xavier University, USA

CO NT EN TS List of exhibits and appendicesxi About the authorsxiii Preface and acknowledgementsxv Introduction to How to Do Relevant Research xvii PART I

WHAT AND WHY

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Theory-driven, practice-driven, and “sweet spot” management research Theory-driven Management Research Practice-driven Management Research Sweet Spot Management Research What Makes Knowledge Useful to Practitioners? The Knowledge Value Stream Knowledge Generation → Transmission → Use Knowledge Generation ↔ Transmission ↔ Use Interactive Knowledge Exchange Toward the Sweet Spot?

2 3 5 7 9 11 13 13 14 17

2

Developing your research philosophy Fundamental Considerations in Management and Organization Research Research Paradigms Considerations for Sweet Spot Researchers Multiple Research Paradigms to Consider Engaged Scholarship

21 22 24 26 27

3

Ethics, Values, and Purpose Reflecting on Purpose Putting Purpose into Research Moving Forward

27 33 34 35 36

Creating value in organizational research: a relational view Bridging the Worlds of Academe and Practice Research in a Knowledge Network Navigating the Knowledge Value Stream Positioning Yourself in the Value Stream Sweet Spot Considerations A Social Network Perspective on Organizational Knowledge Sweet Spot Considerations

39 39 41 42 42 48 49 50

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4

Relevant research: yesterday and today Studying Theoretical and Practical Problems The Foundations of Organization and Management Research Sweet Spot Scholarship in Our Time Rigorous and Relevant Research Methods What is “Good” Research? Pluralism and Pragmatism Building and Tapping into Knowledge Networks Connecting to Practice via Research Centers Joining with Practice in Knowledge Networks A Network to Get Knowledge into Practice A Sweet Spot Research Career is Beckoning

PART II 5

HOW

Theorizing and practice 71 Sourcing-and-Framing Your Research 71 Three Sources of Research 72 Bridging the Theory/Practice Dimension 75 Noticing and Exploring Phenomena 76 Reviewing Existing Research 76 Theorizing77 80 Theorizing from Practice A Closer Look at Sweet Spot Theorizing 82 Problem Formulation 82 Thought Trials Connecting Theory to Practice Theorizing and Practical Research Questions Collaborative Theorizing Points to Ponder

6

55 55 55 57 61 62 63 65 66 66 67 68

Research and practice Standards in Sweet Spot Research Research Methods: The Basics The Pattern Matching Process Empirical Theory Testing Methods Empirical Theory Building Methods Sweet Spot Considerations Exploratory and Descriptive Research

84 85 87 89 91 95 96 97 99 99 100 101 104

CONTENTS

Descriptive Research Sweet Spot Considerations Studying Differences, Relationships, and Processes Studying Differences Variance Theory Methods Process Theory Methods Sweet Spot Considerations Explanatory Research Direct Engagement with Practice Diagnostic and Clinical Research Interventions and Action Research Assessing Organizational Change Sweet Spot Considerations Points to Ponder 7

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104 106 106 107 107 108 108 109 110 110 111 112 114 115

Communicating research to scholars and practitioners 118 Communicating Scholarship: Multi-Products and Multi-Channels 118 Communicating Research Findings 119 Credibility of the Communicator 120 Ethos120 Logos120 Pathos121 121 Your Message: Contributions to Theory and Practice Contributions to Theory 121 Contributions to Practice 122 Four Examples of Theory–Practice Communications Communication Forms: Research as Story The Anatomy of a Story A Realist Tale A Confessional, Impressionist Tale The Audience: Speaking to Research Consumers Make Your Findings “Sticky” Talk and Visual Messaging Creative Communication Communication Channels: Spreading and Amplifying Your Message Be a Maven Be a Connector Be a Salesperson

123 125 126 126 129 130 131 132 133 133 134 134 135

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Communicating to Impact Practice Points to Ponder

135 137

8

Managing research relationships in the field Getting In Researcher Initiated Projects Organizationally Initiated Research Managing Research in Knowledge Networks: Role Systems Research Role Systems Managing Research in a Multi-Party Knowledge Network Motivations to Participate Multi-Party Relationships Ethical, Scientific, and Practical Considerations in Field Research Data Collection Research Methods Dissemination and Publication Points to Ponder

140 140 140 141 142 142 146 146 146 150 151 152 153 154

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Being a sweet spot researcher Bridging Two Worlds Boundary Management Expanding the Bounds of Your Scholarship Combining Academic and Practice Knowledge Scholarship Reconsidered A Career with Commitment

158 159 160 161 161 162

Reflective Practice Making a Difference: An Aspirational View Index

163 165 167 172

EXH I B I T S A N D A PPE N D I C ES Exhibits 1.1

Theory-driven and practice-driven research

1.2 “Sweet spot” management research

3 7

1.3

The knowledge-generating value stream

12

1.4

Collaborative research and interactive knowledge exchange

16

2.1

Ontology, epistemology, methodology, and some practical questions

23

2.2

Burrell and Morgan’s sociological paradigms

25

2.3

Some major research schools of thought

28

2.4

Van de Ven’s engaged scholarship diamond

30

2.5

Engaged scholarship continuum

31

3.1

The knowledge-generating value stream (full)

43

3.2

Networks underlying the knowledge-generating value stream (simplified depiction)

51

5.1

Sweet spot research and the sourcing dimension

71

5.2

Three sourcing/framing strategies

73

5.3

Some practical problems and their theoretical frames

75

5.4

Process models incorporate time

79

5.5a

Stages of corporate citizenship

81

5.5b

Developmental drivers of corporate citizenship

81

5.6

Two types of theory–practice connections

85

5.7

Characteristics of good theory and its application for practice

88

5.8

Network model of organization

90

6.1 Sweet spot research standards

95

6.2

Pattern matching in sweet spot research

98

6.3

Sample agility profile

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6.4

Jazz in the empty spaces

101

6.5

Assessing organization change

113

7.1

Communicating with the consumers of research

119

7.2

How findings contribute to theory and practice

122

7.3

Comparing traditional and sweet spot stories

127

7.4

An agility storyboard

128

8.1

The research role system

143

9.1a

Your journey from the ivory tower to the real world (steps 1–6)

166

9.1b

Your journey from the ivory tower to the real world (steps 7–12)

167

Appendices 1.1

Resources on useful research

20

8.1

“Issues” in Organization Research and How to Respond

156

9.1

Resources on research careers

171

AB O UT T H E A U T HO R S Philip H. Mirvis is an organizational psychologist whose research and private practice concerns large-scale organizational change, the character of the workforce and workplace, and role of business in society. He currently serves as senior research fellow for the Global Network on Corporate Citizenship and Babson Lewis Institute, and has held academic posts at Boston University, Boston College, and visitor, London Business School, Jiao Tong University, and IEDC-Bled. A regular contributor to academic and professional journals, he has authored or edited fourteen books, including a volume on research methods, Assessing Organizational Change: A Guide to Methods, Measures, and Practices, an acclaimed survey of the national mood, The Cynical Americans, a study of corporate human resource investments, Building the Competitive Workforce and, covering twenty years of experience with mergers, Joining Forces, 2nd edition. His latest works are about developing a leadership community, To the Desert and Back, the role of business in society, Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship, and global multilateral partnering, Organizing for Sustainability: Networks and Partnerships. Mirvis has addressed leading university faculties and professional groups in over 50 nations on six continents. He received the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner career achievement award from the Academy of Management and is a Fellow in the Academy. Susan Albers Mohrman has spent her career as a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She is Co-Faculty Director, with Chris Worley, of the Certificate Program in Organization Design at the Center for Effective Organizations, and of CEO’s research programs on Organization Design and Sustainable Effectiveness, and on developing agile change capabilities. Dr Mohrman’s research has been in the areas of organization design and change, and sustainable effectiveness. Most recently she has studied socio-technical frameworks and processes and designs that embed advanced digital technologies in organization designs to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. Since 1985 (Doing Research That is Useful for Theory and Practice, with E. Lawler, A. Mohrman, T. Cummings, and G. Ledford; Jossey-Bass Publishers), she has been active in a growing community of scholars concerned that organization and management research should produce knowledge that is useful for organizations as they adapt to the changing contexts in which they operate. Most recently, she co-edited, with E. Lawler, Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice (Berrett-Koehler, 2011). She has been an editor and author in the Emerald Press series Design for Sustainability. With E. Lawler and J. O’Toole, she has edited Corporate Stewardship: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness (Greenleaf Press, 2015).

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Christopher G. Worley is Research Professor of Management at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business. He is also an affiliate researcher with the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business and was the founding strategy director of the Center for Leadership and Effective Organizations at the NEOMA Business School in France. He is the former Director of the Master of Science in Organization (MSOD) program at Pepperdine University and served as past chair for the Academy of Management’s Organization Development and Change Division. He is a recognized leader in the fields of organization development, design, and agility. His most recent books include The Agility Factor (with Tom Williams and Ed Lawler), Assessing Organization Agility, Management Reset, and Built to Change. In addition, he was co-editor of Organizing Supply Chain Processes for Sustainable Innovation in the Agri-Food Industry and co-editor (with Phil Mirvis) of Organizing for Sustainability: Leading through Networks & Partnerships. He is the author of Integrated Strategic Change: How OD Builds Competitive Advantage in Addison-Wesley’s OD Series and, with Tom Cummings, has co-authored seven editions of Organization Development and Change, the leading textbook in the field.

PREF A C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G EMENT S There’s a classic West Wing TV episode where Leo McGarry (played by John Spencer) helps Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) through a rough time. We’ve adapted the story Leo tells just a little: This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, “Hey doc, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a minister comes along and the guy shouts up, “Hey, reverend, I’m down in this hole. Can you help me out?” The minister says a prayer for him and moves on. Then an academic strolls by and the guy yells out, “Hey, professor, can you give me a hand?” The professor then details an elegant theory of holes but moves on before taking questions. Finally a friend walks by: “Hey, Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.” More than once, each of us has been stuck in a figurative hole: “How can my work influence practice AND contribute to theory?” With the guidance and support of friends who knew the way, we made our way out. And, by training and inclination, we have sometimes been the friend lending a hand to a colleague stuck in a similar hole. This book shares what we’ve learned about being part of an academic and practitioner network whose members help each other do research that matters. Our motivations for this book come from decades of interacting with doctoral students and colleagues in our various institutions, the Academy of Management, and other academic forums. We encountered many people stuck in a hole—wondering how to succeed in a world that values theoretical contributions while knowing that their own internal measures of success included doing research that enhances practice. Hence, you’ll see the idea of a “sweet spot” where you can do both scholarly and practical management and organization research. Throughout our careers, we have collaborated, communed, and co-researched with academics and practitioners in projects large and small, with some lasting many years. These experiences have enriched our understandings of engaged research and the importance of putting practice at the center of our work. As you will see, we regularly join in knowledge generating networks to do our work and get into practice—and recommend you do so, too. It’s a cliché but nevertheless true: no book gets written without help. At different times and in different ways, Ed Lawler’s work at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Survey Research (ISR) and his vision in setting up the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) at the University of Southern California have provided us sustenance and the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the world of practice. We are tremendously grateful to the scholars we interviewed for this book. You’ll get to know them throughout the book and be inspired by their stories and experiences. In urging you to journey from the ivory tower to the real world,

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we have been carried along by Andy Van de Ven, Karl Weick, and many others who have built and crossed a bridge between academe and practice. We give a special shout out to David Creelman and Cristina Gibson, who took on the role of reading and reacting to the entire manuscript. Their comments shaped our message, sharpened our arguments, and confirmed our motivations. Without the otherworldly patience of our editor, Fran O’Sullivan, you wouldn’t be reading this. Closer to home, we extend our appreciation to Nora Hilton, who provided technical and editorial support for the book, and the rest of our staff and colleagues who have enabled some of the research that is mentioned in this book. And we thank our spouses, Mary Jo Hatch, Allan (Monty) Mohrman, and Debbie Worley, who have been deeply intertwined not only in our personal lives, but also as colleagues in the work we do and influencers of the way we see the world we live in and research.

INT R O D UC T I O N T O HO W TO D O R EL EVANT RES E A R C H There has never been a more important time for researchers to generate useful knowledge, catalyze change, and contribute to managerial and organizational effectiveness. To adapt to upheavals in the economic, technical, ecological, social, and political landscape, managers need practical insights, research-based evidence, and knowledge partners to inform and guide their actions. Will organizational researchers be there to help them in this transition? Can we journey from the ivory tower to confront the real world challenges faced by organizations and their stakeholders? Questions about relevance have been the subject of debate for decades in academe where research to develop and test theory has been emphasized over research that supports practice.1 This book makes a case that systematic research can be informed by and contribute to theory and, at the same time, produce knowledge relevant to the problems faced in practice. There is a sweet spot where you can do both scholarly and practical research and we’re going to show you how to get there. Our aim is to speak to the “graduate student in all of us”—as an introduction to PhD students and early career academics who gravitate to this kind of research but worry about its feasibility and instrumentality; a refresher to mid-to-late career scholars who do research for practice and teach young scholars how to do it; and a resource to researchers in a think-tank, institute, or consultancy who want their work to be scientifically sound and practically useful.

THE CASE FOR RELEVANT SCHOLARSHIP Doing relevant research means studying the real issues, problems, and demands facing organizations and the people that work in and manage them. It means generating knowledge that is (1) applicable to practice; (2) useful to practitioners; and (3) actionable. And to this we add a fourth condition—that your research be grounded in theory, your methods hew to standards of reliability and validity, and your findings speak to the literature and your academic peers as well as to practitioners. It is this middle space between the worlds of academe and practice that we put ourselves as researchers, and encourage you to consider. As you will see, operating in this “sweet spot” is, as a wise professor put it, “wonderfully complex, not easy, and presents a new puzzle every few steps.”2 It also poses choices and tradeoffs for you as a researcher. This was the kind of research for theory and practice done by our mentors and professors, who learned from their close connection to practice, and who urged us to do the same. You will hear from some of them—Edward Lawler, Michael Porter, Denise Rousseau, Edgar Schein— and learn about their motivations, strategies, and challenges in doing this kind of research. But they, and we, entered academe in a different time and things have changed. Nowadays, these scholars and their contributions continue to be admired and cited, but too few professors strive to emulate them. In the world of organizational scholarship today, there is rising angst about the irrelevance of management research and teaching, and growing debate about the spread of the “American”

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model of scholarship to business and management schools around the world.3 The central concerns are that business schools have defined themselves as theory- and research-based institutions and that faculty publications in theory-oriented, peer-refereed, top-tier journals have become, as former president of the Academy of Management Tom Cummings observed, the “gold standard and primary determinant of a business school’s prestige.” Consequently, academic theorizing about organizations and their management has become more distant from practice; research rigor has been emphasized over relevance. This is not simply a philosophical choice for a business school and its faculty members—it has implications for a school’s ranking and reputation, student and faculty recruiting (and retention), and accreditation. The AACSB (the America-based Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, whose reach extends globally) and its European counterpart the EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) put a premium on discipline-based research as opposed to scholarship aimed at practice or management education. It has reached the point that many business school professors spend little time interacting with practitioners and companies, and their schools must employ non-tenured clinical faculty and consultants as adjuncts to teach practically minded MBAs and provide executive education. A range of studies suggest that practitioners struggle to find academic studies of potential relevance to them and, when they do, have a difficult time understanding academic argument and jargon let alone discovering anything practical they can use.4 Whether this reflects (1) a knowledge production problem or (2) a knowledge translation problem is an open question.5 Are researchers today guided by theories and methodologies divorced from organizational perspectives and realities? If so, their research has little relevance and applicability to practitioners. Or, do researchers fail to translate and disseminate effectively the knowledge they generate so that practitioners can understand and apply it? In our view: both problems hinder us from doing relevant research. Responding to calls for more practice impact requires a self-examination of our fields of inquiry and the theories and methodologies we employ, the problems we examine, and the way our work connects to the organizations that are shaping our future. We need to reconsider whether our dominant, hands-off, and theory-oriented approach to research has left us in the roles of chroniclers, explainers, and tacit enablers of the status quo rather than generators of knowledge that helps to shape how organizing can unfold differently and more effectively. We believe researchers can get beyond the insulated and singular motivation of advancing disciplinary knowledge and can commit to scholarship that is responsive to the complexity of practitioner challenges. To do so we have to be close enough to organizational realities to see how they are changing, to understand how they relate to our theoretical concepts, and to appreciate their impacts on outcomes of interest to economies, humanity, and the earth. This is particularly important during periods of upheaval and transformation—like now! When practitioners experience new problems, they need to step outside a daily reality defined by their implicit theories and existing solutions. As researchers, we can and should be there with innovative, thought-provoking frameworks and credible findings.

INTRODUCTION

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REPURPOSING MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION RESEARCH The origins of this book trace to the dawn of the new millennium when Mohrman called on researchers to “Seize the Day”: This is a time in history when organizational studies can and should contribute to the shaping of organizations and institutions that have immense impact on the character and quality of life. The unfolding global knowledge economy has presented great turbulence and contradiction: entailing unparalleled opportunity and largesse for some, decreased fortune for others, and the challenge of adapting to a new order for all but the most recent entrants to the workforce.6 Since then we have witnessed global terrorism and the downing of the Twin Towers in New York City; the dot.com bust of 2000 and financial crisis of 2008; ever dire warnings on the impact of climate change; the Arab Spring, Brexit, and social movements ranging from Occupy Wall Street to #MeToo to Black Lives Matter; the COVID-19 pandemic; political unrest in the US and elsewhere; and growing attention to sustainability and social issues by business. Digital companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, alongside Apple, now dominate the Fortune 100 while new organization forms have emerged involving peer-to-peer sharing and gig workers or combining social and economic objectives in “hybrid” business models and B Corps. New strategic challenges stem from geopolitical uncertainty and realignment as dominant Western economies and cultures are being challenged by strengthening economies and different socio-political and cultural frameworks in the global East and South. In a matter of decades, fundamental disruptions associated with globalization and digitalization have propelled significant changes in organizational operations and raised fundamental questions about business purposes and responsibilities. These disruptive changes have created many new areas for scholarly investigation and challenged the continuing relevance of knowledge developed in earlier stages of industrial organization. Our existing understandings of employee commitment may not fit in today’s work world. People are globally dispersed, culturally diverse, and mobile, and companies no longer offer a secure employment relationship or even employment status to those who deliver on the organization’s mission. Our current work designs and mechanisms of control, coordination, and accountability seem ill-adapted to the movement toward robotics and smart IT platforms that carry out decision-making and learn. Ask yourself: Do prevailing assumptions about the objective function of wealth creation make sense when current practices have detracted from human dignity and wellbeing, equity, and the health of the natural ecology? Our organization theories and research studies will have to change to embed these other valued outcomes. Meanwhile, new ideas have been introduced that enrich theorizing and our research methods. Complexity theory, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics infuse important new perspectives into the study of social systems. Theorizing, at least among post-modernists, has taken a “linguistic turn”. Researchers of this stripe “read” organizational speech and doings and deconstruct them by, among other

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methods, looking for alternative interpretations, exploring what is not being said or done, flipping things around to see the “other side” of the story, and seeking out the voices of the underrepresented or marginalized. Theorizing has also taken a “practice turn” (e.g., strategy-as-practice). These approaches and others, including critical management theory, positive organization scholarship, and organizational aesthetics, give us new “lenses” to see what is going on in organizations. Research findings generated from these diverse angles can variously wake up practitioners to troubling realities, affirm positive trajectories, or afford them a fresh perspective on what they are doing.

GETTING KNOWLEDGE TO PRACTICE When we took our first academic posts, the main highway between research and practice went through classroom teaching and executive education, textbook writing, publications in practitioner-oriented journals, and professional books. This knowledge value stream is still in place but just as industries and ecosystems evolve, so too has the value stream through which organizational knowledge is generated and communicated to practitioners. Universities, for example, have established multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder research centers. Scholars from different backgrounds develop and exchange knowledge with one another and with practitioners in health care, technology, nonprofit and government services, and arts/entertainment or with functional specialists in HR, IT, marketing, and engineering. Researcher and practitioner communities have formed to study organization learning, diversity and inclusion, commercial and social innovation, organization design, sustainability, and developments in technology and social media. Private research centers, foundations, and professional service/consulting firms are also in the business of generating and getting knowledge into practice. All this raises some practical questions for you: How will you keep abreast of and engage with the world of practice in framing and doing your research? Do you want to do research solely within the confines of your academic department and discipline or connect to and even collaborate with different sorts of researchers, perhaps in alternative research venues? Can you imagine collaborating with managers and organizations or joining in a knowledge network to do your research? Knowledge is now being transmitted to practice in new forms. Blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos convey “bite-size” bits of knowledge in short, digestible, and entertaining formats. PowerPoint presentations, storyboards, and infographics that explain research and its findings can be downloaded in an instant. Diagnostic surveys, action frameworks, and tools like decision trees or the business-model canvas help practitioners apply research-based knowledge or do research in their own organizations. Now you may sniff that these kinds of knowledge “products” distort the nuances and simplify the complexities of your research. They can … and that’s why those academics who want to speak to theory and practice use different channels to reach these two different audiences—and with appropriately tailored products. This book is about doing and communicating relevant organizational research in this new environment. It is informed by our experiences and the counsel of scholars whom we

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interviewed to enrich, refine, and reality-test our points of view. We do not intend this as a full-throated critique of scholarly dysfunctions in the business school. Indeed, academic researchers have produced rich theoretical frameworks on motivation, leadership, innovation, open and socio-technical systems models of organization, structure–conduct–performance relationships and contingencies, and theorizing on networks, competing values, strategic capabilities, and evolutionary change that have informed both scholarship and practice. Many organizational researchers, including those we interviewed in developing this book, advance theoretical perspectives even as they study subjects vital to organizational functioning and human welfare. This means doing more than just a one-off translation of an empirical article for the Harvard Business Review (HBR) to demonstrate relevance. They have embraced a research process that contributes to both theory and practice—and informs both scholars and doers. You will read in the volume about how they produce theoretically grounded knowledge to improve practice in such areas as adapting to digitalization and globalization, increasing organization agility and ambidexterity, fostering responsible leadership and stakeholder management, developing sustainability and social responsibility, and promoting diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice at work along with work–life integration.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU? In talking with our colleagues, we’ve shared a lot of head shaking over how theory and research are increasingly disconnected from practice. In academic circles today, practice-minded researchers are largely discounted and devalued. In conversations with doctoral students and junior faculty, we also hear and see a lot of “pain”. It is expressed in cynicism about the workings of academe, disillusionment that scholarship should make a difference in organizations and society, and disappointment in themselves for giving up animating ideals and following along mainstream norms. We believe, and will provide examples that show, that it is possible to shape your research career so that it generates knowledge that influences practice. Our aim is to get you thinking deeply about these matters. We provide frameworks, exemplars, ideas, and tools to guide you in the life-long tasks of defining yourself as a researcher and crafting your research practice. And we invite you to travel beyond the seemingly safe pathways laid out for you in your training, and develop a research career where you step into the middle ground where systematic research is connected to emerging organizational futures. The journey toward relevant research is yours. z Are you a doctoral student or early-career professor who came to this field in hopes of doing something different from generating knowledge for its own sake? Do you aspire to develop and transmit knowledge to students and to practitioners for use in their careers or do research with practitioners and their organizations to help solve their problems? Are you being pushed to play the “A” journal publication game and counseled to “Wait ’til you get tenure, then you can worry about practice and ‘saving the world’?” Or, z Are you a scholar-practitioner employed in a management post or consulting firm who gravitated to doctoral scholarship to enhance your knowledge and advance pro-

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fessionally? Have you learned that you are an “outsider” whose practice knowledge is pooh-poohed in academic theorizing and whose motivations to apply knowledge to practice are vaguely suspect? As you take on the academic jargon and neologisms of organization science, do your work colleagues have any idea what you are talking about? Or, z Are you a peripatetic professor who contributes to theory but also and especially wants to influence practice? Are you regularly reminded that HBR is not an “appropriate” journal for academics? Worse, if you are graying, have you received unsubtle hints that you are holding on to a tenured slot that might better be filled by junior faculty socialized into a more “academic” approach to scholarship? Or, z Are you doing your research outside of the university, in a research center, think-tank, or consultancy? Are you keeping track of relevant academic scholarship and wanting to collaborate with academics and practitioners to do relevant research? If so, take heart, this book aims at you. It reimagines how to conduct management and organization research with the twin objectives of developing theory and impacting practice. For us, doing sound research that has practical relevance is a high calling and an adventure. To test and ultimately affirm that it has a place today in business school scholarship, we interviewed a number of our colleagues—and yours.7 Here you will find observations and reflections on doing this work from Max Bazerman, Mike Beer, John Boudreau, Wayne Cascio, Rob Cross, Amy Edmondson, Cristina Gibson, Adam Grant, Stu Hart, Mary Jo Hatch, Ed Lawler, Michael Porter, Bob Quinn, Denise Rousseau, Ed Schein, Majken Schultz, Bob Sutton, and Sandra Waddock, and from scholar practitioners like Sheila Bonini. Thanks to them and welcome to you.

WHAT’S INSIDE? This volume is in two parts. Part I puts research for practice in its context and lays out the foundational bases of practical scholarship. The first chapter introduces you to what we call sweet spot research, what makes its knowledge relevant and useful, and how it connects to a broader ecosystem of knowledge generation and communication about organizations and their management. Chapter 2 asks you to reflect on the philosophical underpinnings of different research paradigms you might use and how you position yourself on a continuum of progressively engaged scholarship. Chapter 3 explores knowledge value streams to help you imagine ways to connect with other scholars, practitioners, and communities of practice to frame, do, and disseminate your research. In transitioning to Part II, Chapter 4 looks at historic exemplars of practical organization scholarship and how contemporary ones stand on their shoulders. Part II concerns “how to” do research for practice with chapters on practical theorizing (Chapter 5), multiple research methods (Chapter 6), communicating to two different audiences (Chapter 7), and managing research relationships (Chapter 8). Note that this is not a research methods book. We assume here that you are familiar with the ins-and-outs of critically reading the literature, framing a problem statement, and formulating a research

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design. And we expect that you are conversant with different data gathering tools and matters of reliability, validity, and analytic techniques. What we present is not typically covered in your methods courses: How to do all of this with practice in mind and how to engage practitioners in your research. A concluding Chapter 9 has you reflect on your professional identity in producing knowledge for theory and practice. Please note that throughout we have kept our references light primarily to acknowledge the main sources we draw from but not to cover the full canon of knowledge on subjects we address. Apologies and hats-off to so many authors whom we would surely cite in a more complete review of pertinent literature. Preview over. Let’s move into three different realms of management research: theory-driven, practice-driven, and the sweet spot.

NOTES 1. Kieser, A., Nicolai, A. and Seidl, D. (2015). The practical relevance of management research: Turning the debate on relevance into a rigorous scientific research program.  Academy of Management Annals,  9(1), 143–233. 2. Shay, J.P. (2008). A tale of a peripatetic professor: An interview with Craig C. Lundberg.  Journal of Management Inquiry, 17(4), 341–52. 3.

See Pfeffer, J. and Fong, C.T. (2002). The end of business schools? Less success than meets the eye. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 1(1), 78–95; Mintzberg, H. (2004). Managers, not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. Berrett-Koehler; Bennis, W.G. and O’Toole, J. (2005). How business schools have lost their way. Harvard Business Review, 83(5), 96–104; and Khurana, R. (2010). From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

4.

Rynes, S.L., Bartunek, J.M. and Daft, R.L. (2001). Across the great divide: Knowledge creation and transfer between practitioners and academics. Academy of Management Journal, 44(2), 340–55.

5.

Shapiro, D.L., Kirkman, B.L. and Courtney, H.G. (2007). Perceived causes and solutions of the translation problem in management research. Academy of Management Journal, 50(2), 249–66.

6. Mohrman, S.A. (2001). Seize the day: Organizational studies can and should make a difference.  Human Relations, 54(1), 57–65. 7.

Interviewees were chosen based on their demonstrated ability to do research that is rigorous and relevant. This a convenience sample representing researchers whom we know based at different institutions. We questioned them about their research careers, professional identities and sense of purpose, how they theorized and did research, and the challenges encountered in doing relevant research and what helped them along the way. The interview material was sorted into conceptual groupings but not coded or subject to quantified analysis.

PART I

WHAT AND WHY

1

Theory-driven, practice-driven, and “sweet spot” management research Start with a thought-experiment. Imagine doing your “ideal” research study. In this study, you are unconstrained by the expectations of your teachers or colleagues and not pressured to get a dissertation done or a study published before the tenure clock runs out. Now consider the three questions below as they pertain to your dream study: My ideal research study: • As I frame my research questions, are they of central concern to theory, to practice, or both? • As I conduct my research, do my methods and approaches aim to be rigorous, relevant, or both? • As I disseminate my findings, do I want to speak primarily to scholars, practitioners, or both?

The first question asks about whether the preferred source of your research is in theory or practice. To extend your reflection: Do you resonate with Auguste Comte’s perspective that “facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory” (theory–practice–theory) or more so with John Dewey’s notion that “we only think when confronted with a problem” (practice–theory–practice)?1 The second question asks about your research methods—is your focus more on standards of rigor (internal validity) or relevance (external validity for the practice world)? The third question asks about the intended audience or consumer of your research—who will use and learn the most from the knowledge gleaned? Answers to these questions yield two archetypic kinds of research—theory-driven and practice-driven—plus a “hybrid” that straddles the two and honors both scholarly interests and practitioners’ needs. Exhibit 1.1 depicts, in a figurative way, the two archetypes in a spider-diagram and shows the respective “spaces” typically covered by theory-driven and practice-driven research. In this chapter we look first at the two research archetypes and then delve into the hybrid space we call the “sweet spot”. We then explore what makes research knowledge useful and how it can be developed and disseminated through knowledge networks of fellow academics, practitioners, and professional service firms and associations to yield actionable knowledge products and learning.

THEORY- AND PRACTICE-DRIVEN “SWEET SPOT” RESEARCH

Exhibit 1.1

3

Theory-driven and practice-driven research

THEORY-DRIVEN MANAGEMENT RESEARCH Many academics are theory-builders and/or -testers at heart. The builders love to conceptualize, play with abstract ideas, and speculate how they might fit together in different ways. The testers tend to be more concrete and frame their thinking in terms of precise hypotheses about variables and formulations of their cause-and-effect relationships. But in both instances motivations and mental energy are directed toward constructing, enhancing, or validating theory. Academic newbies scour the literature to find inconsistencies or gaps that invite further theorizing or tests of hypotheses. More experienced minds, like Margaret Peteraf, take on theoretical conundrums. Her theorizing amplified the idea that the source of competitive advantage might be internal to a firm as opposed to its position in its environment. On the heels of the “positioning” school made popular by Michael Porter, the resource-based view of strategy argued that firm resources could be the basis for competitive advantage but had not yet specified how this could happen. Drawing on micro-economic concepts, Peteraf theorized that a sustainable competitive advantage based on resources required four conditions: 1. Resource heterogeneity is required to be able to claim Ricardian or monopoly rents; 2. Ex post limits to competition prevent others from enjoying the benefits of the same resources after a firm has claimed them; 3. The resources on which advantage is based must be imperfectly mobile—a resource on which a firm relies cannot simply get up and walk out the door; 4. Ex ante limits to competition require the firm to identify and claim the resources for advantage before others do, ensuring that the cost of implementing the strategy would not exceed the benefits (rents).2 This kind of theory-driven scholarship comprises what Susan Ashford calls an academic “home run”.3 Peteraf’s article, published in the Strategic Management Journal, has over 16 000 citations as of now and has influenced hundreds of subsequent research studies on the

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four conditions. This represents, to paraphrase Kuhn, how normal science progresses. Yet, take note that while her scholarship was targeted at an academic audience, she made several truly insightful comments about the article’s potential implications to practitioners in single businesses as well as diversified firms. As to research methods, academics are well versed in the different types of and threats to reliability and validity in research designs, measures, and the particulars of survey research, observation studies, and lab and field experiments. In addition, research is challenged regularly on these counts—initially by dissertation advisors and later by journal reviewers. This leads many to adopt a more distant “objective” role in relation to those whom they study and to favor more controlled research environments. One consequence is that we have seen many more laboratory experiments conducted by organization behavior researchers and far fewer field experiments where it is difficult to randomize participants and control for factors that might interact with experimental conditions. Finally, many academics write primarily for other academics. Scholarly publications are the coin-of-the-realm for tenure track academics. In fields like law, medicine, engineering, and the natural sciences, practitioners are trained and feel obliged to peruse the scholarly literature in their fields. Not so for managers. Instead, those who look for advanced ideas and practical guidance turn to HBR, California Management Review, Sloan Management Review, HR Magazine or People & Strategy. They are also influenced by topical studies from large consulting firms and by management and leadership book best-sellers (often via executive summaries). Meanwhile, much of the academic literature in our field gives scant attention to theorizing on practical matters and even scholars complain that it suffers from “pretentious and long-winded prose”.4 One of the great strengths of scholarly research is that it contributes to a canon of knowledge passed on from generation to generation that is refined, disputed, and redefined by successive theorizing and research. Over the ages, scholarly research has challenged false pronouncements of the institutional church, supplanted superstition with facts, and countered pseudo-scientific ideas and solutions peddled by charlatans and quacks. It is today an important counterweight to misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news”. We were introduced to organizational scholarship in our graduate days through Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise. His distinction between management based on Theory X versus Theory Y assumptions of human nature was practically simplifying without being simple; his writings summed the theoretical foundations and research evidence behind this classification scheme.5 This was the kind of research for theory and practice done by our mentors and professors and urged on us. Of concern here is whether, as currently enacted, theory-driven research is producing useful knowledge for practice. For example, theories regarding the maximization of profit amidst perfect competition are elegant and powerful. But they assume away obvious realities. Resources are not frictionless; there’s no such thing as symmetric information even in today’s digital world; and many firms are large enough to be price makers. In an effort to be rigorous, many academicians also believe that research methods must be “sanitized” for fear that they become a source of variance or error in the results. But limiting interviews and surveys to a pre-defined and standardized set of questions, and applying high-powered statistics to data

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at the expense of trying to understand what might really be going on in the minds of data providers, may add rigor to research knowledge but subtract from its applicability.

PRACTICE-DRIVEN MANAGEMENT RESEARCH The “real-world” challenges facing managers and organizations animate those who do practice-driven research. Their research typically starts with a problem-at-hand and the researcher’s job is to figure out what’s going on and how best to address it. Theorizing is often limited to the particulars of the situation and the primary aim is to produce knowledge that helps to get the problem solved. Popular research methods include interviews, surveys, and behavioral tracking that yield descriptive, numeric, and anecdotal evidence that is readily digestible by its non-academic consumers. You won’t find analyses of, say, any statistical “effect size” in most of these studies. Practice-driven research publications, whether produced by consulting firms, professional associations, or academics, help practitioners to identify and clarify the nature of a current or potential problem and often specify logical and sensible action steps to solve it. Typically, these reports don’t include a literature review or even citations to related theory and research. Practice-driven researchers are motivated by operational rather than scholarly “impact”. Their writings advise their audience what to do and how to do it, but seldom detail the limitations of their research or qualify the conditions under which such prescribed actions apply—and when they might not be so useful. Now you might argue that this is not real research. But practice-driven researchers who do descriptive case studies, observe conditions across a set of organizations, or study the impact of new practices in an organization without pre-post measures or a control group, can nevertheless produce highly relevant and valid findings for practice. Take, as an example, John Kotter’s influential research on leading change. His proposed eight steps for leading change are clear, logical, and sensibly organized into a sequence that is practical and useful to managers. His research methods involved longitudinal observations of change activity in companies but were not in any sense “rigorous”. His findings were neither framed in nor contributed much to the academic literature on change. Nevertheless, each of these eight steps, while expressed in practitioners’ rather than conceptual language, had a sound evidentiary foundation. A team of scholars who later compared his findings versus research evidence report: “A review of the management literature found support for most of the steps, although no research studies were found covering all eight steps in the model.”6 Opinions differ, however, about the research of two Stanford PhDs, Tom Peters and Jim Collins, whose books were home runs far beyond the reach of academic publications.7 Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence stayed on the New York Times best seller list for over sixty months in the 1980s and created the category of management guru books. The two researchers interviewed executives from 43 companies chosen on the advice of colleagues (with financial screens later applied to focus on excellent performers). Then they talked to academic Karl Weick, scholar-practitioner Einar Thorsrud, and Stanford PhD students then grappling with corporate culture concepts to frame their findings. This put some theoretical

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scaffolding around management principles concerning the advantages of adhocracy over bureaucracy and the simultaneous loose–tight properties of excellent companies. Collins’ 2001 book, Good to Great, which sold over 4 million copies, was based on research with a more rigorous sample as his team started with over 1400 companies, reviewed their financial performance over 40 years, and then focused on 11 companies that “became great”. The good-to-great principles were developed, as Collins reports, by “making empirical deductions directly from the data. We did not begin this project with a theory to test or prove. We sought to build a theory from the ground up, derived directly from the evidence.” These two research publications, sourced from the world of practice, were catnip for practitioners seeking to better understand their increasingly complex circumstances and looking for knowledgeable counsel about how to manage them. Timeliness was also a factor in their enthusiastic reception: the excellence book came out amidst the entry of Japan, Inc. into the American economy and good-to-great followed the dot.com bust and the collapse of Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco. Managers were eager for some great news! But despite popular acclaim (or maybe because of it), many academics cast this research into the litterbox. They crabbed that Peters’ findings, while conceptually interesting, were based on unstructured interviews that were not checked for reliability nor it seems were they valid as many of the excellent companies did not sustain their competitive advantage. In turn, Collins’ prescriptions, while empirically deduced (from interviews and newspaper accounts, but by whom and how we never learn), were challenged as largely atheoretical and marred by hindsight bias, and his overall framework was criticized for its analysis of financial greatness.8 A key strength of practice-driven research is that it takes you closer to “real life” phenomena and aims to generate timely as opposed to the timeless knowledge sought by organizational scholars. Rapid change has fundamentally altered and continues to shift the ways that companies do business. Disruptor organizations use new and virtual operating models, construct “gig economy” employment relationships, and break down boundaries across ecosystems in ways that challenge longstanding and taken-for-granted management assumptions. Practice-driven researchers, like Don Tapscott and INSEAD’s Gianpiero Petriglieri, identify these phenomena faster than most who operate on “university-time”. They use multiple media to get their research findings to managers quickly while academics’ papers linger in review, revise, resubmit, rinse-and-repeat cycles. Typically, researchers concerned with relevance get close to what and whom they study and are often immersed in less controlled, often messy research environments. Users of their research want the research methods to be clear and the results credible but don’t generally concern themselves with or even understand matters of the validity and generalizability of research findings. Solid practice-driven researchers at least speak to these matters, but many do not, so “buyer-beware”! Pick up a practitioner-oriented guidebook or article and you’ll often see lists of “things to do” to be more effective on-the-job, ideally sequenced and packaged as a recipe for success— and often purported to be based on research. What should practitioners take from studies of excellent, great, or today’s purpose-driven companies, or from frameworks of “best” practices derived from dubious samples? Absent any theorizing about contingencies and research into the applicability and durability of their “success factors”, things can go wrong. As an example,

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an aggressive attempt to install a GE-like continuous improvement program at 3M nearly killed its innovation capability.9 Just because practices work in one company under a specific set of circumstances doesn’t mean they will work in another facing a different situation. Sometimes, too, the very timeliness of practice-driven research can be a problem. Gary Hamel’s 2000 book on businesses Leading the Revolution hailed the innovativeness of Enron— even as it was headed for bankruptcy and its executives to jail for cooking the books.10 Fun fact: the business press at the time was also hailing Enron’s corporate social responsibility!

SWEET SPOT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH There is a third way to frame and do management and organizational research. Exhibit 1.2 depicts, again figuratively, the space of what we call sweet spot research. Consider this generic definition: Sweet spot, noun: an ideal or most favorable location, level, area, or combination of factors for a particular activity or purpose. Sweet spot researchers source their work at the intersection of theory and practice. Karl Weick exemplifies the type. We remember our excitement at reading how he applied an evolutionary frame to organization behavior in the Social Psychology of Organizing. It provided a theoretical foundation for understanding the ongoing processes of organizing that occur as people carry out their jobs. Later on, he theorized how sense-making organizations variously chat, dissemble, disguise, mobilize, and “galumph” Exhibit 1.2 “Sweet spot” management research (a purposive playfulness that helps an organization innovate).11 Then Weick took a turn to the sweet spot by venturing into the practice world in his studies of fire-fighting in the tragic Mann Gulch and South Canyon forest fires in the 1990s. This research highlighted how, when, and why standard operating processes failed and how fire-fighters adapted and improvised.12 Weick and Sutcliffe built on it to identify characteristics of High Reliability Organizations (HROs) that help to prevent or mitigate errors and enhance learning from them.13 How might these factors apply to practice? Just ask the operators of nuclear plants, air traffic control systems, NASA flight systems, and other complex enterprises and undertakings where “normal accidents” happen. They use HRO principles and practices to keep their operations safe. Mirvis used them to unpack what went wrong in US coronavirus crisis management, including the Trump administration’s denial and discounting of early warning signals of the pandemic, simplification of policy options, and an absence of

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mindfulness when dealing with testing and medical supply chain problems.14 Upshot: sweet spot research contributes to both theory and practice. Are particular research methods and approaches especially suited to sweet spot research? Yes, all of them, but for different reasons. For instance, Denise Rousseau, a leading proponent of evidence-based management, favors research that conforms to the tenets of rigorous “scientific” research.15 As in the case of evidence-based medicine and education, the argument here is that an accumulation of documented “facts” can guide routine and repeated management practices like work design, goal setting, performance appraisal, compensation, and employee supervision. For surprising (under-theorized) or innovative (waiting-to-be-researched) practices, she and others favor more explorative and impressionistic research.16 Speaking to the importance of “listening to your data”, Weick observed that our theorizing can become trivialized when “theory construction is hemmed in by methodological strictures that favor validation rather than usefulness.”17 Linear logic and rationality presume a world that is stable, knowable, and predictable and only by “dropping our tools” of research orthodoxy can we learn how people’s tacit knowledge, imagination, and improvisation come to the fore when confronted by a novel situation. This argues for the use of multiple methods and approaches in your research—not necessarily in a single study but potentially in a series of them that explore the same phenomena in different ways. Finally, sweet spot researchers speak to academics and practitioners, but often use different channels and formats to reach these different audiences. Among our interviewees, none is more skilled at this than Adam Grant. His rigorous, multi-method studies show up in the academic literature and his findings, along with an expository review of others’ studies on prosocial motivation, were featured in the best-selling and highly readable book Give and Take.18 Grant has a strong presence on social media, including a regular podcast. His blogs reach over 3.6 million followers on LinkedIn and his writings are widely downloaded on ResearchGate. In contrast to theory-driven research, sweet spot research often begins on the ground with a pressing problem or novel phenomenon in organizations. Then, unlike purely practice-driven research, it locates that problem within a set of theoretically germane constructs or recognizes the need for new theorizing. Guiding questions include: Does a current body of knowledge explain or help to address the problem? What else do we need to know? What research approaches and methods will yield relevant and timely data? How can these data be generated and tested with acceptable rigor? Traditional management and organization theories have explained and contributed to the behavior of industrial corporations but they have not guided managers on how to operate effectively in a digitally connected, global, post-industrial knowledge era. Stepping into this gap, multiple case-based research by Lynda Gratton in Linux and Wikipedia, along with a sample of telecommunication, investment bank, and old-line industrial companies, identified how and under what conditions “hot spots” emerged within some of these companies where teams of employees could move across internal and external boundaries to innovate

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with others. In other instances, teams were stifled by a bureaucratic “big freeze”. As Gratton explains her research, listen to this mix of a scholarly and practice-oriented approach: We did a huge data search. We ended up with a set of hypotheses and the research that we did tested those hypotheses. But, of course, when I came to write something like Hot Spots, which was written for managers, I also had to use my own intuition and in­sights about companies. So I added and created a context in many ways as I have been advising and consulting to companies for 20 years.19 This study illustrates how research positioned between the worlds of theory and practice can close the “gaps” within each of them and between them. Gratton is not alone in having the foresight to move into these boundaryless spaces early on. Kathy Eisenhardt and Shona Brown’s study of decision-making in fast paced, high-tech businesses was even earlier and generated theory from the ground-up that informed Gratton’s research. Is sweet spot research any better than the other two approaches? We argue with one another on this matter periodically and our views turn on questions of: For what? And for whom? None of the sweet spot researchers we interviewed purported to traffic in “grand-theory”, but rather in “middle-range” theories about behavior of and within organizations. Some saw themselves drawing from and contributing to what Argyris calls “action sciences” or to what he and Schön describe as “theory in practice”.20 As for whom, the intent of sweet spot research is to speak to scholars and practitioners interested in conceptualizing and improving their “doings”. As researchers with responsibility for the integrity and value of findings reported to the scholarly community and to organizations and their stakeholders, sweet spot scholars are obliged to produce sound theory-driven and outcome-oriented research. Let us acknowledge that it is not easy to get organizations and managers to engage in sweet spot research. They are being asked to move from passive subjects of study to active participants and to be both producers and consumers of knowledge. Whether you have the time, temperament, and tenacity to make this ask and do this kind of research is a personal choice—think about this as you read along in the book. How this type of knowledge generation fits into your career trajectory is a personal consideration. Some, like Mohrman and Worley, engage managers and companies in programmatic research designed to build, test, and refine knowledge germane to theory and practice in a particular domain. Others, like Mirvis, bounce around but get lucky in pursuing comparatively “hot” topics as they arise. The many whom we interviewed have their own stories to tell in these regards. This is a point of departure for asking: What makes knowledge useful?

WHAT MAKES KNOWLEDGE USEFUL TO PRACTITIONERS? Janice Beyer and Harrison Trice, among others, find that practitioners are more likely to consume academic research that provides conceptual, instrumental, and/or symbolic value.21 Concepts can help practitioners to think more systematically and strategically prior to taking

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action. Much of the leadership and strategy research that informs practice expresses concepts through graphic models, categorization schemes, 2×2 contingency frameworks, and decision trees that make them easier to digest and translate into plans and intentions. These framing devices are prominent in practitioner publications and management textbooks. Research with instrumental value produces findings that have direct application to practice. This is the promise of evidence-based management. Case studies and research filled with interpretive examples and stories also show how knowledge is applied in practical problem-definition and problem-solving and the challenges therein. Research-based knowledge can be even more impactful when brought to life by heuristics, simulations, scenarios, diagnostic instruments, application tools, and real-life demonstrations that help practitioners to apply it. Finally, research has symbolic value when it justifies taking a course of action. A study of “firms of endearment”, for example, found that companies with a “stakeholder” versus “shareholder” approach to management are far more profitable over time. This helped to propel a movement toward “conscious capitalism” in business.22 Studies of corporate exceptionalism, à la Collins’ great companies, often start with financial performance and work backward to identify the differentiating characteristics of high versus low performers. The firms of endearment study started with a detailed study of a sample of stakeholder-oriented companies and then worked forward to discover that they outperformed their competitors by a ratio of 8 to 1. Learning the approaches taken by successful companies to address, say, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and innovation can help leaders to justify adopting such approaches in their companies and motivate them to learn more about the theory behind their new doings. Yet, consider the many books that purport to reveal the leadership secrets of celebrity CEOs. The logic sold to managers is that by doing what Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Indra Nooyi, Ken Frazier, Anita Roddick, or Elon Musk do (or did) in their companies, you can be a winner, too. This sounds appealing and may help practitioners to sell actions taken in their own companies. But reading about the secret sauce that makes a particular CEO successful may not be of help to executives or middle managers in a company facing a different market, employing a different strategy, or favoring a different management style. This is precisely why practitioners need research that links theory and practice, is both rigorous and relevant, and enables practitioners to understand contingencies and research findings that might and might not apply to the challenges they face. Unfortunately, even though many leading management journals require their academic authors to discuss the implications of their research for practice, the advice is pretty thin. A study of the “implications for practice” sections in these scholarly journals found that readers were mostly advised to: (1) be aware of these findings; (2) conduct training of some sort based on them; (3) redesign or restructure something; and/or (4) change the way they recruit, select, and hire people. Are these really the kinds of “insights” practitioners are looking for? The study noted, too, that “none of the journals examined have easy-to-read implications sections.”23 In introducing this volume, we proposed that knowledge generated for practice be (1) applicable, (2) useful, and (3) actionable. This starts with studying phenomena at the intersection of theory and practice. This is where Wendy Boswell situates her research on human

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resource management. Take a series of studies she and colleagues launched based on this practical research question: What is the impact of work-related emails, texts, and chats on employees “after hours” (nights and weekends)? Prior research found that bosses demanding responsiveness 24/7 primarily drove after-hours communication and that the frequency of after-hours communication was related to employees’ work–life conflict. The research team conducted a series of studies in companies by surveying employees, their bosses, and their “significant others” to explore these matters more fully. An initial study found that employees with high achievement motivation were less likely than their peers to find after-hours communications intrusive and annoying (although the significant others of all employees found them disruptive and bothersome). The researchers then drew from “affective event theory” to formulate and test a conceptual model of the effects of work-related communication during nonwork time. They found, among other things, that: 1. long, complex messages that took time to respond to were associated with increased anger among recipients and reports of more work–life conflict; 2. those who had negative relationships with their boss had more negative reactions to after-hours messages from both their bosses and their co-workers; 3. the combination of long messages × strained relationships with their boss multiplied recipients’ anger and work–life conflict. Happily, the researchers also found that messages with a positive “affective tone” mollified employees’ anger no matter who sent the message and how much they disliked their boss.24 Certainly these findings are relevant to real issues faced in practice, but are they useful and actionable? At face value, users learned that they should keep after-hours messages short-and-sweet and that bad relations with a boss can spill over into how employees see nonwork-hour communications. To advance more operational implications, the researchers drew on the literature and on practical lore to produce seven principles for better communicating during nonworking hours. These included setting boundaries on the time required and topics to cover in nonworking-time communications, establishing mutual expectations between sender and receiver, and providing employees training on sending clear messages, handling negative emotions, and respecting individual differences—as some people prefer to keep work–nonworking time separate while others are less concerned about it. The researchers also illustrated these principles in action by describing how work teams in Google and Volkswagen negotiate when and how to communicate during nonwork time and set shared expectations on messaging response time.

THE KNOWLEDGE VALUE STREAM Having presented a logic and rationale for sweet spot research and for producing knowledge that is useful for practice, let us introduce some ways you can actually do this kind of research. How can you up the odds that knowledge actually makes its way into the practice world? A naive model of practice-driven knowledge generation and transmission is that scholars do their research, publish it in academic outlets adding implications for practice and, voilà, you’ve

Exhibit 1.3

The knowledge-generating value stream

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made an impact on practice! A move to sweet spot research opens up new perspectives on how to operate in the ecosystem in which knowledge is created and gets absorbed into practice. Exhibit 1.3 depicts the range of actors and interests involved in a knowledge-generating and -transmitting value stream.

Knowledge Generation → Transmission → Use First, consider the core “value stream” in this network. That is, how knowledge moves from production to transmission to use. The left side of Exhibit 1.3 (in the circle) represents the research actors and activities that generate knowledge on theoretical and practical problems. Research problems embedded in the “real world” can be framed and understood by theory and concepts and at least partially illuminated by existing research-based knowledge. The framing of the problem may call on the literature and theory base of multiple academic disciplines— such as psychology, economics, anthropology, and management sciences—and its practical manifestations and implications may require inputs from practitioners in finance, marketing, logistics, design, technology, and other functions who have hands-on experience with how the problems are manifested in practice. The right side of the exhibit depicts actors and activities that may be involved in connecting knowledge to practice. They include multiple avenues of dissemination and the packaging of research findings into knowledge “products”, like practitioner-oriented publications, talks, presentations, podcasts, workshops, and classroom teaching materials. Other actors beyond the research team can engage in knowledge transmission—providing translation, visual illustration, and dissemination services designed to get the knowledge absorbed into practice. These include mediating professional services firms, professional associations, other knowledge transmitters, including bloggers, social media influencers, outlets that produce executive summaries of studies and books, and, of course, textbook writers and whoever publishes your work. These actors and activities can take a weak signal from research and magnify its strength and resonance. They are prime pathways for getting research knowledge to practitioners. You may personally get involved all along the value stream, and/or you may form relationships that provide conduits for the knowledge your research generates.

Knowledge Generation ↔ Transmission ↔ Use Look more closely at Exhibit 1.3 and you’ll note that it depicts not just a one-way (→) but rather an interactive (↔) value stream. Through this interaction, knowledge flows into research problem definitions not only from academic and practical disciplines but also from boundary-spanning professional associations and forums and directly from practitioners—the hoped-for users of our research. Many of our interviewees sourced their research problems from their personal contacts with and connections to practitioners, professional associations of HR and IT specialists, networks of technology companies or those concerned with sustainability, and so on. Some (like us, from time to time) frame and conduct research with consulting firms.

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In the same way, research knowledge can emerge through interactive relationships in the full ecosystem of knowledge generation and transmission. There are, for instance, both university and non-academic research centers, communities of practice, and other “venues” that can house or host your research. Practitioners in organizations can provide research sites and participants as well as support and air cover for your research studies. Professional associations and forums can facilitate multi-organization research and add to the bandwidth of research communications. Working with consultants can help you to learn the lingo of practitioners and better understand how they think and learn. And editors at practice-oriented publishers can coach you on writing for that audience.

Interactive Knowledge Exchange Take an example of a research program at the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) within USC’s Marshall School of Business. CEO’s mission is to carry out collaborative research with companies to advance knowledge and enable organizations to be more effective. A group of CEO sponsor organizations provides a network of sites, practitioner colleagues, and sourcing and dissemination pathways that keep CEO researchers connected to the problems in a broad variety of organizational settings. At CEO, Worley and Mohrman have used a variety of methods to study organization design issues. Their research collaborations, generally longitudinal, span a continuum from basic exploration to implementation and assessment research. In one study, Mohrman and colleagues set up a joint learning forum between researchers studying and practitioners struggling with managing and “speeding up” complex change and reorganization efforts. Ten companies joined in the study and identified several units in their firm that were having more and less success with change acceleration. Together, the researchers and practitioners then investigated differences between the more successful and less successful units within and across the companies.25 The research identified three sets of activities differentiating the units: 1. In units where change happened more quickly, people developed a shared language and had a holistic view of how the changes made in their units fit into new organization strategies and designs. They assessed how well they were doing in accomplishing the intent of the change and identified ways they could become more effective. 2. Leadership differed across the units. In successful ones, leaders delivered consistent messages about organizational direction, helped their people to make sense of confusing situations, and role-modeled a more open and participatory approach that accelerated change management. 3. The most significant differentiator was that successful units created time and space for open dialogue and debate about changes among the people involved. Knowledge gleaned from this three-year, multi-company study generated insights about the implementation of design changes that require organizational members to think differently about how they work together to deliver customer value. This and other related studies, in some cases including action research studies, informed a body of theorizing and research evidence about change acceleration. As co-contributors to the study, practitioners came to appreciate the fundamental changes in mindset and behavior that were required to execute

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these new organization designs. They learned both “what” to do to accelerate change in their companies and “how” to do it by seeing and studying what did and did not work in their own and other firms. In all of this, something was also learned about what facilitates and speeds up knowledge exchange between practitioners and academics. A CEO colleague, Cristina Gibson, who was not involved in the ten-company change acceleration study, studied the collaborative research network. She found that participation in the forum itself yielded practical knowledge for the practitioners.26 Joint “perspective taking” was strongly correlated with them finding the knowledge useful. All of those involved recognized that academics and practitioners came from different worlds, spoke different languages, and operated in different timeframes. Practitioners who felt that the researchers understood their pressures and needs and who believed they had provided input into the research design and data collection were more likely to find the research useful to them. This raises a key question: Did the practitioners actually use the knowledge gained in practice? Gibson’s study found that dialogue between the researchers and participants and the sharing of learnings across participants in the different companies were crucial in knowledge use. Further, managers who scored highest on using the findings of the study transferred and translated them to their work colleagues and employed them in strategic action planning in their companies. Exhibit 1.4 shows the general sequence of interactive knowledge exchange and refinement in a CEO research program. Clearly, this sequence of activities takes place over many months and often years, entails an iterative set of collaborations and much learning, and the orchestration of related studies through time. It involves an exchange of perspectives across multiple disciplines of researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders. Along the way, there are many opportunities to share/publish what is being learned and to enrich understanding by feedback from the academic and practitioner worlds. In this engaged research framework, researchers and organizational practitioners are both sources of organizational knowledge and its consumers. Generating knowledge: • Am I hoping to influence organizational practice through theory-based knowledge that practitioners can learn from and use? Or am I hoping to influence organizational practice by combining knowledge from our two communities? • What do I need to know about the perspectives of organizational practitioners and other stakeholders in order to generate relevant knowledge? • How will I build the needed relationships to ensure that my research incorporates relevant knowledge and perspectives?

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Exhibit 1.4 Collaborative research and interactive knowledge exchange A commitment to collaboration means that practitioners inform the full cycle of research—from the definition of the research problem to the dissemination of the results: • Gather a qualitative understanding of the phenomenon of interest as it manifests itself in practice and is experienced by practitioners. This means soliciting their ideas about what they would like to learn through and from the research. For example, convene an interest group meeting where multiple companies share how they define and are approaching the challenge. • Review what is already known to inform the research. Being knowledgeable about prior research and different theoretical frames helps researchers to better understand the phenomenon of interest, and to formulate research questions that advance the field. • Share and test guiding theoretical frameworks with practitioner partners to detect early on where there are gaps between initial theoretical frames and their perspectives. Multiple cycles of data collection and interpretation will promote the re-examination and enrichment of these frameworks. • Examine the phenomenon of interest through systematic qualitative grounded research. Through interviews, focus groups, observation, and mapping of contextual factors, the original research framework is tested in interaction with practitioner partners. • Revise the theoretical framework based on the results of the grounded research activities. Frameworks are tested and revised in consultation with practitioner partners and academic colleagues. • Conduct quantitative tests of the theoretical framework across a diverse sample of companies. The organizations become research sites and practitioners are co-researchers and consumers of the research. • Analyze and interpret the results from the data with the aid of the practitioner partners who are interested not only in the overall study results, but also in their own data. • Carry out action research with companies implementing changes based on what has been learned through the study. This provides evidence about whether the knowledge works in practice, and how the results need to be translated in order for a company to be able to learn from them and embed the learnings in the way they operate. This is a basis for revising and extending the models and frameworks of understanding. • Continue to disseminate the findings of the research to different relevant stakeholders, both scholars and practitioners, via academic articles and presentations at conferences, and to a broader practitioner base through practitioner-oriented journals and presentations at practitioner conferences. Incorporate the findings into classes and workshops, working with partners to help develop tools and practitioner-friendly communications of the knowledge that has been gained. • Identify holes in the framework, and conduct follow-on investigations to evolve and enrich actionable understanding. Start the cycle of collaboration over!

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TOWARD THE SWEET SPOT? The ideas behind sweet spot research are not entirely new. They informed the famous Hawthorne studies and were promulgated by the “practical theorist” Kurt Lewin and his followers in developing the field of action research. But listen to David Coghlan reflect on its current state: I am somewhat conflicted when I look at the action research landscape. On the one hand, I am enthused as I think that there is exciting action research work being done on our key global and social challenges: sustainability, working with migrants, inequality, innovation, and so on. On the other hand, I feel depressed as I see budding scholars being forced to comply with requirements to publish in journals that are locked into a philosophy of research that excludes action…27 In the late 1990s, British scholars called for less Mode I (academic-oriented) and more Mode II (practice-oriented) research. In fact, publicly funded scholarly research is held accountable to produce Mode II knowledge related to “users” in industry by the UK’s “Research Excellence Framework”. The academics’ reaction: “A Frankenstein Monster!”28 In 1999, Anne Huff gave her presidential address at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting where she called upon colleagues to at least consider Mode 1.5 research—combining theory and practice perspectives.29 The audience responded with polite applause but also plenty of eye-rolls. Nowadays, however, things could be changing. There has been an increase in activity in the Academy of Management and the professional literature that raises awareness of and motivates action to bridge to bridge the gap between academic organizational research and practice (see Appendix 1.1). For example, in 2020, AACSB revised its standards to include criteria and measures that enable schools to take account of the practical impact of research and its “positive contribution to society.”30 Practice itself is becoming a focus of study for organizational researchers who are advancing strategy-as-practice and other “practice theories” by studying— what a surprise—what managers and operators actually do. Mintzberg used this approach in his 1990 study of the ten different roles of managers. The approach is being resurrected in the study of organization “routines” which it turns out are filled with improvisation.31 In the same vein, there is growing interest in the “performativity”—how people do things—and the words and conditions that shape their performances.32 It remains to be seen if and how this focus on practice as an object of study will move from the vantage of the ivory tower to connect with and help to improve practice. In the next chapter, we delve into the philosophy of science issues implied by sweet spot research. We invite you to read on.    

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NOTES 1.

Comte, A. (1858). Positive Philosophy. C. Blanchard; “We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt.” Dewey, J. (1910). How We Think. D.C. Heath & Co.

2. Peteraf, M.A. (1993). The cornerstones of competitive advantage: A resource‐based view. Strategic Management Journal, 14(3), 179–91. 3. Ashford, S.J. (2013). Having scholarly impact: The art of hitting academic home runs. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(4), 623–33. 4.

Aguinis, H., Cummings, C., Ramani, R.S. and Cummings, T.G. (2020). “An A is an A”: The new bottom line for valuing academic research. Academy of Management Perspectives, 34(1), 135–54; Tourish, D. (2020). The triumph of nonsense in management studies. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(1), 99–109.

5.

Douglas, M. (1960). The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw Hill.

6.

Kotter, J.P. (1996). Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press; Appelbaum, S.H., Habashy, S., Malo, J.L. and Shafiq, H. (2012). Back to the future: Revisiting Kotter’s 1996 change model. Journal of Management Development, 31(8), 764–82.

7.

Peters, T.J . and Waterman, R.H. (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-run Companies. New York: Harper & Row; Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

8.

Niendorf, B. and Beck, K. (2008). Good to great or just good. Academy of Management Perspectives, 22(4), 13–20.

9. Peppers, D. (2016). How 3M lost (and found) its innovation mojo. Inc. Accessed at https://​www​.inc​.com/​ linkedin/​don​-peppers/​downside​-six​-sigma​-don​-peppers​.html. 10. Hamel, G. (2000). Leading the Revolution. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 11. Weick, K.E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd edn. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 12. Weick, K.E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628–52; Weick, K.E. (1996). Prepare your organization to fight fires. Harvard Business Review, 74(3), 143–8. 13. Weick, Karl E. and Sutcliffe, K.M. (2001). Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 14. Mirvis, P. (2020). Reflections: US coronavirus crisis management—Learning from failure, January–April, 2020. Journal of Change Management, 20(4), 283–311. 15. Rousseau, D.M. (2006). Is there such a thing as “evidence-based management”? Academy of Management Review, 31(2), 256–69. 16. Briner, R.B., Denyer, D. and Rousseau, D.M. (2009). Evidence-based management: Concept cleanup time? Academy of Management Perspectives, 23(4), 19–32. 17. Weick, K.E. (1996). Drop your tools: An allegory for organizational studies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(2), 301–13. 18. Grant, A.M. (2013). Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 19. Gratton, L. (2007). Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy—and Others Don’t. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 20. Argyris, C., Putman, R. and Smith, D.M. (1985). Action Science. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1974). Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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21. Beyer, J.M. and Trice, H.M. (1982). The utilization process: A conceptual framework and synthesis of empirical findings. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27(4), 591–622; Beyer, J.M. (1997). Research utilization: Bridging a cultural gap between communities. Journal of Management Inquiry, 6(1), 17–22; Jarzabkowski, P., Mohrman, S.A. and Scherer, A.G. (2010). Organization studies as applied science: The generation and use of academic knowledge about organizations – Introduction to the Special Issue. Organization Studies, 33(9&10), 1–19. 22. Sisodia, R., Wolfe, D. and Sheth, J.N. (2003). Firms of Endearment: How World-class Companies Profit From Passion and Purpose. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. 23. Bartunek, J.M. and Rynes, S.L. (2010). The construction and contributions of “implications for practice”: What’s in them and what might they offer? Academy of Management Learning & Education, 9(1), 100–117. 24. Boswell, W.R. and Olson-Buchanan, J.B. (2007). The use of communication technologies after hours: The role of work attitudes and work-life conflict. Journal of Management, 33(4), 592–610; Butts, M.M., Becker, W.J. and Boswell, W.R. (2015). Hot buttons and time sinks: The effects of electronic communication during nonwork time on emotions and work-nonwork conflict. Academy of Management Journal, 58(3), 763–88; Boswell, W.R., Olson-Buchanan, J.B., Butts, M.M. and Becker, W.J. (2016). Managing “after hours” electronic work communication. Organizational Dynamics, 45(4), 291–7. 25. Tenkasi, R., Mohrman, S. and Mohrman, A. (1998). Accelerated learning during transition. In S. Mohrman, J. Galbraith, E. Lawler et al. (eds), Tomorrow’s Organizations: Crafting Winning Capabilities in a Dynamic World. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, pp. 330–61. 26. Mohrman, S., Gibson, C. and Mohrman Jr, A. (2001). Doing research that is useful to practice: A model and empirical exploration. Academy of Management Journal, 44(2), 357–75. 27. Coghlan, D. and Lindhult, E. (2019). The status and future of action research: An interview with Professor David Coghlan. Technology Innovation Management Review, 9(6). 28. Martin, B.R. (2011). The Research Excellence Framework and the “impact agenda”: Are we creating a Frankenstein monster? Research Evaluation, 20(3), 247–54. 29. Huff, A.S. (2000). 1999 Presidential address: Changes in organizational knowledge production. Academy of Management Review, 25(2), 288–93. 30. See https://​www​.aacsb​.edu/​accreditation/​standards/​business. 31. Feldman, M.S. and Orlikowski, W.J. (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization Science, 22(5), 1240–53. 32. Gond, J.P., Cabantous, L., Harding, N. and Learmonth, M. (2016). What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity. International Journal of Management Reviews, 18(4), 440–63.

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APPENDIX 1.1 RESOURCES ON USEFUL RESEARCH There are increasing numbers of articles and chapters that speak to practical knowledge creation and collaborative research pertaining to organizations and management. Most can be readily sourced from websites. Here we highlight collections of books on these subjects. FURTHER READING

Producing Practical Knowledge Lawler, E.E., Mohrman, A.M., Mohrman, S.A., Ledford, G. and Cummings, T.G. (1985; 1999). Doing Research that is Useful for Theory and Practice. Lexington Books. Mohrman, S.A. and Lawler, E. (2011). Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Academic–Practitioner Collaboration Shani, A.B., Mohrman, S.A., Pasmore, W.A., Stymne, B. and Adler, N. (eds) (2007). Handbook of Collaborative Management Research. Sage Publications. Bartunek, J.M. and McKenzie, J. (eds) (2017). Academic–Practitioner Relationships: Developments, Complexities and Opportunities. Taylor & Francis.

Doing Practical Research Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) (2001). Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. Sage. Van de Ven, A.H. (2007). Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rousseau, D.M. (ed.) (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Evidence-based Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Developing your research philosophy Does the idea of doing sweet spot research appeal to you? If so, you have some choices to consider about what you study, how you theorize and do your research, and for what purposes. The philosophy of science addresses the assumptions, logic, methods, and aims of research. It concerns matters of ontology and epistemology—the nature of reality and whether or not scientific results comprise “truth”. You were no doubt introduced to these topics in research methods courses and, for those further along in their careers, reflect on them periodically. Why highlight them in the context of doing research relevant for practice? First, we are not studying natural or physical systems to derive immutable laws and document the enduring essence of things. We are investigating social artifacts that, as Herbert Simon described them, “are as they are only because of … being molded, by goals and purposes, to the environment in which [they] live” (p. ix).1 At best, researchers can only offer probabilistic statements about what is going on with and within organizations or qualitatively strive to interpret their meaning and implications. Understanding the logic and limits of our research methods is essential. Second, when we study practitioners and their practices, we aim to generate knowledge that connects with their world. This is apt because organizations are in the sense-making business. People are trying to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, and equivocality.2 To understand and communicate with practitioners calls for something of a mind-meld. This takes many of us from the research laboratory into the field where we can engage with practitioners in collaborative scholarship, sense making, and problem solving. It also invites a move beyond description to prescription—to make a case, based on evidence, for a particular policy, strategy, process, or practice that can be implemented responsibly. Attention to values and ethics is paramount. Finding your way through this kind of research does not happen easily or all at once. Your personal research philosophy—defined loosely as your beliefs about the nature of organizations, about knowledge, truth, and human existence, and about your purposes as a researcher—will shape and be shaped by how you do research. You will encounter colleagues with differing beliefs about what constitutes rigor and relevance. They may have different personal aspirations and subscribe to different “shoulds” and “oughts” about how to build a research career. Through experience, learning from peers and role models, and personal

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reflection, you develop a research philosophy that becomes a compass guiding your work and career. Listen to Max Bazerman, who does research on behavioral decision-making: As a graduate student in the late 1970s, I was trained to be descriptive; prescription was for consultants, not for serious researchers. I now believe that this attitude is wrong, not only for the field of management but for society as a whole. Today, the most important management research provides novel descriptive findings that can be turned into useful prescriptions. Adopting the economic concept of rationality as a goal state helps us to identify appropriate prescriptions. As you read this chapter (and the rest of the book), we urge you to reflect on your own beliefs about the nature and purpose of organizational research. In this chapter, we first recap key philosophical questions that underpin the study of people and organizations and then examine how our answers to them reflect scholarship based on different research paradigms. Next, we discuss the dimensions of engaged scholarship and how they reflect different research purposes, frames, and roles, and generate different types of knowledge pertaining to theory and practice. The chapter closes with a preview of some of the value-laden and ethical issues you will encounter in carrying out sweet spot research. By its end, we hope you will have reflected on these questions: My research philosophy: • What do I believe to be true about the nature of organizations (ontological beliefs) and about how knowledge can be generated to impact organizational practices (epistemological beliefs)? • What do I care about? What purpose drives my research practice (my values)? • What are my obligations to the people in the organizations I study, to other stakeholders, and to the users of my research (my ethical narrative)?

FUNDAMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS IN MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION RESEARCH Philosophers debate questions about what is real, or true, or good, and how and what we can know. Philosophers of science have, in turn, focused on the ontological and epistemological questions such as: Is there free will or are we researching a determined world? Can our knowledge ever be proven? There is no agreement on these matters, so as you consider your personal research philosophy, recognize that there is no “correct” point of view. Exhibit 2.1 provides a brief description and some orienting questions on key elements of a philosophy of science—ontology, epistemology, and methodology—in regards to the study of people and organizations. They challenge you to reflect on, for instance, whether organizations are objectively “real” or constructed by thoughts, concepts, and language? Are they best understood as phenomena with essential qualities or as phenomena whose attributes are

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continuously changing through the actions of a set of forces and actors in a dynamic context? What is the best way to “know” organizations—as structures, processes, social systems, constellations of stories, or what? And how do you know? Exhibit 2.1 Ontology, epistemology, methodology, and some practical questions Ontology. This refers to the nature of reality. Your ontological assumptions shape the way in which you see and study phenomena. In organization research, these assumptions influence how you conceptualize structure, strategy, technology, management practices and processes, working lives and experiences, as well as events, artifacts, and myriad other phenomena. Consider two important ontological questions: • Are organizations real, like physical objects, or instead constituted by multiple meanings, interpretations, and “realities”? • Are organizations composed of core forms or of shifting elements in dynamic interrelationships that constitute a field of activity? Epistemology. This has to do with what is treated as knowledge, what makes it valid and legitimate, and how it can be communicated to others. Researchers from different disciplines who study organizations generate different types of knowledge, captured and communicated in different forms, that ranges from numerical data to narratives, from facts to interpretations, and from theoretical models to practical advice. What makes their knowledge valid? Consider these two epistemological questions: • Can organizations best be understood objectively through systematic, arms-length, analytical research, or subjectively, from the perspectives of the people in them and how they create and operate in their organizations to accomplish their purposes? • Does understanding empirical behavior at one level in an organization system require understanding its embeddedness in the larger field in which it operates? Methodology. Ontological and epistemological assumptions are often reflected in research methodologies—the tools and procedures used to acquire knowledge. You may favor, for instance, a more distant or immersive research role, quantitative or qualitative data, or a reductive or holistic type of analysis. Consider these questions about how to obtain knowledge about work and organizations: • Can organizations best be studied by focusing on and measuring their component “parts” or by experiencing them more fully in their particular context? • Is it better to use methods that focus on phenomena that are empirically manifest or to get inside phenomena to grasp their existential meaning? • Is practitioner knowledge and language relevant to the scientific study of organizations? Similar questions can be asked about organizational “actors”: are they abstractions best understood in terms of roles, identity, or configuration in a social structure, or as flesh-and-blood people with agency and autonomy?

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Ed Schein has wrestled with these philosophical questions, and their practical implications, throughout his career. Early on, for example, he launched a panel study of Sloan School alumni to study individual acculturation in organizations that yielded a new concept—“career anchors”—which are specific constellations of values, talents, abilities, and motives that form the basis of individual roles and personal identity. He then conducted a follow-up study, fifteen years later.3 In the first round of the study, Schein operated from the ontological assumption that career anchors were fixed (like personality) and the epistemological view that they were best studied through an arms-length standardized survey (to maintain objectivity and ensure repeat measurement reliability). In the follow-up study, however, he observed that career anchors were fluid and changed “as people discovered what they are really good at, want, and value” at least up until mid-career. He also found that personal interviews with panelists provided him a “deep understanding of the context in which these activities play out” as compared with “statistically manipulated check marks on a survey.” His conclusion: “Human systems are truly different from physical systems.” What are your views?

RESEARCH PARADIGMS Thomas Kuhn defined a research paradigm as “the set of common beliefs and agreements shared between scientists about how problems should be understood and addressed.”4 But when Mohrman and Mirvis completed their graduate studies in the late 1970s, questions as to whether there were one, two, or many more paradigms for doing social research were very much in the air (the paradigm wars!) but seldom discussed in the management and organization literature.5 As Gareth Morgan remembers it: there wasn’t a great deal of reflectiveness in organization studies. People made assumptions about organization that were never questioned or challenged. You could pick up most organization texts, and on the first page the definition of organization would be something like “a rational co-ordination of people who have come together to pursue a common goal”. That definition swept under the carpet all the interactive problems about organization, what it means to organize, and why it is so difficult.6 Burrell and Morgan then came out with their influential volume, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis:7 We tried to explore and expose assumptions on the premise that good social scientists must come to grips with the fact that they do make these assumptions. In their work, these assumptions tend to shape everything they write about, what they see, and what they research … So the idea was … we might widen the epistemological basis of organization theory to open up the different paradigms we were identifying. They showed that organizational researchers were using multiple paradigms and presented a two-dimension framework to differentiate them (Exhibit 2.2).

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Exhibit 2.2 Burrell and Morgan’s sociological paradigms         Subjective        

The Sociology of Radical Change   Radical Humanist  

Radical Structuralist

  Interpretive  

Functionalist

Objective

The Sociology of Regulation

     

Source: Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Used with permission.

Along one dimension, they contrasted subjective versus objective approaches to social science. A subjective view adopts an ontology of nominalism where the social world only exists in the names and labels we attach to it. We use these labels to inform our sense making and to interact with the social world. Subjective epistemologies include idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and constructivism where action and life itself are reference points for the construction of theory and development of knowledge. Subjective approaches typically do not seek enduring laws operating in the social world, nor is subjective knowledge acquired by situating researchers as external observers of social activities. Proponents argue instead that one needs to be personally connected to such activities—to understand from the inside rather than the outside.8 In sum, knowledge is subjective, carried through language and conventions; it cannot be generated objectively. By contrast, an objective view adopts an ontology of realism that assumes the social world has a reality of its own. Social structures have an independent existence, no matter how we think about them or refer to them. The objective view adopts an epistemology of positivism. It advocates a search for regularities within the social world and posits causal relationships among its components. Hypotheses and numeric findings are used to help prove or falsify claims about regularities. Seen this way, organizational practice is an instantiation or representation of the theoretical knowledge that is discovered through our research.9 Along a second dimension, they differentiate two opposing views on the nature of society. One set of scholars studies organizations through the lens of regulation and emphasizes stability, cohesion, integration, and consensus. Another set emphasizes change, conflict, disintegration, and domination. Many of them see organizations through a critical lens that calls for radical change. The result is four paradigms of organizational analysis: z Radical Humanist. Research in the subjective radical change quadrant aims at understanding and generating knowledge to underpin changes in organizations that could unleash human potential and turn organizations toward bettering society.

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z Radical Structuralist. The objective radical change quadrant aims at understanding conflicts and tensions in the way that organizations have evolved that have fostered inequity and injustice and need reconfiguration to produce a new social order. z Interpretivist. The subjective interpretivist quadrant looks at organizations through the perspectives of the participants, seeking to understand their capacity for self-regulation that can better align human purpose and organization. z Functionalist. The objective, functionalist quadrant assumes rational behavior, and uses theory and hypotheses to generate knowledge to maintain or enhance the existing social order.

Considerations for Sweet Spot Researchers As you consider your own philosophy and fit yourself into one or more of these quadrants, note that scholars who aspire to relevance in their research can find a home in any and maybe all of them.10 Let’s take them in reverse order. Functionalism has been the dominant paradigm in organizational research. Its threads run from Taylor’s scientific management and the human relations school through socio-technical systems models and human resource management up to contemporary studies of organizational agility and employee engagement. Why such an impact? It produces knowledge that makes sense to practitioners, is seen as relevant for effectiveness, and can contribute to harmonious working relationships in organizations. John Miner’s Organizational Behavior 4: From Theory to Practice amply documents how the work of scholars operating in the functionalist quadrant have influenced job enrichment, goal setting, compensation, supervision and leadership, decision-making, and organization design.11 Knowledge from this functionalist space can be used in organization problem solving and, to put an ontological frame on it, make the “machine” function better.12 Interpretivists have figured heavily in studies of organization culture. Urban legend has it that management guru Peter Drucker once said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” So scholars explored this idea. Ouchi, referencing Japanese organizations, argued that “clans” were a distinct form of organization structure and control relying on values and traditions, as opposed to prices (markets) and rules (bureaucracy).13 In turn, Ed Schein and research partners Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz used the methods of clinicians and anthropologists respectively to explore the depths of organization culture and its mythic and symbolic aspects. In this ontological frame, organizations are understood to be living organisms constituted by meaning. Informed by this perspective, practitioners pivot from managing the “hard” to the “soft” and wrestle with competing values, cultural polarities, and the paradoxes of organizing.14 Radical structuralists also have something to say to practice. Research by critical theorists has exposed power imbalances in organizations, pictured them as “psychic prisons”, highlighted the social and environmental costs of industrialization and global capitalism, and introduced the voices of indigenous peoples and “marginal” stakeholders into managers’ consciousness and practice. Studies of social movements now feature in organizational research and in the doings of practitioners: #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, #climatechange.

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Finally, what radical humanists study is the positive potential of organizations as shaped by interactions between social forces and the intentions, values, capabilities, and actions of the people who work in and with them. Researchers in this space trade in emancipatory metaphors as philosophical as “free will” and as pragmatic as empowerment and inclusion of the “whole” person at work. They engage in positive organization scholarship, appreciative inquiry, dialogic organization development, and myriad forms of consciousness-raising involving art, spirituality, and lived experience. Their thrust is to express rather than constrain human and organizational potential and open eyes to new possibilities.

Multiple Research Paradigms to Consider Foucault observed that knowledge has been organized and produced through disciplines—“institutionally grounded bodies of discourse”—where you study particular subjects, adopt favored concepts, and embrace its dominant philosophy of science.15 But take a look around: management and organization research is carried out by members of 25 different divisions and interest groups in the Academy of Management, in academic associations such as the Society of Industrial and Organization Psychology, the European Group for Organizational Studies, the Art of Management & Organization, and by organization scholars in associations of social workers, sociologists, environmentalists, and economists. Exhibit 2.3 shows several schools of thought in organization studies today and their accompanying philosophical tenets. It demonstrates how widely different researchers have oriented themselves philosophically. Each of these approaches to understanding organizations has a literature and significant empirical exemplars. They grapple differently with ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions, yet each has an approach to systematically contribute to practice. Your task, taken up in detail in Part II of this book, will be to determine which approaches enable you to express your interests and produce knowledge for both theoretical understanding and practical impact.

ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP The closest thing we’ve seen to a philosophical statement about sweet spot research is Andrew Van de Ven’s Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. He provides a philosophical rationale, logic, and guidelines for generating knowledge about the problems that organizations face and how they might be solved. He describes the challenges of carrying out the kind of research that incorporates the perspectives of practice and broadens the knowledge base that informs it.16 We will use his framework throughout this book as we explore more deeply how one actually addresses those challenges in carrying out sweet spot research. It can help you refine your own approach to this kind of work.      

Positivist

There is an objective reality or truth and it is governed by causal factors and laws.

Reality is discovered by valid concepts and reliable measurement. Test theory against external world.

Deductive, experimental, quantitative

Identifies “causal” relationships that link organizational conditions or practices to outcomes. Plan actions: Means → ends.

 

Ontology

Epistemology

Methodology

Practice Implications

Makes “tacit” knowledge about organization and practice more explicit. What is really going on? Deepens diagnosis.

Inductive, phenomenology, qualitative

Reality is interpreted to discover underlying meaning.

There is no single reality. Truth is relative to the knower and constructed by social and contextual understanding.

Interpretivist

Exhibit 2.3 Some major research schools of thought

Surfaces “alternative” interpretations of organization “realities”. New voices and perspectives to consider.

Discourse analysis

Reality is a function of perspective. Facets are knowable when deconstructed.

Reality is what we believe to be real. Nothing exists beyond its renderings in speech, text, or artefacts.

Post-Modern

Applies a “critical” eye to organization and practices. Hidden or unspoken perspectives revealed.

Critical immersion

Reality is revealed when hidden or distorted forces are understood.

There is a reality created by powerful figures and forces. It is hidden by obfuscation.

Critical

Highlights emotive and nonconscious aspects of organization experience. New criteria of quality and effectiveness.

Empathic immersion

Reality is revealed via appreciation. Beauty is a principal aesthetic category.

Reality is felt and experienced.

Aesthetic

Focus on practical applications of theory to practice. What works!

Practical application

Reality is based in instrumentality. Find out what works.

Reality is negotiated and interpreted in light of what is useful.

Pragmatist

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Van de Ven thought long and hard about doing research on the problems faced in practice. He recognized and spoke to how different schools of thought and ways of doing organizational research can produce valid and useful knowledge. His emphasis on pluralism in approach and methods reflects his personal research philosophy, which he labels as “critical realism”. In his words: It is now widely recognized that scientific knowledge cannot be known to be true in an absolute sense. Rather, from a critical realist perspective that I adopt, there is a real world out there, but our attempts to understand it are severely limited and can only be approximated ... all facts, observations, and data are theory-laden and embedded in language. Moreover, most phenomena in the social world are too rich to be understood adequately by any single person or perspective (pp. 14–15). Exhibit 2.4 presents Van de Ven’s Engaged Scholarship Diamond. It illustrates four key tasks in conducting research geared to practice and how engagement with academics and practitioners in your knowledge network is relevant in each of them. At the apex of the diamond—research design ↔ theory building—is a set of activities familiar to most researchers. It is where we develop conceptual models and design research. As we will detail further in Part II, theory building can involve deduction (favored by positivists), induction (favored by interpretivists), or abduction (especially relevant in sweet spot research). A research design, in turn, defines how scholars generate data and use them for theory building or theory testing with their associated standards of truth and validity. The two activities at the bottom of the diamond—problem formulation ↔ problem solving—are positioned in the realm of practice or, as Van de Ven labels it, reality. This is where practitioners formulate and confront “real world” problems and apply knowledge to solve them. Note how this framework connects the researcher’s and practitioner’s worlds. On the right side, theory building ↔ problem formulation connects our concepts to problems or phenomena in the practice world. On the left, research design ↔ problem solving connects our methods and findings to problem solutions. The aim is to apply theory to relevant problems and produce findings that can have an impact on practice. Van de Ven believes that practitioners and other experts can provide knowledge, perspectives, and expertise that enrich theory and research designs and that researchers, in turn, can learn from and contribute to problem formulation and problem solving in practice. Exemplars of engaged scholarship abound. Take the example of one of our interviewees, Bob Sutton, a graduate of Michigan’s psychology program. As a grad student, he held practice in “disdain” and viewed academics advising companies as “snake oil salesmen.” After joining the Stanford faculty, however, he began “hanging out” at IDEO, the design company, and encountered problems that theory couldn’t answer: “Should I fire so-and-so?” and “How do I get more out of my team without screwing them up?” He began moving to the intersection of theory and practice and engaging with practical problems (and practitioners) seriously. Nowadays, he treats organizational problems/phenomena as “specimens” to investigate. From one angle, he is a proponent of “evidence-based” management and “connects mountains of peer reviewed literature to practice”. From another angle, he realizes that existing evidence

Exhibit 2.4

Van de Ven’s engaged scholarship diamond

Source: Van de Ven, A.H. (2007). Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Used with permission.

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doesn’t speak to many complex management problems or simply cannot be implemented. This launched him into studying the gap between knowing and doing and identifying “weird” ideas that work. Exhibit 2.5 presents a continuum of engaged scholarship, based on Van de Ven’s original formulation but amplified here to illustrate components relevant to sweet spot research. As you scan through the columns in this exhibit, movement along the continuum has a bearing on the purposes of the research and how it is situated, the researcher’s role and engagement with practitioners, and the knowledge generated. The progression toward higher levels of engagement moves toward what Maslow called “experiential” knowing as opposed to more distant and detached “spectator” knowing.17 This situates you in the world of practice and ultimately has you interacting fully with the world of practitioners taking action. Exhibit 2.5 Engaged scholarship continuum  

Basic Research Informed by Theory and Practice

Collaborative Basic Research

Design and Evaluation Research

Action/Intervention Research

Research Purpose

Describe, explain, or predict phenomena with practical implications

Describe, explain, or predict phenomena connected to practical problems

Design or evaluate policies, programs, or models for solving practical problems

Co-design and implement, learn from and refine “solutions” to practical problems

  Research Frame  

Study of the world

Study in the world

Researcher Role

Provide concepts and methods. Produce and transmit findings.

Connect theory-problem. Collaborate with practitioners to interpret findings.

Practitioner Role

Host study. Provide advice and feedback.

Frame practical problem. Active engagement in research process.

Knowledge Generated   Degree of Engagement  

Study with the world

Co-theorize. Co-construct research process and results.

Analytic—Universal

Synthetic—Particular

Knowledge about practice

Knowledge for practice

Conceptual relevance “know what”

Instrumental relevance “know how”

Practical implications

Practical applications

LOW --------------------------------------------------------------------------- HIGH

Research becomes progressively more engaged as it moves from basic research informed by practice and theory to collaborative basic research that explicitly connects theory to practice and incorporates the knowledge and purposes of practitioners into the research. More practice-situated research, such as design and assessment studies or action/intervention research, entails increasing collaboration between scholars and practitioners to the point of co-theorizing, sense making, and co-production of knowledge. Research in these arenas often

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involves innovation and purposeful changes that are assessed for their efficacy in addressing specific problems. Such situated research is designed to develop and/or test the validity of knowledge-based solutions in practice. How does an academic begin to engage the practice world in this way? Sutton started by “hanging out” in an organization. Others whom we interviewed participated in executive education programs or joined in academic/practitioner consortia to become “bilingual”—able to see and talk about the world through both theoretical and practitioner lenses and frames of reference. The most venturesome connected to research institutes, professional associations, corporations, and consulting firms to learn how to carry out cross-discipline and multi-stakeholder research with practice as the focal point. The roles of researchers and organization members shift along this engagement continuum. Knowledge production becomes a joint enterprise and researchers actively engage research participants and sponsors in defining research questions, designing and conducting the research, and interpreting the findings. Relationship building and maintaining become key researcher competencies. Progressively more engaged research also involves interactive knowledge transfer, translation, and transformation. Active listening, joint perspective-taking, mind-mingling, and patience are needed—by both a researcher and practitioners. As Schein points out, this is all facilitated when practitioners believe that a researcher is sincerely interested in helping them. Note, too, that the knowledge generated from research shifts as you get closer to practice. Bazerman took his first steps on this continuum as he moved from description to prescription in his research. Further along, your research reorients philosophically from an analytic to synthetic mode and from searching for more universal explanations of phenomena to nuanced understandings of contingencies and the ability to apply knowledge with deeper understandings of the situation at hand.18 Engaged research of all types can illuminate management concepts and help practitioners know what to do with research knowledge. Deeper engagement can enhance both practitioners’ and researchers’ know-how and capacity to craft theory-informed and evidence-based solutions to organizational problems. Van de Ven argues that the more ambiguous and complex the problem under investigation, the greater the need for engaging others whose knowledge can shed light on it. Perhaps more importantly, he advises patience. Problem-focused knowledge emerges only incrementally based on a single study, but can be transformative in a program of research that encompasses multiple or longitudinal studies using different research methods and paradigms. Engaged scholarship: • Where are my interests, opportunities, and skills positioned along the continuum from basic engaged research to action/interventionist research? • What problems am I interested in helping to solve, and what knowledge am I trying to generate that advances both theory and practice? • Beyond your own, what perspectives and knowledge are needed to address these problems and yield actionable knowledge?

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ETHICS, VALUES, AND PURPOSE Ethics deals with the moral principles that govern behavior—with what is considered right or wrong. This dimension in one’s personal research philosophy often gets short shrift in graduate education and may even remain tacit in a research career. In sweet spot research, however, you will be confronted with ethical challenges. Your values may not coincide with those of other interests and may even be in direct conflict with them. So, consider these questions: What purposes, values, and desired outcomes drive my research? How do I reconcile my purposes, values, and desired outcomes when they differ from those who lead organizations that I study, conflict with organizational stakeholders, or clash with those of my peers, mentors, or others in my research community? Whose interests do I serve in my desire to influence practice? We raise these questions not to preach or tell you what is right or wrong. Ethical precepts can be influenced by one’s upbringing and socialization, the societal context in which one operates, and religious or other formalized belief systems. They can also be grounded in rationally constructed thought systems about what is just and good. It is precisely because these influences differ considerably among researchers that we believe it is important to be reflective about your own ethical guideposts. Be alert and sensitive to the ethical questions and dilemmas that can arise when doing sweet spot research. The philosophy of science is replete with debates over whether or not scientific research should be value-free, value-laden, or seemingly value-neutral. We adopt the view that there is no such thing as values-free research. Even arms-length, theory-driven positivist research purporting to take an objective view of organizations reflects values and beliefs about the purposes of organizations and the role of scientific knowledge therein. Values are expressed in the theories chosen, the research questions asked, the methodologies employed, and the outcome variables explored. Waddock put it this way, “You can’t be values free. You impact what you study and write. You have to be very clear about your values.” She believes that what you study has to come from the heart. Otherwise, “you become a robot doing research.” Are you value-free if your research might be used to exploit, coerce, or disadvantage some persons or interests? Should you be value-neutral? Is it even possible to be value-neutral? This is serious stuff. What is your personal ethic? Sweet spot research inherently embodies value-laden tensions: between rigor and relevance, the interests of researchers and practitioners, and the advancement of both theory and practice. In engaged and collaborative research, and especially in studies that may design or change organizations, researchers cannot unilaterally choose a values perspective to guide the research. We have made a commitment to take into account the knowledge and perspectives of others. Yet we are researching organizations with different stakeholder groups that may have competing interests and purposes—some at odds with our own. A researcher who engages practitioners and wants to impact organizations must also consider the ethical issues operative in these circumstances. Although Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes have been set up in universities and research institutions to prevent research that can cause harm, the ethical issues you encounter in real-world research are often more subtle than the overt harm that IRBs police. In a prototypical case, organizational researchers studying motivation, work design, or management

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practices investigate how these factors impinge on employees’ job satisfaction, effort, and commitment to the organization. This seems reasonable enough. But what may not be explored is how such factors can also “speed up” work at the expense of people’s physical well-being, mental health, and overall work–life balance. Nor does such research typically examine whether any financial gains that accrue to executives and owners are equitably shared with employees. Mohrman was confronted with these issues early in her career when she presented results from a study of high involvement work systems at an Academy of Management meeting. Her results showed that when provided with increased knowledge, information, power, and opportunity for reward, workers experienced greater meaning. They also felt they had more control through their participation in self-managing teams and their performance increased. Who could squabble with those results? Well, she was peppered by colleagues with questions as to whether high involvement work systems might disadvantage, say, women with families or older workers who might not want the extra responsibility, accountability, and stress of self-management. Similar questions are asked today as digital and artificial intelligence applications threaten to make certain occupations obsolete and to put all of us, as workers, consumers, and citizens, under constant surveillance. From the vantage of history, we know the dehumanizing aspects of Taylor’s scientific management and that industrialists ignored his call for rest periods, shorter work hours, and company-provided meals for employees. How will historians years from now look on our studies about the use and impact of smart machines? Will we be seen as servants to power?

Reflecting on Purpose There is today widespread questioning of the purpose of the corporation. For decades, business school research adopted, tacitly or explicitly, a value proposition that the primary objective function of the corporation was to generate economic returns and drive shareholder value. Indeed, those who subscribe to this perspective can point to increases in global economic growth and the extent to which large portions of the world’s population have moved out of poverty and into the middle class. At the same time, an alternative perspective suggests that the privileging of return on capital has contributed to increasingly wide gaps in wealth and living standards, declining employee engagement, lowered confidence in fair treatment and justice, and degradation of the natural environment. Sumantra Ghoshal highlighted how theory can be distorted and misused in this arena.19 He criticized agency theory for promulgating the view that managers cannot be trusted and that monitoring and controlling people is the best way to run an organization. Agency theory—a view of the firm as a production function presided over by a manager (agent) who acts on behalf of the owners (principal)—moved like wild-fire into investor, board of directors, and management circles. It raised the possibility that a “moral hazard” arose when agents act in their own interests and contrary to those of their principals, and set the stage for a fight over the “market for corporate control”, the ascendance of shareholder power, and widespread downsizing, restructuring, and consolidative mergers and acquisitions in business from the

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1980s up to today. Financial finagling to produce paper profits led to the financial crisis in 2008. Whether or not you subscribe to this criticism of agency theory, it points to a real and serious problem as scholarship turns to practice. Scholars are a weak force in a field of powerful ones, with only limited means of ensuring that their findings are used thoughtfully and ethically in practice. The constructs researchers study are embedded in an increasingly competitive global economy marked by high performance expectations of increased earnings, consumption, and economic growth. Consequences include an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and power worldwide that favors certain sets of interests over others. As Burrell and Morgan pointed out, your research responses to this may favor regulation and improvement within a prevailing order or you may be oriented toward more radical change. If the former, your research may dispassionately investigate the extent to which wealth is being concentrated and the causal factors and resulting impacts. Researchers who challenge the status quo may opt instead to do research that focuses on the adverse economic effects of the ways organizations accrue and distribute their wealth, finagle their finances, or obscure their wealth accretion through philanthropy or green-washing. A more engaged research approach that challenges the status quo would be to test alternative frameworks through action research involving social and organizational “experiments” in, say, increasing employee ownership, creating shared value, embracing conscious capitalism, or promoting more inclusive prosperity. Researchers who want to influence practice have, in our view, an obligation to puzzle through ethical conundrums and make their values orientation clear to themselves and to those who might participate in the research and/or apply their findings.

Putting Purpose into Research Sweet spot scholars aim to produce actionable knowledge—knowledge that is connected to positive purpose. This has led some to shift their research focus from agency theory to social responsibility, from efficiency to sustainable effectiveness, and from profit maximization to inclusive prosperity. Researchers in the post-modern mold deconstruct organizational pronouncements on equity and put a spotlight on attitudes and practices that work against the interests of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQs. Others apply an aesthetic lens to the “beauty” of responsible management and introduce artful interventions to enhance organization life. Positive organization scholars study what produces healthy, effective, and ethical organizations. They explore cultures defined by abundance (rather than scarcity), the power of positive communication and work relationships, mindfulness in work, and the potential of a positive organizational purpose. Note the choice of outcome variables in these studies: mental and physical health, energy, resilience, resourcefulness, inspiration, and flourishing. Among our purposeful interviewees, Sandra Waddock has documented the benefits of social responsibility for business and society and developed practical tools for its implementation and enhancement in companies.20 Michael Porter has developed a business case for shared value.21 And Stuart Hart and C.K. Prahalad introduced the idea that meeting economic and societal needs at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) had strategic relevance.22

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Hart exemplifies engaged scholarship through his fieldwork and research with organizations in situ as well as his richly relevant research topics, career choices, and connection to knowledge networks. He arrived in the University of Michigan’s Environmental Planning PhD program with a deep interest in why governments and companies continued with strategies that ignore environmental destruction. At the time, inclusive prosperity and corporate greening were not on the B-School agenda and few researchers had explored the importance of “fringe stakeholders” to competitive advantage. While working at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, he was exposed to the literature on organizational change, technological innovation, and organization theory; his dissertation explored the theoretical issues of incorporating diverse stakeholder perspectives into strategy and the practical impact on firms dealing with environmental change and innovation. In his first academic position, he was told, “Just keep focusing on strategic processes and decision making. Give up this crazy environmental stuff, it doesn’t belong in a business school. Once you get tenure you can think about what you want to do.” Instead, he pursued his passions and assumed a number of non-traditional academic posts where he founded BoP and environmentally focused research institutes, led innovative teaching programs, and, yes, gained tenure at several universities—chaired professorships at University of North Carolina, Cornell, and Vermont. Hart’s example shows the power of a strong moral compass in guiding your research. It also illustrates the challenges of swimming upstream against dominant disciplinary definitions of what you should study and the strategy scholar’s traditional role as spectator—observing rather than engaging in the fray. Early on, Prahalad mentored Hart and imbued him with the belief that a business school scholar’s job was to contribute to practice. However, much of his progress in this new territory was gained experientially via “learn by doing.” Hart reports that he regularly partnered with and got feedback from “people who are good at something you need to learn how to do”. He learned from editors at HBR and other practitioner outlets how to translate academic concepts into the argot of managers. And he gained insights into practice from business people who were also swimming upstream in their firms by taking on BoP and environmental sustainability research projects. Nowadays—but not when Hart first tackled them—these topics are prominent in both the research agenda and curricula in many business schools. Reflective queries follow naturally: What are your interests and purposes as a researcher? Are you willing to swim upstream?

MOVING FORWARD Academics interested in these leading-edge topics today join in knowledge networks of business people, technical professionals, consultants, citizen-scientists, and policy makers. They take theoretical and practical perspectives on the issues, conduct research, report findings, and introduce (and study) new practices and policies. Researchers in these and other arenas are also establishing university centers and forming communities of practice to advance and communicate their work.

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A community of scholars taking shape proffers this utopian vision: “Imagine a world where business and management research is used widely in practice by business and other non-business organizations to improve the lives of people in our societies.”23 Academics and deans, plus some business people, firms, foundations, and multisector organizations, have joined forces under the banner of Responsible Research in Business & Management (RRBM) to position scholarship in service to society. Among its provisos are calls to value both basic and applied research; to do multidisciplinary scholarship; to use both quantitative and qualitative research methods; and to engage stakeholders to define topics, participate actively in studies, and help to interpret and disseminate the findings more broadly. All of these thrusts complement our call for sweet spot research. We explore in more depth the scholar’s role in relation to practice and in building and connecting to knowledge networks in the next chapter. To close this consideration of ethics, value, and purpose in organizational research, we believe that sweet spot scholarship, at its best, operates from a “values-full” perspective.24 Here you have to be clear about your own values and perspectives on ethical issues but also be sensitive to and take account of those of the practitioners you engage with, the interests of their bosses and enterprises, and of other stakeholders implicated in or affected by your research. How should we conduct our research in a world where the purposes of organizations are in contention and societal expectations are both polarized and politicized? The ethical dimension may be the most important to cultivate in your personal research philosophy. Achieving ethical clarity: • What values and moral principles guide my purposes as a researcher and my research practices? • Am I transparent with other stakeholders about the values and outcomes guiding my research? • How can I design research that acknowledges that different stakeholders have varying and often conflicting values and purposes?

NOTES 1.

Simon, H. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edn. New York, NY and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2.

Weick, K.E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd edn. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, p. 250.

3.

Schein, E.H. (1978). Career Dynamics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

4.

Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

5.

Guba, E. (1990). The Paradigm Dialog. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

6.

Mills, A. (1990). Interview: Gareth Morgan. Athabasca University’s Aurora. Accessed at http://​aurora​.icaap​ .org/​index​.php/​aurora/​article/​view/​61/​73.

7.

Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann.

8.

Evered, R. and Louis, M.R. (1981). Alternative perspectives in the organizational sciences: “Inquiry from the inside” and “inquiry from the outside”. Academy of Management Review, 6(3), 385–95.

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9.

Mohrman, S.A., Gibson, C.B. and Mohrman, A.M. (2001). Doing research that is useful to practice: A model and empirical exploration. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 357–75.

10. Morgan, G. (1984). Opportunities arising from paradigm diversity. Administration & Society, 16(3), 306–27. 11. Miner, J.B. (2015). Organizational Behavior 4: From Theory to Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. 12. Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. 13. Ouchi, W.G. (1981).  Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 14. Waterman, R.H. and Peters, T.J. (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-run Companies. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 75–6. 15. Foucault, M. [1966] (2002). The Order of Things. London: Routledge. 16. Van de Ven, A.H. (2007).  Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 17. Maslow, A.H. (1966). The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. New York, NY: Harper & Row. 18. Mohrman, S.A. and Lawler, E.E. (2011). Research for theory and practice.  In Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, pp. 9–33. 19. Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices.  Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(1), 75–91. 20. Waddock, S. and Bodwell, C. (2017). Total Responsibility Management: The Manual. Abingdon: Routledge. 21. Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2011). Creating shared value. Harvard Business Review, 11, 1–17. 22. Prahalad, C.K. and Hart, S.L. (2002). The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Strategy and Business, 26, 54–67; Hart, S.L. (2005). Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. 23. See https://​www​.rrbm​.network/​. 24. Mirvis, P.H. (1982). Know thyself and what thou art doing: Bringing values and sense into organizational research. American Behavioral Scientist, 26(2), 177–97.

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Creating value in organizational research: a relational view Chapter 2 addressed the importance of grounding your research point of view in the philosophy of science and clarifying your own personal values and purposes with regard to contributing to practice. We also showed how different kinds of research connect to the world of practice along a continuum of engaged scholarship. In this chapter, we pick up the theme that sweet spot research is decidedly relational, a social activity among academics and practitioners, our respective institutions, and the many intermediary actors and interests in the knowledge value stream. Denise Rousseau described a necessary mind-shift: “People in organizations are surrounded by forces that are political and hierarchical and that define reality for them…. For them to learn, we have to answer their questions, not academics’ questions.” Here we discuss how to think about your relationships to practitioners, the choices you face in how to position your work in the broader knowledge value stream, and how to engage with other actors and stakeholders to produce knowledge relevant to academe and practice.

BRIDGING THE WORLDS OF ACADEME AND PRACTICE If we haven’t made it clear yet, let’s be specific now: academics and practitioners operate in different worlds. In the publish-or-perish academic world, scholars do lots of reading and reflecting, design their studies carefully, analyze data laboriously in search of significant findings, write then rewrite, and also do their teaching and committee work. In research work, one must be careful, rigorous, and thorough. Urgency is tempered with caution; good scholarship takes time. In the business world, by contrast, the pressure to produce leads to less time reflecting and reading, and more time doing. Practitioners make many decisions with limited information. They face constant and sometimes competing demands from customers, multiple stakeholders, and their boss amidst political power plays and market competition. Their interactions are measured in minutes and distractions are commonplace. In this kind of work, caution is tempered with urgency. One must be quick, decisive, and mostly right. Under these conditions, is it any wonder that managers turn to digestible sources of timely information that address their issues and give them actionable ideas? Some argue that it is not possible to “bridge the gap” between academe and practice as the two worlds are incommensurate and self-referential with their own language, logic, constituents, incentives, time frames, and goals.1 As a result, sweet spot researchers face a challenge: to generate knowledge that

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can contribute to effective action, we must not only understand our own world, we must also understand how practitioners learn and make sense of their world. Jean Bartunek and Sara Rynes are among the leading voices in a network of researchers who advocate for and study how to build bridges across the research and practice communities. They have been instrumental in developing a body of literature that examines the nexus theoretically and empirically and have brought in the voices of both academics and practitioners.2 Bartunek, for instance, highlights how academics and practitioners seek different kinds of knowledge. In her research on organization change, she found that researchers want to understand how and why change happens in organizations, whereas practitioners want to know how to make change happen. Can these two interests be joined in framing a research problem for study? Bartunek explains how she approaches differences: Say I am collaborating with a practitioner. S/he will be holding a fundamentally different assumption about how the world works than I do. What that means in practice is that instead of saying to each other “you, stupid idiot”, we say “this difference is meaningful in itself. Let’s pay attention to the polarities going on here and try to see what we can learn from them”.3 Rynes found that a large percentage of HR professionals believed, “Most research findings make sense in theory, but don’t work well in practice.”4 Accordingly, she speaks to the importance of “ecological validity” in scholarly research—that a study topic be located in and its findings speak to the “real world”. Mohrman sharpens the point and recommends that research studies address “operational validity”—findings that can be specifically applied and tested in practice. We were guilty above of stereotyping the worlds of academe and practice. Neither is monolithic. Many business schools, for instance, favor research that fits into “Pasteur’s Quadrant”— named in honor of a researcher who produced fundamental and useful knowledge (as compared to pure basic research, “Bohr’s Quadrant”, or pure applied research, “Edison’s Quadrant”).5 Growing numbers worldwide have rejected Western research standards and embraced an accreditation scheme (International Quality Accreditation: IQA) that is better suited to schools that produce practical research geared toward management students and organizations in their regions. Likewise, there are many managers who gravitate to theory and look for evidence-based guidance on how to deal with challenges in their organizations. Functional specialists in finance, marketing, R&D, HR, IT, CSR and sustainability are both open and responsive to new knowledge in their fast moving fields. Strategists are on the lookout for big ideas. Across the spectrum of organizations, firms in different sectors and industries often affiliate with universities to stay abreast of relevant research. And their knowledge needs are diverse—compare the interests of Google versus GM, fast-food restaurants versus hospital chains, bureaucratic government agencies versus entrepreneurial “hybrid” organizations. In all of this are possibilities to connect with organizations and practitioners that might look favorably on your kind of research. You can also find topical communities of practice or multi-organization consortia whose members are looking to learn something new.

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Research in a Knowledge Network Garima Sharma, an early career academic, and Pratima (Tima) Bansal, an experienced one, illustrate research in a knowledge network in their 2018 study of how researchers and practitioners think, talk, and work together.6 The setting for their study was the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS). Founded by Bansal, NBS is a Canadian public–private partnership where researchers and managers combine academic knowledge with practical experience and original research to keep sustainability professionals informed about topical issues. Both the setting studied and their research activity involved co-creation by researchers and practitioners who aligned their interests, constructed research questions, and interpreted data jointly. NBS researchers and practitioners teamed together to study two questions: (1) “How do managers think long term in a short-term world?” and (2) “How do competitors collaborate for advancing sustainability?”7 To theorize co-creation as a process, Sharma and Bansal drew on “process ontology” to frame the interplay of academic and practitioner knowledge over time. Data were collected via real-time observation of knowledge exchange between researchers and managers in these project teams and interviews with 67 researchers and managers involved in these two and other NBS co-creative projects. What did they learn? In joint projects, researchers and practitioners spent their early days “talking at” each other and then shifted to “talking with” one another. True co-creative moments occurred episodically. They happened when either researchers or practitioners expressed uncertainty, asked questions, and suspended judgments and then together unpacked the assumptions behind their respective points of view. Sharma and Bansal illustrated the flux-and-flow of process dynamics and how co-creative events punctuated and connected prior, current, and future activities in developing knowledge products (reports for sustainability professionals) and in deepening knowledge transfer between researchers and practitioners. In another example, Mohrman learned a lesson about the importance of translating knowledge for practice. In one of CEO’s collaborative research programs on the design of team-based organizations, her research team spent several years doing small exploratory studies, then a ten-company theory-testing longitudinal study, and several action research studies to test the applicability of the findings. During that time, academic and practitioner-oriented articles were written and presentations were made. A book was produced that put forward a systems framework on how to move from a siloed structure to a team-based knowledge organization, and it featured what they presumed to be practitioner-friendly figures, examples, and checklists.8 Academic colleagues spoke well of the book and praised its clear implications for practice. Practitioners? Not so much. Almost immediately after receiving their copies, executive level members from three different participating companies reached out to Mohrman with the same request. “The book is fine, but NO ONE in our organization is going to wade through 400 pages. Is there any way to make this more accessible … and quickly?” The three companies offered to be Beta Sites to fund and work with the researchers to create a generic “workbook” to guide an organization through this kind of transition. They used the material in their own organization design projects, and provided very quick feedback about what worked and what didn’t. They opened up their design processes to scrutiny so the authors could observe practitioners working through

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the design process. The team that developed the workbook included an instructional designer, graphic designer, process engineer, and business leader from each of the companies. The resulting workbook was less than 100 pages, contained conceptual and process-framing information expressed in short, clear bullet points, plenty of process diagrams, step-by-step design sequences, pictures, prototypes, examples, and illustrations. Interestingly, the company sponsors insisted that the preface should explain the research process that resulted in the workbook material and refer to the longer book so that people would feel confident about the work that underpinned it. Twenty-five years later, even though it is out of print, the authors still receive periodic emails from organizational leaders who have used the workbook to redesign their organizations. These sweet spot studies show different ways researchers and practitioners exchange knowledge and learn together. Other academics bridge the gap by providing practitioners with evidence-based management knowledge or by focusing on the subjective experience of organizing, which enables practitioners to hear what they say and see what they do in a different light. Still others produce knowledge that either raises practitioners’ consciousness or challenges their consciences. What are your aspirations in making a leap into the practice world?

NAVIGATING THE KNOWLEDGE VALUE STREAM A challenge in generating knowledge that impacts organizations is to get it there in a form that can be absorbed and incorporated into practice. An ideal way of accomplishing this is to position your research activities within a web of relationships that constitutes an ecosystem for organizational knowledge production, dissemination, and absorption. Exhibit 3.1 presents a more elaborated version of the knowledge value stream introduced in Chapter 1. Several key relationships and pathways (labeled (a)–(e) in the exhibit) can link research knowledge generation to its practical use in organizations.

Positioning Yourself in the Value Stream The wellspring of knowledge generation in the value stream is problem-focused research shown in the circle on the left. The challenge for all of us is to get that knowledge to the practitioners on the right, and there are multiple ways to do that. How might you operate in this value stream?

Traditional academic research Let’s start with a prototypical academic who aims to influence organizational practice through the development and dissemination of theory-based knowledge. While your primary audience is fellow academics, you can connect to practitioners along pathway (a) by also producing “knowledge-products” tailored to organizational practice. As we described in Chapter 1, the traditional pathway (a) to knowledge dissemination begins with academic publications that vet the quality of the work. In turn, getting knowledge to practice includes writing books and articles for practitioner-oriented journals, incorporating research findings into textbooks and teaching materials, and doing some consulting.

CREATING VALUE IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH: A RELATIONAL VIEW

Exhibit 3.1

The knowledge-generating value stream (full)

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By staying abreast with what is going on in organizational practice, you can locate the practical manifestations of what you are studying. Debra Cohen, editor of HR Magazine, asked readers in 2017 what they wanted from articles in her practitioner journal. Two of their strong desires were for “practical real-world information” and for materials that would help them “stay ahead or up-to-date on important trends and issues”. In communicating your results, expand the implications for practice section via examples and action steps. You can also take a stab at practitioner-oriented publishing through HBR or the California Management Review. Beyond that, it will be up to other actors along the value stream to become aware of your work, make your findings more digestible, and guide any actions that follow from them in an organization. The traditional pathways to practice still exist, but their reach is limited. How does a middle manager who received her MBA ten years ago become exposed to the findings of your research? What about practitioners who don’t have an MBA or regularly participate in continuing education programs? Exhibit 3.1 shows many other pathways through which practitioners are exposed to knowledge and many actors who focus on delivering value to them. Academics who want their work to influence practice can take advantage of these various pathways with a strategy that fits with the kinds of influence you want to have and the activities that interest you.

Interactive knowledge creation Knowledge flows in both directions between researchers and practitioners on pathway (b) before being translated into final products. This kind of research: (1) incorporates an understanding of practice and practitioners’ problems; (2) considers how they use knowledge to solve problems and get things done; and (3) assesses how the application of knowledge fares when put into practice. The ongoing organizational processes of constructing meaning, designing action, and taking action inform this kind of research and are informed by it. This research does not eschew theory, but rather incorporates and iterates it. In this interactive pathway, the experience, interests, and knowledge of practitioners are “insourced” to inform the research. Other stakeholders may be involved as well. Engaged scholarship, ranging from practice-informed basic research to participatory action research, can be developed and transmitted along this pathway. The level of engagement hinges on what kind of knowledge you are trying to produce. In “Collaborate with practitioners: But beware of collaborative research”, Kieser and Leiner warn against working too closely with practitioners, because “the solution of problems in practice has priority. Producing scientific insights is a side effect” (p. 20). In reply, Shani and Coghlan argue that collaborative research contributes to our theories of “action science” and to the “science of practice”, a research paradigm that is grounded in the value of doing research with people rather than on or for them.9 Paths (c) and (d) are more complicated. They involve performing research in alternative venues and/or working with different stakeholders to bundle research knowledge. Moving along these paths might have you affiliate or partner with a university-, industry-, or interest-based research institute, or conduct your research in a multi-stakeholder forum. These various research venues generally see as their mission to accelerate and leverage the generation and flow of research knowledge through the value stream. Each can provide col-

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laborative opportunities and knowledge dissemination channels for academic researchers who want to find new ways to carry out research aimed at reaching practice. Consultancies and professional associations are also positioned as alternative research venues as well as intermediate bundlers. They can produce, curate, and disseminate relevant knowledge and link directly to organizational and professional members and clients. These alternative knowledge developers are populated by highly educated professionals, including PhD-level organizational researchers who prefer to do research closely linked to practical problems and in collaboration with organizations and other stakeholders. Often they partner with academics in conducting research on emerging issues in organizations. One of our colleagues, Cristina Gibson, worked with consultant Bruce Pasternack and Booz Allen Hamilton in a ten-company study of organizational alignment. Their research involved a survey of a random selection of members in each organization to develop an instrument to diagnose alignment and validation studies on the relationships between alignment and performance. This research yielded a scholarly paper with Julian Birkinshaw on the “antecedents, consequences, and mediating role of organizational ambidexterity”, a practice-oriented piece on “building ambidexterity into your organization”, and a diagnostic tool for use by consultants and organizations.10 Finally, there are regional, national, and global research consortia that sponsor academic and practitioner research collaborations. The Australia Research Council’s linkage program, for instance, requires that academics and organizations together prepare research proposals that address, among other points, the rationale for their research, its potential benefits to science, practice, and society, and who will do what, when, and how at each step of the research effort. The UK Research Partnership Investment Fund supports research partnerships between universities, industries, and charities, and emphasizes “translational” research and projects that yield “positive” knowledge (and products) for practice. The National Science Foundation, government agencies, international foundations and NGOs, colleges, and companies host a variety of “challenge” contests where interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners (and students) compete to “solve” practical technical and social problems. Many of these research projects fit squarely in the sweet spot.

Joining a research institute Your research interests can often be realized through non-traditional venues. A number of our interviewees spent time in and even founded research institutes during their careers (taking pathway (c)) with some straddling between traditional academic jobs and problem-focused institute research. Ed Lawler remembers being interviewed about leading a research program at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR). He was asked, “Have you ever raised research money before?” His answer: “No.” “Have you ever managed multiple research projects and researchers?” “No.” Undaunted, ISR offered him a job and he took it. He saw it as a risky move to unfamiliar terrain but also as a chance to do large-scale field research and to learn how to do funded research. At ISR, Lawler led a series of studies on the Quality of Work Life (QWL) and a research team that included fellow professors, assorted research scientists (such as Denise Rousseau), and graduate students (including Mirvis) from several different disciplines. When the

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federal government and private foundations dialed back their QWL funding and shifted their monies toward social needs, Lawler moved to USC and organized CEO as a corporate member research organization. Mohrman was an early hire and Worley later joined on after being a doctoral student at the Center. You’ve seen how they and their colleagues approach theory-and-practice oriented research in studies of multiple companies. Many private research centers, foundations, and associations are also in the business of generating practice-relevant research knowledge. The World Wildlife Fund, for instance, does surveys, case studies, and field research on environmental conditions and corporate practices to support ecosystems. Sheila Bonini, who heads the WWF’s Private Sector Engagement, told us that in this arena she puts together multidisciplinary teams, sometimes including organizational researchers, to engage with companies to apply knowledge to practice. WWF’s recent projects include work with Levi Strauss on water use, McDonald’s on bio-plastics, and a coalition of high-tech companies on renewable energy. Think about how linking up with WWF or others might enhance the relevance of your research!

Research with consultants and professional associations Researchers can work in or partner with consulting firms and professional associations to fund research and generate, bundle, and/or package knowledge for use in practice (pathways (c) and (d)). For example, the consulting firm Strategy& (formerly Booz Allen Hamilton) funded Worley’s early agility work and later work was funded by the German advisory firm goetzpartners and the Center for Leadership and Effective Organizations at France’s NEOMA Business School. Throughout the research program, the partnerships supported literature reviews, surveys, case studies, and other data collection and analyses as well as the development of consulting tools for translating and applying the learnings into practice. The outputs of one study resulted in a “heat map” diagnostic tool that organizations could use to identity the most impactful interventions. That and other results were published in on-line monographs, publications to B-School alumni, and academic outlets. Wayne Cascio’s first forays into the practice world began when he was a doctoral student and a senior professor invited him to join in a consulting assignment. The field data he collected on workplace discrimination led to his first papers on fair employment practices and on how training programs could enhance affirmative action programs—well before these topics were central issues in scholarship or HR management. Over his career, he used pathway (d) in associations with the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). In SIOP, he has been a leading voice in calls for enhancing both rigor and relevance in research and regularly speaks at its conferences, contributes to its magazine, and served as its President in 1993. He worked with practitioners at the SHRM Foundation to develop 14 DVDs that illustrated how companies were using research knowledge to address HR and business challenges, including ones on ethics, sustainability, executive succession, the people challenges in M&As, talent analytics, creating future global leaders, valuing diversity, and investing in older workers. Professional associations can be allies with researchers doing systematic research focused on the needs and problems faced by practice. They exist to help professionals adjust to the changing

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demands of their jobs and careers, and can provide resources, partners, and skills to package knowledge, and venues and outlets that reach large numbers of organizations and their members.

Building knowledge and practice networks Finally, communities of research-and-practice can be formed to conduct studies or to connect researchers and practitioners in temporary or longer-term networks for knowledge combination, generation and dissemination around common interests (pathway (e)). Consider two examples. Majken Schultz and Mary Jo Hatch had several bridges to cross in building their own research relationship and in doing collaborative research with practitioners. When the two first met at Copenhagen Business School in the early 1990s, Hatch, an American trained in classical organization theory and research, and Schultz, a Dane socialized in the Scandinavian model of practice-driven research, thought they had little in common. But Hatch and Schultz agreed that “what practitioners knew and did” should inform theorizing. As Hatch told us, “You can’t stay in the ivory tower. You have to go into the field…” to which Schultz added, “and listen to the field and bring what the field tells you back into the (scholarly) arena.” An early venture into the practice world took them to Wolff Olins, a London-based consultancy moving from product to corporate branding. There the two “female professors” (aka the “girls”) compared thoughts, argued with, and began to co-theorize with “branding professionals” (aka the “guys”) about the meaning of a corporate brand. Their subsequent article in HBR on corporate branding put them, as they say, on a “different footing” with the pros. When they launched the Corporate Branding Initiative, they joined with brand specialists from ten global companies to explore the ins-and-outs of corporate branding. The forum’s three aims: z To share ideas and experiences among practitioners in the ten companies, combine them with the scholarly and practice literature, and identify best practices (practice agenda); z To capture the real time processes each company uses to implement brand vision as it moves from strategy into practice as well as gather personal brand experience stories from key stakeholders (research agenda); z To disseminate the produced knowledge by publishing on the theory-and-practice of corporate brand management and conducting briefings in the participating companies to transfer the collective learning (educational agenda). Knowledge exchange in the forum was never easy and involved a certain amount of translation between the practitioner’s often personalized frameworks and the researcher’s interests in organization-level theorizing. For instance, what a practitioner called an “arrogant bastard” (a brand manager focused inwardly on the company), the researchers expressed as organizational “narcissism” (“If companies don’t listen to external stakeholders, their ‘identity dynamic will be internally focused and self-contained’”). In turn, what a practitioner called a “headless chicken” (a manager slavishly following consumer trends) was translated into “hyper-adaptation” (“Like adolescents who try to change themselves into whatever they think others want them to be, the hyper-adaptive organization has no strong sense of itself or its purpose to guide its choices”). After three years together, the researchers and practitioners developed a deep understanding of a corporate brand as “a symbol of organizational identity,

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the meaning and value of which are influenced in equal measure by top management vision, organizational culture, and stakeholder images.”11 Rob Cross has had a “consistent but expanding research focus on the role that networks play within organizations,” and a deep commitment to making sure that his research program is useful to organizational practice. A first strategy was to build learning symposia to disseminate “network thinking” and create greater interest among companies. In the process, he developed a keen appreciation of the difficulty of taking academic concepts and making them intelligible to practitioners. In his words: “As academics, we view the world through our own tools and theories. Breaking out of that and understanding how to position things to engage and create outputs that companies value given the way they experience and think about the world was a really important development challenge.” By linking his work so closely to practitioners, he “came to appreciate how limiting our frameworks are and what companies really need to get something out of our work.” Encouraged by over 80 corporate executives who had come to value his work, he built the Connected Commons™, a collaborative learning community that embodies the two-way learning described earlier in this chapter. Its mission is to learn about and develop network approaches that enable people to work together more effectively. A key step in developing a truly collaborative learning consortium was to develop diagnostic tools that allowed organizations to understand their own networks and implement measures to be more effective. This has enabled the learning of the Commons to be led by practitioners, who, according to Cross, tell “stories about what they’ve done and accomplished – and about what works or doesn’t work – that are way better than mine. Providing the tools and knowledge for the companies to do their own learning has led to a pivot for the Commons.” Distinctions between researchers and practitioners have blurred. Community interest determines what the Commons studies and ensures network theory is applied to the latest challenges that face organizations. One focus of investigation is finding ways to address what Cross calls the “collaborative overload” present in today’s organizations. The Commons is also using network ideas to integrate new employees quickly and effectively and to develop organizational agility.

Sweet Spot Considerations Navigating such a complex knowledge value stream may seem (and probably is) superfluous to academics concerned primarily with theory and academic publications. For sweet spot researchers, however, the value stream is a necessary friend—leading to needed collegial relationships and partnerships with various stakeholders, including practitioners. These relationships can be a source of feedback and a connection to a much broader set of organizations than you can reach through solo efforts. They also offer you interesting work and a great deal of satisfaction and learning. Such a view fits with Van de Ven and Johnson’s notion of “intellectual arbitrage”— combining knowledge from different sources to understand a phenomenon and to incorporate feedback about the impact of knowledge when put into practice.12 As you navigate the knowledge value stream remember: 1. The value stream from research knowledge to practice knowhow bridges boundaries among different kinds of researchers, practitioners, and organizations. It can include researchers from multiple disciplines, university and non-university research groups,

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consultants, professional associations, direct participants in the study, and practitioners from different functions and organizations. Each of these communities has its own purposes, language, methodologies, and standards of knowledge and communication. 2. Multi-directional communication, influence, and knowledge sharing underlies both the development and dissemination of theory and practice knowledge. Although the ultimate direction of this value stream is from research to practice, the flow is not linear. It is a cycle of knowledge-advancing activities and its success hinges on getting diverse actors to talk together, align their interests, and collaborate to achieve their separate and shared goals. 3. Roles are fluid across the value stream. Various types of linkages and partnerships form to carry out different value-adding activities, and actors can have multiple and shifting roles. Researchers may focus on the research itself and/or be active in knowledge translations and transmission. Practitioners and other stakeholders may collaborate variously in problem definition, the research process, and/or the dissemination of results. Obviously, you may not be able or personally interested to assume all positions on the value stream, particularly at one time. Nor can we be experts in all relevant fields of knowledge needed to address systemic problems. Nevertheless, if we aspire to impact practice, we do need to be sufficiently connected to others in the ecosystem to create collaborations and pathways to both receive and disseminate relevant knowledge. Researchers who want to influence practice have to think beyond the bounds of their own institutional base and academic disciplines. This requires intentionally building relationships that position you at the intersection of different communities of research-and-practice so that you can leverage the work you do through collaborations. As you think about your research in the knowledge value stream, consider these orienting questions: Plugging into the knowledge value stream: • How will I take into account and connect to knowledge from organizational practice? • How will I combine that with knowledge from my own and other disciplines to shed light on the problem being investigated? • Which pathways are best suited for getting my research findings into practice? • What help and resources do I need to move along on those paths?

A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE Management sage Peter Drucker once said that we are a society of organizations. Today, that statement can been amended: we are a society of networks, individual and organizational as well as physical and wired. How do these networks operate in generating and transmitting knowledge? Let’s take another look at Sharma and Bansal’s Network for Business Sustainability (NBS). At NBS, researchers and practitioners work together to produce knowledge with and for managers, sustainability specialists, and students—some closely tied to NBS in research and

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product development and others loosely tied as subscribers to publications or just “visitors” to their website. Beyond that, NBS is a central node in the “Sustainability Centres Community”, a virtual community of more than 150 such centers around the world whose leaders share best practices and support one another through virtual collaboration and in-person events. Lifting our eyes up from the particulars in this example, you see research going on in extensive, diverse, globally dispersed, and dynamic networks of actors and institutions. In each of them, and across many of them, are strongly or loosely interconnected subnetworks that conduct research activities and through which knowledge, information, and resources flow. These networks consist of nodes, hubs, pathways, actors, populations, and communities having both common and crosscutting purposes—all the elements that are studied by network researchers. Knowledge networks transcend particular institutions and countries, and are largely self-organizing.13 They emerge through the actions of individuals, teams, and organizations as they connect with one another to advance understanding and knowledge. In the case of sustainability, there are hundreds of formal networks that range from CEOs in the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and companies in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) to practitioners in Businesses for Social Responsibility (BSR) and business students and recent grads in Net Impact. These associations scan trends in sustainability and conduct periodic surveys of what is (and is not) happening in governments, businesses, and campuses in this area. In some cases, they sponsor systematic research. Thousands of subnetworks within and across universities and schools, organizations of all types, and in communities exist where people learn from this knowledge and contribute to it—including scholars affiliated with the Academy of Management’s Organizations and Natural Environment and Social Issues divisions. It is difficult to know how a lone researcher could contribute to the theoretical and practical advancement of sustainability knowledge without being connected to the parts of this network most relevant to his or her interests.

Sweet Spot Considerations Exhibit 3.2 juxtaposes a notional and simplified knowledge network with the knowledge value stream. The generation, dissemination, and incorporation of management and organizational knowledge into practice occurs in complex ecosystems. There are many networks of activity as well as dynamic and continually emerging connections and actors. The figure depicts research as an engaged process that pulls in actors of various sorts who have relevant knowledge in order to carry out relevant research. This knowledge can connect to practice through multiple pathways along the value stream. In this exhibit, we only show one hypothetical research program in the circle on the left: a research program that brings several disciplines, practitioners, and representatives from intermediaries, such as consulting firms, into the research process. There will of course be many research programs generating knowledge that may be relevant to practice. Practitioners are faced with choices about what knowledge signals they will notice and potentially incorporate into how they operate. Researchers face the need to build their network connections and a dissemination strategy that leverages the power of network connections.

Exhibit 3.2

Networks underlying the knowledge-generating value stream (simplified depiction)

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It’s easy to see why it’s important to be reflective about what you care about, where you are trying to make a contribution, how you fit into this very large domain, and how you spend your time. What connections within and across knowledge disciplines, and with what organizations and practitioners, will enable you to investigate the problems and phenomena in which you are interested? What kind of connections do you need to establish so that the resulting knowledge will flow through the knowledge stream and ultimately impact organizational practice? Knowledge advances along the value stream through discrete well-planned studies and carefully strategized collaborations. It also advances through dynamic connections that emerge as knowledge is shared, combined, extended, and applied by the members of different communities or ecosystems. Social networks exist to advance discipline knowledge, generate knowledge to solve problems, translate basic into applied knowledge, and provide knowledge-based services and solutions. Researchers can be connected to and participate in the activities in different networks at multiple locations along the value stream. A knowledge network that advances HR theory and practice would find Wayne Cascio in a number of different places. Cascio’s active and strong connections have shifted over time as his constellation of activities shifts, but he would also have many weak and/or less-active ties that he could activate as needed. The connections you make as you position yourself and your research in a networked world will influence how you see and study organizations and how well you relate to and learn from different stakeholders. Building relationships that make up your knowledge network involves critical capabilities if you want to do impactful research. In addition to knowledge and skills, other important resources that flow between and link together the actors in a network include funding, access to research sites and infrastructure, and links to publication and dissemination channels. In the value stream, you may collaborate with editors, artists, instructional designers, and other experts to develop practice-oriented communications. You may join with other researchers, practitioners, or professional associations to set up interest groups or company consortia to investigate a key problem or develop dissemination channels for the knowledge you create. Deciding which knowledge networks you will be part of should be a conscious choice and reflect your personal research interests and philosophy. One strategy to consider is to forge a combination of weak and strong ties: 1. Weak ties give you a “passing acquaintance” to what is going on in subnetworks that can inform your research and be a pathway to its consumption. Sweet spot researchers don’t just consult the academic literature, they also search for and peruse reports from consulting firms, think-tanks, professional associations, and other knowledge producers—such as NBS, WWF, and WBCSD. It helps, too, to establish some relationships in these circles. There is strength in weak ties! 2. Strong ties are formed with the people, organizations, and other stakeholders involved in your research. These relationships require intentional “care and feeding”. To form and sustain them takes skills in relationship building, collaboration, problem solving, and conflict management. Think about the skills involved in teaching, parenting, and managing—all of these are marshalled in collaborative research.14 Your research career and your life will go through phases of shifting interests and aspirations as the societal, organizational, and personal contexts in which you operate shift. To have

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impact on practice, build an ever-expanding network of “friends” from different disciplines and communities of practice, and develop an increasingly systemic understanding of organizations. It’s not something that happens all at once. Rather, the scholars we interviewed gradually and intentionally built their connections and their research programs blossomed over time and created a momentum for the chain of activities that result in impact on practice. The checklist below provides a set of issues for you to think about as you make career and research decisions concerning how to connect with the knowledge value stream. Some questions to help you think through connecting to knowledge networks: What problems are you interested in? • Where is work being carried out that is related to these problems? • How will I connect with this work? • What other perspectives and knowledge are needed to address the problems I care about? • How will I define and understand these problems with awareness of how they are experienced and manifest in organizations? What impact would you like to have? • To help organizations become more effective in accomplishing human purposes; • To help organizations innovate and change as the demands of the market economy change; • To improve the skills and behaviors of people in organizations; • To enhance organizational capabilities; • To help organizations position themselves in their ecosystems and achieve their desired contribution to different stakeholders. To have your desired impact, who do you need to connect with to ensure your knowledge moves along the value stream? • • • •

For access to data and places to examine the phenomena of interest to you; For knowledge generation; For feedback and learning about how the knowledge works in practice; For leverage—to learn from others with different perspectives in the value stream who are contributing in different ways to how organizations become more effective.

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NOTES 1. Kieser, A. and Leiner, L. (2009). Why the rigour–relevance gap in management research is unbridgeable. Journal of Management Studies, 46(3), 516–33. 2.

Bartunek, J.M. and Rynes, S.L. (2014). Academics and practitioners are alike and unlike: The paradoxes of academic–practitioner relationships. Journal of Management, 40, 1181–201.

3. Bartunek, J.M. (2007). Academic–practitioner collaboration need not require joint or relevant research: Toward a relational scholarship of integration. Academy of Management Journal, 50(6), 1323–33; Garima Sharma’s interview with Jean Bartunek, accessed at https://​www​.nbs​.net/​articles/​jean​-bartunek​-how​-to​ -maintain​-productive​-tensions. 4.

Rynes, S.L., Colbert, A.E. and Brown, K.G. (2002). HR professionals’ beliefs about effective human resource practices: Correspondence between research and practice. Human Resource Management, 41(2), 149–74.

5. Tushman, M. and O’Reilly III, C. (2007). Research and relevance: Implications of Pasteur’s quadrant for doctoral programs and faculty development. Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 769–74. 6. Sharma, G. and Bansal, P. (2020). Cocreating rigorous and relevant knowledge. Academy of Management Journal, 63(2), 386–410. 7.

To learn more about the findings of the two projects studied, see “The basics of long-termism in a short-term world” and “Collaborating with competitors to advance sustainability” on the NBS website https://​www​.nbs​ .net/​.

8.

Mohrman, S.A., Cohen, S.G. and Mohrman, A.M. (1995). Designing Team-based Organizations: New Forms for Knowledge Work. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

9.

Kieser, A. and Leiner, L. (2012). Collaborate with practitioners: But beware of collaborative research. Journal of Management Inquiry, 21(1), 14–28; Shani, A.B. and Coghlan, D. (2014). Collaborate with practitioners: An alternative perspective—A rejoinder to Kieser and Leiner (2012). Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(4), 433–7.

10. Gibson, C.B. and Birkinshaw, J. (2004). The antecedents, consequences, and mediating role of organizational ambidexterity.  Academy of Management Journal,  47(2), 209–26; Birkinshaw, J. and Gibson, C. (2004). Building ambidexterity into an organization: A company’s ability to simultaneously execute today’s strategy while developing tomorrow’s arises from the context within which its employees operate.  MIT Sloan Management Review, 45(4), 47–56. 11. Hatch, M.J. and Schultz, M. (2008). Taking Brand Initiative: How Companies Can Align Strategy, Culture, and Identity Through Corporate Branding. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. 12. Van De Ven, A.H. and Johnson, P.E. (2006). Knowledge for theory and practice.  The Academy of Management Review, 31(4), 802–821. 13. Monge, P.R. and Contractor, N. (2003).  Theories of Communication Networks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 14. Granovetter, M. (1983). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited.  Sociological Theory, 1, 201–233; Worley, C.G. and Mirvis, P. (2013). Building Networks and Partnerships: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness (Vol. 3). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.

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Relevant research: yesterday and today Prior chapters reimagined management and organization research and the philosophical and relational foundations for such work. Sweet spot researchers: (1) study problems germane to both theory and practice; (2) conduct research with both methodological rigor and practical relevance; and (3) produce knowledge of interest to both scholars and practitioners. To accomplish this kind of engaged scholarship, we urged you to clarify your values and points of view on research. We also encouraged you to plug directly into knowledge networks. These ideas may seem heretical in a world where scholars are rewarded for producing discipline-based, “A” level journal articles judged on theory, scientific rigor, and their contribution to the academic literature. However, the history of organizational research is replete with examples of leading scholars who studied practical problems and built or tested theory, used multiple methods in their studies to understand phenomena objectively and experientially, and produced actionable knowledge by leveraging academic and practitioner knowledge networks. Far from an historical vestige, many academics favor this sweet spot approach today. It is what motivates their research, how they do it, and what gives their professional lives meaning. They are part of a rising tide calling for more useful and responsible scholarship. In this chapter, we draw on bits of history and the results of our interviews with contemporary scholars to summarize and integrate how this way of working produces groundbreaking, classic, and respected knowledge.

STUDYING THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL PROBLEMS The most important management and organization research questions studied over the years have been inextricably linked to the Zeitgeist—what is happening in the world at a given time. The problems that organizations face change through time, and the strategies and practices they put into place change the nature of the organizations we study. Good research, some of the most read and cited research, has always been attached to and sourced in the arc of organizational and social evolution.

The Foundations of Organization and Management Research As the twentieth century began, widescale industrialization and urbanization spread across the Western world. Modern commerce and business organizations were in their formative stages.

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A diverse coterie of engineers, practitioners, and academics became interested in figuring out how best to structure and manage these modern enterprises and to address the attendant poor working and living conditions, low wages, child labor, and pollution. Frederick W. Taylor conducted a series of studies at Bethlehem Steel, including the “science of shoveling” and “experiment with pig iron”, in an effort to “replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.” It led to his 1911 classic, The Principles of Scientific Management and he is credited with introducing “scientific” principles into the curriculum of the Harvard Business School shortly after it opened in 1908.1 Reflecting on his own practical experiences, Henri Fayol enumerated five management functions in his 1917 book General and Administrative Management: (1) forecast and plan, (2) organize, (3) command, (4) coordinate, and (5) control.2 In a nod to the human factor, one of his 14 principles of management was the importance of esprit de corps. In a counterpoint to these technical-rational models of organization, more humanistic conceptions of organizing emerged. In 1924, Mary Parker Follett, advocated for the principle of “integration”, or non-coercive power sharing, and the idea of “power with” rather than “power over” and in 1938, Chester Barnard wrote The Functions of the Executive. He depicted managers as both professionals and stewards exercising authority through moral integrity and presented organizations as social systems where results were achieved through “cooperation among men that is conscious, deliberate, purposeful.”3 Mid-century, mindful of the rise of fascism and the ravages of WWII, social scientists delved into the authoritarian personality (via a questionnaire) and obedience to authority (a laboratory experiment on following orders that Milgram said was both inspired by and an explanation of Nazi behavior). Another research line considered the impact of democratic versus autocratic leadership. An experimental study by Lewin, Lippitt, and White (who added the “laissez-faire” type to the mix) found the democratic style superior for morale and sustained performance. Later, amidst the post-war economic expansion and emergence of large, increasingly complex companies, theorizing and research by Maslow, McGregor, and Argyris explored human motivation and highlighted the problems and possibilities of “integrating the individual and the organization”. While located in academe, these scholars wanted their work to be applied and tested in organizations. During this same post-war period, Eric Trist and colleagues developed their socio-technical systems theory of organizations. Using very “hands on” methods, they studied organizations where changes to the production systems—intended to increase efficiency—were leading to unrest among workers. Socio-technical systems theory is closely tied to practice and emphasizes the analysis of the organizational context, the nature of the technical system, and the experienced needs of the people carrying out the work. Theoretical and practical questions were raised and answered in this era about the relative import of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, how to set goals and how challenging they should be, when and how to give feedback, whether jobs should be simplified or more stimulating, whether leadership practices should be universal or situational, what factors lead to cooperation versus conflict, and so on. Expanding from their platform of personnel testing and training, researchers in I/O psychology and organizational behavior (OB) units in business schools conducted lab and field experiments and questionnaire-based studies on these topics.

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Their findings still populate almost every I/O psychology, OB, and HR management text and set the empirical foundation for evidence-based management. William Scott reports, “organizations emerged as a recognized field of social scientific study during the 1950s.”4 He would join with Peter Blau to develop a typology of organizations based on “who benefits” (members, clients, owners, public) and Etzioni’s typology was based on how they were controlled (coercive, utilitarian, normative). Viewing organizations as open systems was first promulgated by Boulding in the mid-1950s and amplified by Katz and Kahn in their Social Psychology of Organizations. Accordingly, researchers classified organization environments as, for instance, random versus ordered, placid versus turbulent, certain versus uncertain. In turn, they studied how different kinds of organizational structures, technologies, and control systems fared under different environmental conditions. Empirical field research by Lawrence and Lorsch established that an organization’s performance depended on striking a balance between differentiation and integration in their structures for a given level of environmental uncertainty. Building on these factors, Jay Galbraith proposed several mechanisms for reducing the need for information processing or increasing an organization’s capacity to process it. He developed the practical STAR™ model of organization design that emphasized the alignment among formal structure and strategy, processes, rewards systems, and people.

Sweet Spot Scholarship in Our Time When we entered our respective doctoral programs in the 1970s (and 1980s), managers and organizations were facing a host of practical problems. These included rapid advances in computing technology and the advent of management information systems; global competition and the global expansion of corporations; slumping worker morale and productivity; calls for women and minorities to move in-and-up in companies; deregulation and privatization of public services; the build-up of industrial waste; and the merging and downsizing of businesses amidst a shift to a “post-industrial” economy in the West and industrialization of the developing world via outsourcing. In light of these conditions, researchers over the next decades proposed and tested new concepts and action-oriented frameworks to enable increasingly complex organizations to adapt to turbulent environments and the need for continuous change. Studies of disruptive innovation, dynamic capabilities, and absorptive capacity showed that organizations need to continually bring in and learn from external information in order to adapt to their changing contexts. Process views of the organization provided a basis for aligning the operating model of the firm with the nature of the work. Frameworks for understanding organizational culture and the competing values in companies helped managers to shape new approaches to aligning the organization and individuals. Finally, theory and research on stakeholder management, virtual organization, sustainable effectiveness, and workforce diversity-and-inclusion were keyed to the challenges of reinventing organizations in the twenty-first century. Amidst all of this, there were calls to focus and limit our theorizing and research to core, discipline-based lines of inquiry. In the early 1980s, Jeff Pfeffer bemoaned, “the domain of organization theory is coming to resemble more of a weed patch than a well-tended garden.

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Theories ... proliferate along with measures, terms, concepts, and research paradigms.”5 He called for adoption of a “unifying” paradigm, like the ones used in economics and political science, wherein scholars agree on the important research questions, on the best research methods and variables to study, and on the goals of knowledge development for the field. The reaction? Head nods by some academics but just as many giggles and gasps. John van Maanen penned a rejoinder that Pfeffer was trying to render organizations “safe for science” and argued that the more we try to be precise and exact in our theorizing and research, the less we are able to say about organizations and their doings.6 Others made a sublime counter-argument to Pfeffer: “Science is not a magnificent march toward absolute truth but a social struggle among scholars of the profession to construct truth.”7 Suffice to say, scholarship about work, organizations, and management continues to diversify and research paradigms proliferate. We live in a “big tent”. Today well-regarded academic researchers continue to contribute to theory and practice. Our discussion of sweet spot research has been greatly informed by talking with them about how they advanced theoretical knowledge through rigorous research that focuses on the problems of practice. Our interviewees include senior scholar role models, academic contemporaries, and comparative newcomers to the field.

Mentors and role models Let’s begin with Edgar Schein. After conducting laboratory experiments of social influences on perception for his PhD in social psychology from Harvard in 1952, he joined the Army’s Clinical Psychology Program, and he was then assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research amidst the Korean War. While at Walter Reed, Schein flew to Inchon, Korea, to join shiploads of repatriated US prisoners of war to assess their mental health. He interviewed POWs and identified the mechanisms of “brainwashing” used by their Chinese captors.8 Schein analyzed how some POWs, especially civilians who were kept in mainland prison for over three years, “cognitively redefined” the meaning of making a false confession, not because of persuasion, but rather via mechanisms of change, including the use of group pressure and indeterminate prison sentences to “disconfirm” current precepts and learn new ones in order to feel psychologically safe. He labeled this process “Coercive Persuasion” and showed how it was not unique to Chinese brainwashing but involved interpersonal and group processes that were common to schools, military and religious training, and even parenting. Schein thereafter joined MIT where he planned to run experiments on group communication and leadership. But when he was introduced to T-Groups and invited by Douglas McGregor to join in human relations training and learn how to consult to organizations, he told us: that really was the crucial turning point … from pure experimentalism to making observations and making sense of the observations with others. As I was learning how to be a trainer, I was also learning how to be a consultant in organizational settings in which I could see first-hand the power of cultural forces in determining daily behavior.

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His field studies involving careful observation of two organizations undergoing culture change yielded concepts that not only had theoretic resonance, but also practical relevance: managers were introduced to the hidden layers of organization culture (often represented as an iceberg where the foundation is below the surface) and counseled, “Organizational analyses that show separate boxes for ‘culture’ and ‘strategy’ are making a fundamental conceptual error. Strategy is an integral part of the culture.”9 On the subject of strategy, the key analytic tool in the early days—the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats framework (SWOT)—bothered the aerospace and mechanical engineer turned Harvard MBA, Michael Porter. Porter recalls, “The theory of the day was SWOT but there was no framework. It raised good questions but no way of thinking about how to answer the questions it generated.” During his PhD in industrial organization (I/O) economics, he explored the relationship between market structure and performance in the retail industry, eventually authoring the influential HBR paper on “how competitive forces shape strategy” that identified “techniques for analyzing industries and competitors”.10 It was a significant departure from the experience-curve influenced strategy paradigm, which was focused on larger scale and lower cost. He went on, I am fundamentally a scholar … the core of the work is creating ways of looking at important questions, and I believe deeply in immersing myself in the real thing. I want to build actionable and powerful frameworks about problems confronting managers and capture the complexity of the real (world). There is too much simplifying and stylizing today; the real world is complicated. Every country is different, every company is different, and they are complex. Porter’s ability to translate the dense mathematics of I/O economics into principles that made sense to executives led to his rise as a leading voice in the strategy field.

Contemporaries and peers Michael Beer and Amy Edmondson worked in industry before joining the scholarly world, and each has approached organizational research with a deep understanding of practice that stemmed from these experiences. As a newly minted PhD, Beer’s early work in the personnel research group at Corning involved the study of practical problems (supervisor turnover, performance management) using traditional methods (surveys, interviews). But when a plant manager sought to redesign operations based on McGregor’s Theory Y principles, he had to get his “hands dirty trying to solve a problem we didn’t know the answer to.” “It’s not enough to describe the difference between Theory X and Theory Y,” he told us; “A knowledge base needs to be created about how an organization can transform itself to achieve a new way of operating.” Based on this work, Beer recognized that training and workshops were not enough to effect change in an organization. With Edgar Huse, he published an influential article on a “systems approach to organization development”, which proposed that structural and interpersonal changes must complement and reinforce each other and that adult learning starts with behavioral change rather than

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cognitive change.11 Later, Beer (and Nitin Nohria) differentiated between Theory E and O methods of organization change: Theory E has as its purpose the creation of economic value … Its approach is planned, programmatic change, based on formal structure and systems; driven from the top with the help of external consultants and financial incentives. Theory O has as its purpose development of the organization’s human capability to implement strategy and learn from experience. It depends on a high commitment culture in which change is continuous and emergent. Change is enabled through a participative process which relies less on consultants and incentives.12 Amy Edmondson also made a transition from practice into the academy. Before her academic career, Edmondson worked on transformational change in large companies as Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers and was chief engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller. She joined the HBS faculty in 1996 and was determined to follow her “passions”—influencing practice and doing interesting work in the world. She explains her approach: “Problems provide a natural connection with practice. Studying a compelling problem, researchers are motivated to care about action. Problems matter!” And then goes on, “Although one can learn about an industry or company from written materials, fuller understanding and new ideas are more likely when meeting and observing people who work in that setting.” As for the importance of collaboration, she says, “In most field research sites, it takes time to understand both the organization and the industry. Collaborators who bring different perspectives and expertise can accelerate the learning needed to get up to speed and offer novel insights.” Her first research studies were of patient-care teams in hospitals where she found, paradoxically, that high functioning teams, according to a standard team effectiveness survey, appeared to have higher error rates. Digging into the data, she discovered that these teams were more apt to report, rather than conceal, errors and thus to continuously improve their practice. Reflecting on these findings, she writes, “Low levels of psychological safety can create a culture of silence. They can also create a Cassandra culture – an environment in which speaking up is belittled and warnings go unheeded.”13 Edmondson styles herself an engaged scholar who starts with a practical problem, goes into the field, and reaches across boundaries to generate knowledge. She told us, “For me to understand drug errors in hospitals, for example, would have been extremely difficult without working closely with the physicians and nurses in the larger research project.”

Scholarship today Although we have lamented how academic research became strangely disconnected from the world of practice, and how new PhD students are trained and socialized to treat organizations as objects to be studied in order to contribute to the top journals, there are exceptions. Even as Adam Grant graduated from Michigan’s psychology program, he was attracted to practical problems from the get-go. He remembers being advised to focus on a singular scholarly “niche” but instead explored three of them in his early research: work motivation, job design,

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and prosocial behavior. A strong proponent of rigorous research, he insists that his work be practical, noting, “There is so much hunger in the world for practical knowledge.” Grant’s research has made the case that “prosocial” motivation is a powerful driver of work engagement and a source of personal meaning and significance on the job.14 His various studies, involving observations, survey research, and experiments, show the benefits of “positive” organization behavior at work: z Jobs that enable employees to see the positive impact they have on “beneficiaries” of their work (both inside and outside their companies) can be more motivating than those that offer, say, better pay or intrinsic challenge; z Sales people who are “givers” and strive to benefit co-workers and customers are more productive than those who primarily look out for themselves; z Work teams where supervisors spend their time consulting with, mentoring, and coaching team members are more effective than where the boss micromanages; and z Employees who volunteer for community service through their employers are more satisfied and have higher commitment than those who do not volunteer. In a felicitous turn of the phrase, Grant says work engagement is more about employees “giving” than “receiving”. The introduction to this volume highlighted some of the contemporary problems facing organizations in our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. From his vantage, Cascio told us, “there are more opportunities than ever to make real practical differences in organizations with the development of new technologies and all the human issues that it raises, such as monitoring and surveillance, privacy and stress, and the reactions of people to being monitored and surveilled.” What about you? What current organizational problems animate you and speak to your passions?

RIGOROUS AND RELEVANT RESEARCH METHODS As we saw in Chapter 2, scholars base their research in different philosophies of science and approach their studies in different ways. The study of organizations originally featured two different ways of conceptualizing and investigating the social order. To Emile Durkheim, the world is constructed of “social facts” that are external to individuals and that function to govern society through cause–effect laws. This perspective embraced French philosopher Comte’s positivist view that the social sciences should follow the logic and methods of the natural sciences to identify universal laws through empirical observation and testing. Durkheim would introduce quantitative methods to sociology.15 To Max Weber, by contrast, the world is constructed via “social action” that is a product of individual actors, motivations, or “cultural orientations”. He adopted an anti-positivist perspective that would attend to a “full spectrum of causal factors” and consider “reciprocal relationships” among them. He used interpretive methods (verstehen) to understand the subjective motivations and meanings individuals attach to their actions. Weber was no armchair sociologist. He studied farm workers using questionnaires and did case studies of industrial

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workers and facilities. In his writings on “objectivity” in research, he wrote on the meaning of knowledge generated by different research methods and minds: All interpretation of meaning, like all scientific observation, strives for clarity and verifiable accuracy of insight and comprehension. The basis for certainty in understanding can be either rational, which can be further subdivided into logical and mathematical, or it can be of an emotionally empathic or artistically appreciative quality. In the sphere of action, things are rationally evident chiefly when we attain a completely clear intellectual grasp of the action-elements in their intended context of meaning. Empathic or appreciative accuracy is attained when, through sympathetic participation, we can adequately grasp the emotional context in which the action took place.16 The famous Hawthorne studies in the 1920s and early 1930s drew on both traditions using natural and controlled experiments, empathic observation, and quantitative and qualitative measurements. For instance, early interview questions such as “Do you like your supervisor?” or “Is he in your opinion fair or does he have favorites?” only stimulated antagonistic or simple “yes” or “no” responses. Shifting to non-directive interviewing, employees expressed themselves more openly and candidly. In his autobiography The Elusive Phenomena, Roethlisberger wrote: These were the phenomena for me, and I was in no hurry to wrap a hard covering around them … I felt very strongly that in these soft, gooey data there existed uniformities about human behavior that had to be coaxed out by a point of view and method that were perhaps different from those used by my more hard-nosed, realistic, objective and scientific … colleagues. This … method of clinical observation and interviewing … did not make soft data into hard data, [but] it did make them more understandable.17 The next decades would see the introduction of case studies (e.g., William F. Whyte on incentive systems), action research (e.g., Coch and French on the introduction of participatory management), and participant-observation (e.g., Dalton’s Men Who Manage) into organization research and the beginnings of planned change studies and consultative-clinical research—all with the intent that research contribute to effective practice.

What is “Good” Research? When we entered our graduate study, courses on research methods and statistics emphasized positivist logic and quantitative methods to produce theory-driven research contributions. How did this become orthodoxy? Many trace this emphasis in management and organization scholarship to October 1959, when both the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation for the Advancement of Education issued reports critical of America’s business schools on, among other counts, a lack of theorizing and empirical research by faculty.18 The Academy of Management, formerly an association of teachers, was reoriented toward research and launched a journal for scholarly research. Thereafter, many other journals were birthed—the

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most prestigious being those that favored quantitative, theoretically driven research that advanced the knowledge of the discipline. March and Simon were among those who set an example by putting “bounded rationality” into models of “rational-economic” organization to reflect how cognitive limits in decision making and inconsistent goals, incomplete information, intra-organizational conflict, and miscommunication all impinge on organization behavior.19 In so doing, they offered over 200 propositions about organizations to be tested by empirical research. The “Hypothetico-Deductive” method would be dominant in organization research ever since. In our coursework, one of the main texts on doing rigorous research promulgated to faculty and their grad students was Campbell and Stanley’s Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research. Advances in statistical methods and later the use of computerized software for conducting multi-variate analysis sped quantification in research. With all this, many academics studying behavior in and of organizations embraced empiricism and rigorous research methods in keeping with their “hard” science brethren. The joke in academe was that we were afflicted with “physics envy”. Yet we also read C. Wright Mills who cautioned against “abstract empiricism” at the expense of the “sociological imagination” and Chris Argyris who argued that dependence, overt and covert withdrawal, aggression, and even “false data” were among the “unintended consequences” of rigorous experimental and field research.20 Among us were many scholars who resisted methodological orthodoxy and embraced pluralism. Researchers with a qualitative bent used the ethnographic and contextual research methods of anthropologists and Chicago School sociologists. They found guidance on how to systematize their research in Glaser and Strauss’s Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. As Hatch explains it, “you become an ‘empty’ vessel” and “make notes, ‘journal’ your impressions.” Her first studies were challenged by professors: “How do you tell a good interpretation from a bad interpretation?” In answering, Hatch and Schultz pointed to the benefits of doing collaborative research as each of them would form their own impressions of phenomena, “argue” with each other about what it might mean, and, in turn, test their inferences with participants in their studies.

Pluralism and Pragmatism The sweet spot researchers we interviewed conduct research all along Van de Ven’s continuum of engaged scholarship. They hold varied ontological and epistemological beliefs, and operate in different paradigms. Other respected researchers have embraced positive scholarship, taken critical management perspectives, or employed aesthetic and post-modern ways of looking at things. Researchers today have available a full panoply of research methods whose use, as Edmondson and McManus point out, depends on their “fit” with a chosen research question, the strength of prior theorizing, proposed research design, and expected contribution to theory and practice.21 Almost all of the researchers we interviewed were connected in some way, currently or recently, to academic institutions. They were trained in positivist research methods and did mostly quantitative research in their graduate school days. Early in their careers they published

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rigorous empirical research in “A” journals. But being an arms-length quantitative researcher was not a “life sentence” and most turned to multiple and different research methods as their careers progressed. Several identified themselves as having a dual-identity—as, say, a practice-oriented scholar or scientist-practitioner. During their careers, many expanded into new disciplinary areas and others teamed up with colleagues from complementary disciplines, in recognition that many important problems of practice cannot be addressed through the lens of one disciplinary perspective. Almost all believed that having learned the principles of rigorous research design and methods, statistical modeling, and sources/threats to internal validity provided a good and solid grounding that served them well. As Rob Cross told us: When I first got out [of my PhD program], I was given the advice not to waste time on [practitioner articles]. I didn’t let this deter me, but if I hadn’t been hitting also in A journals I would have been unable to pursue my interests in relevance in that setting. So I published in both kinds of outlets and always made sure I was looking at the applied side and understanding the problems of practice. Some of my most important scholarly papers were only enabled by my ability to talk to companies and get data from them. What also struck us about our interviewees was their commitment to their purpose—doing work that impacted practice, in the ways that made sense. Our interviewees shared a common purpose to produce relevant research, but they were pluralistic and pragmatic in their choice of research methods. Cascio told us: I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into doing one kind of research. Event studies, lab, field work. What is the best way to get insights into a particular question? Barry Staw and his notion of the flow from exploratory research in companies to case studies to systematic research and framework formulation had a big influence on me. And Amy Edmondson concurred: My choices on methods are “eclectic” and depend on what the setting allows and what the question needs … There are three attributes of my approach to conducting research that may increase the chances of the research being useful: starting with an important problem, getting into the field (early and often), and not being afraid to collaborate across disciplinary and organizational boundaries. Their message, and ours, is that there is no “one” best research method. All have strengths and weaknesses that must be considered and optimized in service of rigor and relevance. So, what are your favored research methods? How do you optimize rigor and relevance when you use them?

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BUILDING AND TAPPING INTO KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS Chapter 3 placed sweet spot research into a complex knowledge-generating value stream comprised of scholars and practitioners, consultants, translators, funding organizations, publishers, and professional associations. If we learned one thing from our interviewees, it was the importance of building networks and communities. It should not have been a new insight. On the contrary, leveraging networks for access, understanding, and advancing knowledge through exchange and collective learning has always played a role to scholars aiming to impact practice. Back in 1911, for instance, enthusiasts from engineering, business, and academe formed the Taylor Society to launch a movement to “establish industrial management as a profession subject to scientific laws.” Among its members were Frank (industrial engineer) and Lillian (industrial psychologist) Gilbreth, who used motion picture cameras to analyze the fundamental components of work (called therbligs or Gilbreth spelled backwards). As Barnard was compiling his reflections for Functions of the Executive in the 1930s, he participated in Harvard’s heady “Pareto Circle” that included leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists on the campus.22 Barnard credits discussions of how “non-logical” mental processes affect human behavior with helping him to identify the workings of the informal organization—which “is to be regarded as a means of maintaining the personality of the individual against certain effects of formal organizations which tend to disintegrate the personality” (p. 122). The influential Pareto Circle introduced the concept of organizations as social systems in a state of social equilibrium that, as Keller points out, “was a paramount theory for over three decades.”23 Post-WWII, multi-disciplinary social research centers were established in the US (MIT, University of Michigan, Chicago, Iowa, Columbia, etc.), in the UK, Scandinavia and continental Europe, Russia, and eventually worldwide. Their numbers continue to grow. John Boudreau credits his days at Cornell’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies for helping him think in network terms. At Cornell, researchers benefited from a strong community of corporate supporters and willing thought partners. Boudreau recalls, The people there were admired because they did both … they were good researchers in good journals and they were able to have drinks with executives. I pretty quickly realized that a lot of academics never had these conversations with executives. Building networks has to be deliberate. We think we are relevant but only to other academics. What comes with the rigor/relevance aspiration is that you have to be involved with practitioners. It became apparent that you cannot have rigor and relevance without the network. Sandra Waddock has also put herself purposefully into networks. She sees herself as a connector and the outcomes of her networking as a function of “luck and intent”. “I like to connect people in forums where they will make a difference … I have been interacting with the practice side through social investors and connecting with progressive folk pushing this responsibility agenda. I knew the people—that’s what made me aware of the elements of this big picture. The network is really critical.”

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Connecting to Practice via Research Centers We highlighted in the prior chapter how work in a research center can be a pathway to generating and transmitting relevant and timely knowledge. At Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Ed Lawler and Stanley Seashore led a research program on the quality of work life to advance scientific knowledge and to enable companies (and labor unions) to take action informed by sound research. These studies brought together researchers from multiple disciplines and practitioners from organizations and unions to introduce significant changes in how they operated. Carried out in the 1970s, when US productivity was slumping, competition from Japan Inc. was increasing, and concern over alienation in the workforce was growing, these stakeholders worked together to introduce change and study its impact. This research produced new tools and methods to study organizational systems and their transformation, and substantive findings and frameworks about change and “high involvement” organizations. A robust network of companies, consultants, and academics emerged to continue to learn with and from each other and advance practice in the areas of organizational effectiveness and QWL. Staying close to practice has been key to Michael Porter’s relevance and impact. Early on, he told us, “I got asked to be on a commission on US competitiveness with CEOs and leaders. If we took the firm as the unit of analysis and spread it globally, what’s the role of location and geography? Out of that grew clusters and regions. It was the next big question.” This research led to a study of the competitive advantage of nations and creation of the Cluster Mapping Project, which pioneered the rigorous measurement of economic geography. Since then, Porter has started three research centers to bridge his academic and practice interests: the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, concerned with economic development in distressed urban communities; the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which creates rigorous tools for measuring foundation effectiveness; and FSG-Social Impact Advisors, which helps NGOs, corporations, and foundations to create social value. A community of practice joining scholars and organizations, the Shared Value Initiative, has recently emerged. These organizations arose from Porter’s general philosophy of always asking, “What’s the next big question?”

Joining with Practice in Knowledge Networks Knowledge networks joining academics and practitioners have proliferated in recent years. We described Rob Cross’s Connected Commons™ in Chapter 3. As Rob puts it, “There are so few people that exist at this intersection (either from academia or companies) that when I meet someone who really gets it and understands how to engage, it’s really a relationship to be treasured.” This community spans the value stream. Research projects are carried out with input, exchange, and cross learning among academic researchers and a cross-functional set of practitioners. Cross and his Commons partners have created tools and applications that allow companies to carry out their own research, which facilitates deeper engagement of practitioners in the research endeavor. This also provides a vehicle for in-company absorption of the concepts and tailored experimentation with network approaches to organizing. The

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community’s website is a font of resources and thought pieces accessible to members of the Commons and beyond. A number of other communities exist to advance and learn from engaged research. For example, Hilary Bradbury founded Foundation AR+, a global community of participative action researchers that features regular virtual and face-to-face gatherings of action researchers, myriad publications and “cookbooks”. It also hosts co-labs where researchers and practitioners can work together. Scholar-practitioner Peter Senge formed the Society for Organization Learning (SOL) following the publication of The Fifth Discipline. The Society helped to promulgate methodologies for “systems thinking” and hosted several greenhouses where scholars and practitioners could share the processes and results of their joint studies.

A Network to Get Knowledge into Practice Denise Rousseau has championed multidisciplinary research. But of late, she says, “I’m less excited by new theory than by the question of how to use the knowledge we have.” She has been a leading voice in advancing the practice of evidence-based management (EBMgt). Her Center for Evidence-Based Management at Carnegie Mellon is a network of scholars, grad students, consultants, and practicing managers working to more fully understand and improve practitioners’ capability to make evidence-based decisions. She writes: The basic idea of evidence-based practice is that good-quality decisions should be based on a combination of critical thinking and the best available evidence. A premise is that currently, although all management practitioners use evidence in their decisions, many pay little attention to the quality of that evidence. The result is bad decisions based on unfounded beliefs, fads and ideas popularized by management gurus du jour. The bottom line is bad decisions, poor outcomes, and limited understanding of why things go wrong.24 In response, Rousseau and others founded a PhD program in management research at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit to bring practitioners’ perspectives to bear on research findings and to establish an evidence base that is accessible to them. Many of the students come from consulting firms or specialized knowledge-based professions. Their dissertations entail systematic reviews of research related to specific practice-oriented questions to determine whether or not research has produced strong and trustworthy evidence to guide and improve management practices. The students, in effect, assess, summarize, and translate research evidence for busy practitioners. However, scientific studies are only one input into the practice of evidence-based management. To be fully applicable, research findings have to be combined with organization-specific data, practitioners’ own professional experience, and the perspectives of relevant stakeholders, inside and outside of an organization. These topics and more are on the agenda of EBMgt scholars. Rousseau sees this PhD program as developing a community of scholars and scholar-practitioners who have a passion to carry this approach forward, and help shape and evolve management as a profession.

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A SWEET SPOT RESEARCH CAREER IS BECKONING Looking at management and organization research over time shows that scholars have connected to the issues of their day. They employed multiple methods and took iterative and cumulative approaches to theorizing and studying substantive problems and to working out what their research might mean for practice. Many of them linked up to knowledge networks in service of accessing research problems and of getting useful knowledge into practice. What our interviewees showed us is that this approach to research continues and that making a difference with your scholarship is both useful to practice and personally satisfying. For senior scholars, we hope this reawakens memories of researchers who influenced your first studies. We hope the contemporary exemplars remind you of the import of doing sweet spot research in today’s world. For graduate students and early-career scholars, hear this as a call to action and to adventure, an invitation to undertake your own version of the “hero’s journey” where a first inclination might be to resist the call and turn back to the comfort and tasks of everyday academic research.25 Know that your forebears and mentors have taken this heroic journey with all of its ordeals and satisfactions. Many scholars today can guide you forward and will gladly do so. It is our hope that you attend to this call and consider carefully the questions posed thus far as to whether the journey ahead is right for you and which pathways you might take. In Part II of this book, we turn to doing sweet spot research—with more reflective questions to ponder and some answers to this one: “How do you pull this off?” Reflecting on your research: • What research studies over the years do you rate as being both scientifically sound and practically significant? • Who are your contemporary role models for doing research that connects theory to practice? • What kinds of knowledge networks might connect to your research interests? • How do you deal with competing pressures and trade-offs that come up with sweet spot research?

NOTES 1.

Taylor, F.W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers; McDonald, D. (2017). The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite. New York, NY: HarperBusiness.

2. Fayol, H. (1917).  General and Industrial Management. Pitman, 1949.  Originally published in French as Administration Industrielle et Générale: prévoyance, organization, commandement, coordination, contrôle. Dunot et E. Pinat.

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3. Follett, M.P. (1924).  Creative Experience. Longmans, Green and Company; Barnard, C.I. (1938). The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 4.

Scott, W.R. (2004). Reflections on a half-century of organizational sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 1–21.

5.

Pfeffer, J. (1993). An interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer. Organization and Management Division Newsletter, 1, 5.

6.

Van Maanen, J. (1995). Fear and loathing in organization studies. Organization Science, 6(6), 687–92.

7. Cannella Jr, A.A. and Paetzold, R.L. (1994). Pfeffer’s barriers to the advance of organizational science: A rejoinder. Academy of Management Review, 19(2), 331–41. 8.

Schein, E.H., Schneier, I. and Barker, C.H. (1961). Coercive Persuasion. New York, NY: WW Norton & Co.

9.

Schein, E.H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (Vol. 2). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

10. Porter, M.E. (1979). How competitive forces shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 57(2), 137–45. 11. Beer, M. and Huse, E.F. (1972). A systems approach to organization development. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 8(1), 79–101. 12. Beer, M. and Nohria, N. (2000). Breaking the Code of Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 13. Edmondson, A.C. (2018).  The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 14. Grant, A.M. (2013). Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 15. Durkheim, E. (1897). Le Suicide: Etude de Sociologie. Alcan. 16. Weber, M. (1914). Basic sociological terms. In T. Parsons (1947), Introduction to Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 1(11). 17. Roethlisberger, F.J. (1977). The Elusive Phenomena, edited by George F.F. Lombard. Division of Research, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, Boston, MA. 18. Gordon, R. and Howell, J. (1959). Higher Education for Business. New York, NY: Columbia University Press; Pierson, R.C. (1959). The Education of American Businessmen. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. 19. March, J.G. and Simon, H.A. (1958). Organizations. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. 20. Mills, C.W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Argyris, C. (1968). Some unintended consequences of rigorous research. Psychological Bulletin, 70(3), 185–97. 21. Edmondson, A.C. and McManus, S.E. (2007). Methodological fit in management field research. Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1246–64. 22. Among the Pareto Circle were anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, economist Joseph Schumpeter, historians Crane Brinton and Bernard DeVoto, mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, psychologist Henry Murray, sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, as well as George Homans, Lawrence Henderson, and Elton Mayo. 23. Keller, R.T. (1984). The Harvard “Pareto circle” and the historical development of organization theory. Journal of Management, 10(2), 193–204. 24. Barends, E., Rousseau, D.M. and Briner, R.B. (2014). Evidence-based Management: The Basic Principles. Amsterdam: Center for Evidence-Based Management. 25. “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York, NY: MJF Books.

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Theorizing and practice This begins the “how to” section of the book where, in successive chapters, we examine theorizing and practice, conducting research, communicating your findings, and managing research relationships. This material may be entirely new to some readers and more familiar to others—dig in as your interests and knowledge dictate and feel free to glide through what you already know. This chapter addresses the first of the three fundamental questions raised in Chapter 1: “As I frame and source my research questions, are they of central concern to theory or practice or both?” Theorizing in relation to practice is the craft of integrating academic and practice knowledge to explore concepts and relationships associated with a particular phenomenon (see Exhibit 5.1). As you will see, there is no “one best way” to theorize for this purpose. Much depends on your personal research interests, what you are studying at any one time, and your philosophical point of view on research—matters of ontology and epistemology we covered earlier. Your knowledge-generating network is a crucial resource. In sweet Exhibit 5.1 Sweet spot research and the spot research, involvement with sourcing dimension organizations, practitioners, professional associations, and business and social movements can lead to theoretically interesting and practically useful research questions. After reading this chapter, we hope you will see how to draw research questions that link theory and practice.

SOURCING-AND-FRAMING YOUR RESEARCH As sweet spot researchers, our work integrates the following theory/practice characteristics: 1. We often source our research in problems felt by managers, issues/challenges facing organizations, or something happening in the Zeitgeist that seems pertinent to practice.

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As sweet spot researchers, we pay attention to what bothers those experiencing change and disruption. 2. Our research questions often build on and extend our long-term theoretical interests. Typically, we don’t start out with a blank slate, nor do we let a particular theory drive our search. Rather, projects present themselves with an opportunity to extend or refine our theorizing on any number of frameworks we have been studying. 3. Our research and theorizing tends to be multidisciplinary; it draws on and bridges perspectives from different academic communities and professional functions. No single academic or organizational discipline contains the knowledge to understand or the know-how to address the complex issues facing organizations today.

Three Sources of Research We highlighted in Chapter 1 distinctions between the archetypes of theory-driven versus practice-driven research. Here we drill down to where you locate and how you frame your research: Are you trying to elaborate on a theoretical question or better understand and address a practical problem? Some scholars favor working through the logic of theoretical constructs, playing out in their minds how different formulations might yield different dynamics and results. Field research provides them a setting to test out their theorizing. Others gravitate toward real-world phenomena and problems encountered in organizations. They build out an understanding of a problem, step by step, and express it in concepts and a model of their interrelationships. Field research is like a playground where they can construct (or deconstruct) what’s going on. If you operate in the sweet spot, you do a bit of both—back-and-forth, and often interactively with colleagues and practitioners who think about things differently from you. Where you source your research influences when and how theory enters into the research process, its underlying logic, what knowledge is generated, and its primary audience (see Exhibit 5.2).

Exploring theoretical questions This rationalist approach to research is aimed at cumulating knowledge by proposing and testing relationships between variables in a logically constructed model of how the world works. A key belief is that new knowledge is best developed and assessed in relation to theories expressed in the literature. Research framed in this space builds on conceptual models or propositions (deductively) or generates them (inductively). It aims to produce findings that contribute to a body of evidence that validates, elaborates, or challenges theoretical constructions. Naturally, a primary outlet for this research is academic journals. Career advancement for a theory-driven academic researcher—one who sources and frames research questions in theory—depends on being steeped in the literature and deeply conversant in a particular domain of knowledge.    

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Exhibit 5.2 Three sourcing/framing strategies  

Theoretical Questions →

Motivation for research

Contribute to theory: fill a gap or validate a specific theory

Contribute to both: link theory to practice

Contribute to practice: interpret & understand a practice problem

The role of theory

Fundamental: Existing theory frames research questions

Integrative: Continuous co-mingling of theory and data. Often draws on concepts from multiple disciplines.

Derivative: Theory emerges from research on a practice problem

How the contribution is made

By proposing and testing theorized relationships between variables

By applying/advancing theories to explain a phenomenon found in practice

By identifying factors/ processes related to a problem

Knowledge generated

Conceptual models; propositions; evidence

Linking models (theory-and-practice); evidence and prescriptions

Action-oriented models; tools, guidelines

Primary audience

Academics

Applied researchers and practitioners

Practitioners

Sweet Spot Research

← Practical Problems

Source: Portions drawn from Schwarz, G. and Stensaker, I. (2014). Time to take off the theoretical straightjacket and (re-)introduce phenomenon-driven research. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 50(4), 478–501.

Addressing practical problems This empirical approach to research, by comparison, immerses you in the practice world. The aim is to capture and extend practical knowledge by starting with a problem, looking at how practitioners encounter or are handling it, hypothesizing and studying what might be causing or contributing to it, and understanding how it might be addressed more effectively. The results of this kind of research are specific “theories of the case” and action-oriented models, tools, and guidelines for practitioners. Researchers in consulting firms, think-tanks, and industry/issue groups who observe organizations, interview practitioners, and conduct surveys use this method often. There are academics, too, who make a career of being expert in some area of practice and publish their research in “applied” academic journals and practitioner outlets. However, there are potential drawbacks to making practice an exclusive playground. For instance, keeping up with the rapidly changing world of work, managing, and leading can make it difficult to stay abreast of developments in the literature and how different knowledge disciplines are advancing. As a result, you risk missing out on new or competing concepts that might better explain the problem at hand. A challenge for practice-driven academic researchers is to be both conversant with and a contributor to theory.

Linking theory-and-practice Sweet spot research tries to “jointly optimize” the strengths of these two strategies. Like practice-driven research and some of its close cousins, phenomenon-driven research, Mode 2, and practice theorizing, this approach typically sources research in practice (What challenges

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are organizations facing? How are they being handled?). But it also means you stay close to the literature (How have scholars been thinking about this?) and theorize with an eye to both scholarly and practical knowledge (How do I make practical and theoretical sense of this?). Consumers of sweet spot research are academics with an interest in seeing how theory applies to practice and practitioners with an appetite for practical ideas backed up by research. In our view, sweet spot research is best guided by abduction. Pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term “abduction” to denote a type of non-deductive inference that is also different from pure induction.1 In research, it involves the “systematic combining” of the empirical and theoretical—to formulate “hunches” that orient you to the phenomena and take firmer shape as plausible hypotheses and interpretations emerge. The chief complaint with abductive reasoning is that it can yield many potential causes of observed effects. Welcome to theorizing in the complexities of the real world. We cited exemplars of sweet spot research throughout Part I of this volume. Look at a sampling of these researchers, the problems they studied, and the theories that framed or were derived from their research (Exhibit 5.3). As you see, sweet spot researchers investigate a variety of phenomena based in practical affairs and link them to varied and sometimes multiple types of theories. The old adage of “horses for courses” applies—different theories apply to different situations. We will continue to cite exemplary research studies (and describe some of our own) in Part II of this book to illustrate how sweet spot researchers work with theory, design and conduct their research, and communicate its results. We will also address how researchers engage in diagnostic, design, and action research, implementation studies, and change efforts in organizations where you directly engage with practice. Sweet spot research is a full-time job with its own purposes, language, and ways of doing things. Those of you in traditional university settings may see this way of sourcing and framing research as having potential costs in terms of your disciplinary depth and tenure decisions skewed to theory-driven publications. But the payoff is a research program that is relevant to practitioners and credible to academics. Amy Edmondson is clear on this point: I see myself as a bridge builder between the two worlds and spend time in both of them. I can speak to and connect with people who have no idea what goes on in the Academy but they are telling me about an issue related to people speaking up. And vice versa, I value and connect with those nested in the academy and I like that bridge building. Most sweet spot researchers, depending on their domain of interest at the time, do research geared more toward answering theoretical questions or to addressing practical problems. There is value in and relevant knowledge to be gained from sourcing and framing your research in different ways. Theory-driven research formalizes core concepts and models and yields findings for evidence-based management. Practice-driven research provides insight into what is going on in organizations and surfaces core concepts needed to interpret and model problem components and dynamics. Sweet spot research has you engage with practice to theorize a situation, draw on research-based knowledge to address or improve it, and then test and refine this knowledge based on feedback from its application in practice. It is of course

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Exhibit 5.3 Some practical problems and their theoretical frames Researcher

Practical Problem

Theoretical Frame

Peteraf theorizing and subsequent research

Sources of Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Resource Based Strategy

Weick & Sutcliffe

Adapting to Crises/High Reliability Organization

Organizational Cognition/ Sense-Making

Gratton

Innovating across Boundaries

Network theory

Boswell & Colleagues

Coping with “After Hours” Communication

Affective Event, Boundary/Role theories

Hart

Creating Markets at the Base of the Pyramid/Green Business

Competitive Strategy/ Sustainability theories

Sharma & Bansal

Knowledge Exchange between Researchers and Practitioners

Process/Social Exchange theories

Hatch & Schultz

What is a Corporate Brand?

Identity theory

Schein

Brainwashing/Organizational Culture

Psychodynamics/Attitudes & Cognition

Cascio

Equal Opportunity/Costs of Restructuring/People Analytics

I/O Psychology/ Behavioral-Economics

Porter

Competitive Forces

I/O Economics, Strategy/Positioning

Beer

Organization Change

Systems theory

Rousseau

Evidence Based Management

Decision theory

Grant & Colleagues

Giving versus Receiving

Paradox theory

Edmondson

Team Learning/Psychological Safety

Group Dynamics/Learning theories

Cross

Collaborative “Overload”

Network Theories of Knowledge Transfer

rewarding when your hypotheses are confirmed, but disconfirmation is needed to debunk popular management myths or discredit “conventional wisdom”. As we learned from our interviewees, doing all of this in a single study is impossible. But you can alternatively focus on puzzling theoretical questions, address tough practical problems, and do studies addressed to both academic and practitioner interests in a broader and longer-term program of research. Theorizing for practice: • Are your research questions theory-driven, practice driven, or a mix of both? • What practical problems most interest you? Which theories best apply to them?

BRIDGING THE THEORY/PRACTICE DIMENSION The process of sourcing your research questions betwixt theory and practice involves (1) noticing and exploring phenomena (where practice happens); (2) reviewing research (where

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related theory and studies are described); and (3) theorizing relationships (where explanations are built). While each of these activities has its own characteristics, it is best to think of them as a spiral in which you continuously develop and refine your main research questions. Sometimes sweet spot research begins with a curiosity about why something is happening in practice—a budding research question—that leads to spirals of exploring, reviewing, and theorizing. Other times, research questions emerge from a different sequence of these activities. How this process actually manifests itself will depend on and reflect your personal perspective, but be mindful that research collaborators, the larger community that is exploring related issues, and organizational practitioners can provide plenty of help.

Noticing and Exploring Phenomena In doing sweet spot research, you spend a lot of time immersed in organizational life, talking to managers and workers, attending industry or professional conferences, engaging in consulting assignments, and tracking emerging trends in the media. C.K. Prahalad believed that this not only keeps you in touch with current reality and practice, it also alerts you to potentially disruptive developments on the horizon and exposes you to what he called “next” (as opposed to best) practices.2 Leveraging connections in his networks to locate emerging ideas and innovations, C.K. divined breakthrough concepts like “core competencies” (with Gary Hamel) and the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” (with Stu Hart). Our job as sweet spot researchers is not only to notice what’s happening in the world, but to explore how it is being perceived, thought about, and managed (or not) in organizations. Getting deeper into this mode for a specific research project calls for “practical rationality”— understanding phenomena through the “logic of practice”.3 This means: (1) take practice as the point of departure; (2) look for how practitioners perform their doings (and what they say about them); (3) search for the different ways practices are enacted; and (4) explore what motivates these practices, how they are situated and understood in the organization, how accountability is handled, and how they contribute to intended and actual outcomes. This process of attending to phenomena is seldom done tabula rasa—you are likely to have some preconceived notions about what’s what and some favored ways of looking at and framing phenomena. So beware the classic conundrum: Do you know what you see or Do you see what you know? This calls for removing your own blinders and for being alert to what might be hidden, undiscussable, or simply outside the consciousness of people engaged in your research—both in your research team and at a research site. Be alert, too, to groupthink. When all concerned have the same orientation to and explanations of a problem deemed worthy of study, it can be easy to blindly follow the herd and adopt the same perspective. Practice reframing—choose another theory or lens to look at the problem and determine if it produces a different perspective worth exploring.

Reviewing Existing Research Sourcing and framing your research questions also means connecting with how current theory and scholarship intersect with the phenomena you are interested in. You not only read the

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academic literature but the relevant business press, practitioner publications, and the articles, blogs, debates, videos, and podcasts that derive from a strategic search of the internet. Again, people in your knowledge network can be helpful—highlighting useful resources, talking you through some of the fine points, and testing out whether your sense-making makes any sense to them. Jay Galbraith, our late friend and organization design scholar-practitioner, was brilliant at this. Not only was he grounded in theories of organization and information processing, he regularly queried colleagues and executives and scoured the business press for stories of large-scale strategic change and redesign. He used these concrete examples to continually advance and bring his explanations of organization design to life. Over four decades, he evolved his actionable STAR Model framework to address the increased complexity of organizations in their changing markets, the unfolding global economy, and the evolving technological underpinnings of business and work.4 There is a point of view that prior theory clouds observation and prevents you from seeing and interpreting phenomena afresh. There is some truth in this. However, scanning the literature can inform you how others have seen and conceptualized what you are studying and what theories they have applied and why. This educates your eyes and mind and expands your focal and interpretive repertoire. Reading outside of your disciplinary boundary or dialoging in a multi-disciplinary team can introduce you to new concepts and ways of seeing. Finally, attending to the literature is central in making an academic contribution. It is painful to read a research article that says “nobody has ever studied this before” when the extant literature says otherwise. Listen to Edmondson on reviewing research: The literature—that is, prior research that informs and shapes the research question—is an integrating force, helping to shape research to make its best contribution. Familiarity with what has come before in a given field that relates to your research question makes sure prior findings are integrated, elaborated, or refuted in the current work. More specifically, with respect to understanding a problem, finding out what others have done to understand that problem lowers the risk of reinventing the wheel. This statement is just as applicable for researchers who aspire to inform practice as for those who consider advancing theory their sole aim.5 There are also methods, guidelines, and tools to “partner up” with practitioners in systematic reviews of the literature.6

Theorizing Theorizing has you pull together and integrate the problems (and opportunities) you’ve seen with the knowledge you’ve studied into a conceptual formulation or model. Kerlinger’s classic 1964 methods book defines theory as “a set of interrelated constructs (concepts), definitions, and propositions that presents a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting the phenomena.”7 Naturally, there are many other definitions of theory based on different ontological and epistemological views of

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reality and how to know it. These foundational considerations, in turn, have implications for what types of theory you will be working with, how you will be working with it, and ways in which your theorizing connects to the world of practice. Let’s review the basics briefly. Whetten identifies four key elements in a complete organization theory: 1. What: The concepts or variables that logically make up or explain the phenomena of interest. A parsimonious theory is one that uses the lowest number of variables to the best effect. 2. How: A description of the way the variables are related. In positivist studies, this is often represented in a model with “boxes” (what) connected by “arrows” (how) that indicate whether the relationship is positive or negative. In interpretivist research, the what-and-how emerge over the course of a study. (Expressed in practical terms, the “how” connects means-and-ends, problems-and-solutions, causes-and-consequences.) 3. Why: This involves an explanation or interpretation of the underlying dynamics linking the variables. Whetten reports, “this rationale constitutes the theoretical glue that welds the model together” and lays out reasons for the positive or negative relationships proposed. 4. Who, Where, When: These elements delineate the “boundary conditions”—time and context—for findings. They project under what conditions proposed relationships hold true and thus the limits and generalizability of a theory.8 Not every good and useful theory has all four elements. Descriptive research focuses on the “what”. Here you might classify organizations, decisions, strategies, or leadership styles using concepts that compare similarities and differences between them. Theorizing becomes richer when you begin to describe “how” specific concepts connect to other concepts of interest. Sutton and Staw argue that the “why” question is central to a good and complete theory.9 That said, the development of good theory depends on the specification of relationships among concepts and variables. Although not exhaustive, four broad types of conceptual or logic models can be used to bridge theory and the phenomenon/problem you are studying. Typologies organize phenomena and concepts in terms of similarities and differences. Weber distinguished among traditional, charismatic, and rational authority while Porter’s 2×2 model characterized different types of competitive strategy based on (a) competitive scope and (b) type of advantage (low cost versus differentiation). Some argue that typologies are classification schemes (of what exists) without theoretical foundation (how and why). Yet a case can be made that theory is embedded in grouping concepts into different categories and in understanding and predicting behavioral implications.10 In their work on business strategies, Miles and Snow began with a grounded typology—prospector, defender, analyzer, and reactor strategies—based on the way organizations addressed entrepreneurial, engineering, and administrative problems. They then theorized how and why these types might succeed or struggle under different environmental (and market) conditions.11 Variance models typically provide an explanation of phenomena and concepts ordered into cause → effect relationships.12 Hypotheses take the form of if X, then Y. This approach also leaves room for multiple causes—sometimes expressed mathematically [Y=f(x1, x2, x3…)]— and the addition of mediating or moderating variables. Wayne Cascio’s research finds, for

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example, that the link between employee job satisfaction and turnover is moderated by the unemployment rate.13 Adding a mediator or moderator variable to an existing theory is an important contribution because it helps both scholars and managers understand the conditions under which a relationship will hold. Process models represent phenomena and concepts in a dynamic view through sequences of events, activities, and choices. Rather than specify hypotheses, process theorists typically conceptualize and theorize how a sequence of events or activities unfolds. Weick famously called for turning our attention away from organization (a noun) to organizing (a verb).14 What happens when you switch focus from the “boxes” in variance models to the “arrows” between the boxes? Innovation studies explore the antecedents, sequences, and processes of innovating. (The same applies when you study communication as communicating, strategy as strategizing, and so on.) In so doing, researchers incorporate time into studies and model processes and flows as illustrated in Exhibit 5.4.

Exhibit 5.4

Process models incorporate time

Hernes has documented the use of process models in organizational studies about groups, decision making, strategy, networks, and change—wherever phenomena are best understood with a “relational” view. Van de Ven and Poole remind us, however, that causality in process theories is not “well behaved” because of feedback and feedforward loops (circular causality) and other systemic dynamics.15 Systems models represent multiple variables (e.g., concepts) in relation to one another and describe how phenomena emerge through their dynamic interactions over time. Systems theorists focus on patterns, fields, or waves of interaction and map them in the context of part–part and part–whole relationships. Organizational culture is one example of an emergent phenomenon. There are many potential interacting sources and no clear linear relationships. Such relationships lead to the emergence of system level qualities as well as dynamics that are non-deterministic and not reducible to a particular set of variables. Causal inferences are tricky here because complex system interactions (what some refer to as “aggregations” or “entanglements”) can be marked by mutual (↔) or reciprocal ( ) causality and emergence in relationships that “evolve and change together in such a way … as to make the distinction between cause and effect meaningless.”16 Chandler, as an example, proposed that the multi-division organization form co-evolved with the development of mass transit and communication technology. Eisenhardt and Brown, in turn, modeled the product

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decisions they observed in fast-paced businesses as nonlinear transitions between order and chaos (at “the edge of chaos”). Peter Senge, building on the pioneering work of his mentor Jay Forrester, enhanced the “systems thinking” of practitioners and showed how different system archetypes (e.g., shifting the burden, tragedy of the commons, etc.) can be used to model and manage complex systemic behavioral patterns. Other ways of modeling the link between theory and phenomena include the specific frames and specialized language of paradox and dialectics, narrative and discourse, and so on. There are two key advantages to modeling relationships conceptually, graphically, or mathematically: 1. Models help you think through the linkage between theory and phenomena in sweet spot research. They can guide you to formulate hypotheses to be studied (deduction), to make sense of and conceptualize patterns observed (induction), or to pragmatically puzzle out what is going on and theorize why (abduction)—or all of the above. 2. Models help you to communicate by simplifying and structuring your research logic and findings. They also translate into frameworks and tools that practitioners can use to diagnose organization conditions and problems, plan and take actions, and evaluate results. Take a practical problem that you would like to study. As a Sweet Spot Researcher: • How would you notice and explore this problem? • What literature would you review? • What type of theory (typology, variance, process, systems) would you apply to it?

Theorizing from Practice Let’s look at an example of building theory from practice. Mirvis, working with the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, met many practitioners who reported that their firms were moving from traditional philanthropy to stakeholder management and even sustainability. Others, however, said that their companies were still focused on legal compliance and that their CEOs thought CSR was “nice” but not necessary for running the business. Accordingly, the researchers shifted from “noticing” the phenomenon to “exploring” it. They systematically queried members of the Center and had over 100 of them complete a survey about their firm’s practices. The result of this investigation was a “stage” model based on a company’s operative citizenship concept and associated practices ranging from an elementary to an integrated approach to an advanced approach. Across the stages, the researchers observed that a company’s engagement with societal issues was progressively more open and its dealings with stakeholders more interactive. How companies think about their responsibilities becomes more complex, and the organizational structures and systems used to manage social responsibilities are more sophisticated and aligned with the business (Exhibit 5.5a). To explain how companies moved through the stages, the researchers perused the literature about “development” and adapted Greiner’s classic logic. Movement between stages is “triggered” by tensions between current practices and the problems they produce that demand a new response from a firm. 17 For instance, mere compliance with legal and industry standards

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can create a crisis of credibility when companies prove to be unable or unwilling to respond to new demands and heightened expectations to do more than regulations or norms require. This stimulates deeper engagement with society. Further along, innovation produces another developmental challenge. As new ideas take hold and programs proliferate, they tend to be “siloed” and fragmented across a company. This fragmentation creates a crisis of coherence in a company and companies take steps to integrate citizenship throughout the organization more fully (Exhibit 5.5b). Exhibit 5.5a

Stages of corporate citizenship

 

Stage 0: Compliant

Stage 1: Engaged

Stage 2: Innovative

Stage 3: Integrated

Stage 4: Transforming

Citizenship Concept

Jobs, Profits & Taxes

Philanthropy, Environmental Protection

Responsible to Stakeholders

Sustainability or Triple Bottom Line

Change the Game

Strategic Intent

Legal Compliance

Reputation

Business Case

Value Proposition

Market Creation or Social Change

Leadership

Lip Service, Out of Touch

Supporter, In the Loop

Steward, On Top of It

Champion, In Front of It

Visionary, Ahead of the Pack

Structure

Marginal: Staff Driven

Functional Ownership

Cross-functional Coordination

Organizational Alignment

Mainstream: Business Driven

Issues Management

Defensive

Reactive, Policies

Responsive, Programs

Pro-Active, Systems

Defining

Stakeholder Relationships

Unilateral

Interactive

Mutual Influence

Partnership

MultiOrganizational Alliances

Transparency

Flank Protection

Public Relations

Public Reporting

Assurance

 

Exhibit 5.5b

Developmental drivers of corporate citizenship

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This example shows researchers moving from noticing and exploring phenomena to create a categorization of practice to then perusing the literature to theorize how developmental processes might activate movement across the stages of corporate citizenship. Notice, too, how access to a community of practice (corporate members of the Center) enabled the researchers to build out their thinking with a large and interested set of practitioners who could later use the stages model to diagnose the current state of practice in their companies and inform action plans to move it forward.

A CLOSER LOOK AT SWEET SPOT THEORIZING Theorizing involves “disciplined imagination” and not simply problem solving; simultaneous parallel processing rather than linear thinking.18 Yes, there is a problem to be solved. However, even in traditional research, a concentrated search for a solution can prematurely narrow possible explanations and options at the expense of “out-of-the-box” thinking and creative solutions. And, yes, theorizing involves logically arranging concepts and their relationships, but in the sweet spot you also have to attend to how processes of social construction contribute to the way problems and practices take shape in the behavioral world.19 Theorizing requires sense making. There are three interrelated activities in theorizing that need close attention: (1) problem formulation; (2) thought trials; and, especially in sweet spot research, (3) making the theory–practice connection.

Problem Formulation Problems (situations, challenges, phenomena, practices) can present themselves as questions, paradoxes, or puzzles, may feature patterns of regularity or seeming anomalies, and usually have antecedents and consequences. In the approach we take, you work with what you see and what you know to make sense of these phenomena. As you engage with what you are studying, read relevant literature, think, intuit, and talk about what you see compared against what is known, several factors may “trigger” a need for further inquiry and theorizing.

Anomalies Theorizing can be triggered by an anomaly, something that comes up in your reading or your network interactions where the phenomenon of interest doesn’t “fit” with what is standard, normal, or expected. Michael Porter has studied industry attractiveness and competitive strategy for decades, but it was a conversation with a colleague about her awful experience in the health care system that bothered him personally and professionally. Something was wrong. He told us, “How is it that various providers in a system were competing like hell but they were not becoming more efficient? An intensely competitive situation producing worse outcomes does not fit with traditional economic models.” Thinking about this anomaly led him to begin a stream of research on the health care industry.

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Paradoxes Bumping into a paradox—a situation containing apparently contradictory features or characteristics but which is nonetheless true—can trigger theorizing. Ed Schein described to us how paradoxes feature when individuals see the world from two competing frames of reference. As he described it, he was initially shocked to find that the pre- and post-surveys from participants in an intense week-long program on personal growth and group dynamics reported significant declines in their self-insight. What could account for this? Follow-up interviews revealed that participants had developed completely new definitions of “self-insight” during the week and applied this new frame of reference to themselves in the post-survey. Argyris later theorized several other “behavioral” paradoxes in organization life (e.g., consistent inconsistency; skilled incompetence) and framed them theoretically in the form of defensive routines.20

Problematizing A favored approach to theorizing by postmodern and critical management researchers involves unearthing and challenging assumptions behind an established truth, throwing doubt on conventional understandings, or calling into question a solution because it might produce new problems. In “going to the root” of an issue, problematizing can reveal that something may be missing or wrong (in theory and practice) that needs to be addressed. Sandra Waddock problematized mergers and acquisitions by looking at them through the eyes of different stakeholders, especially those who have less power or are disadvantaged by the practice, including lower-level employees, community groups, and even the natural environment.21 This kind of theorizing not only opens up fresh thinking, it can also show how defining a problem in another way can lead to a different reading of what is known and who is served by prevailing knowledge.

Practice perspective The most direct trigger for thought trials (the next step in theorizing) in sweet spot research is to take a practice perspective. How do practicing managers enact, understand, and explain the phenomena you are interested in studying? Observing practice closely can reveal surprising, paradoxical, or problematic details that invite new theorizing. March, Cohen, and Olsen’s “garbage can” theory of organization decision making, for instance, was cooked up when they were together at the University of California, Irvine and witnessed a chaotic search to hire a new dean. With an initial focus on the rationality of decision makers, they instead noticed how the presence/absence of search committee members at meetings, time constraints, the emergence of new issues and participants, and misconstrued head nods and body language showed “what people actually do” when they make collective decisions. This stimulated theorizing that decision making was like a garbage can where three streams of garbage combined and factored into the process: (1) problems looking for solutions; (2) solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer; and (3) decision makers looking for work.22 Needless to say, this theorizing “relaxed” (as Olsen put it) the rational decision making model.

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Thought Trials Here, scholars (sometimes with practitioners!) iteratively explore what, how, and why questions to model relationships, develop theory, and make sense of the phenomena and problems they encounter. The idea is to create a large and diverse pool of possible explanations of the phenomena and to prototype several interim representations of theory in the form of a map, metaphor, model, or framework. This can involve orienting questions, such as “how come” or “so what”, or successive if–then conjectures.

Thought-trial tools Creativity in the thought trial process can be facilitated by applying different tools: z Thinking-and-analysis tools, such as a fishbone or root-cause analysis, the five why’s, or framing a situation in the form of polarities or a paradox, are ways to acquire new insights into problem causes and complexities. z Perspective-changing tools, such as adopting different stakeholder mind-sets, shifting levels of analysis, or reframing via metaphors, all enable you to look at a phenomenon or problem from multiple perspectives and gain a more complete view of it. z Emotive tools, including introspection, empathizing with others, and enacting a situation through a role-play or simulation, can give you a better “feel” for phenomena and their meaning for practitioners. z Pictorial tools, such as path diagrams, mind-maps, or 2×2 tables using different dimensions, are handy for looking at components and relationships in a system, how they might be configured in different ways, and whether or not they can be categorized in some fashion. Drawing on a “whiteboard” is ideal for brainstorming and visually representing your concepts and thinking (sticky notes work too). z Static to dynamic tools, like scenarios, causal loop diagrams, and storytelling, are ideal for process and systems thinking and for refining your sense making. These tools help open your mind, prevent premature “lock in”, and ensure that the variety of your thinking matches the complexity of the problem at hand. Remember the implication of Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is usually the best—but heed Einstein’s amendment: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Thought trials in unfamiliar worlds How do you think through and model a phenomenon or problem that is unique or new to you and where existing theories might muddle or obfuscate what is going on? Watch Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, and you have a pretty good idea of how bringing existing or traditional theories to a new area can create ethical problems and flat out erroneous conclusions. This is a central problem for researchers who study practices in, for instance, a “foreign” or traditional as opposed to modern culture. You risk misunderstanding and mistakenly theorizing the situation.23 Native American Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall points the way to seeing the world from two different lenses. He started a movement for Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed Seeing, which

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refers to viewing from one eye the strengths of indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing, and from the other eye the strengths of Western knowledge and ways of knowing ... and “learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all.”24 This same approach applies to sweet spot theorizing and field research: it combines “emic” (the perspective of insiders within a culture) with “etic” knowledge (viewpoints and theories from outside the culture).25 In their call for new theorizing in the Africa Journal of Management, Nkomo, Zoogah, and Acquaah point out that the traditional and rural character of Africa’s informal economy and market activity requires taking account of context: (1) a history of colonialism and dependence; (2) tribal heritage and the brain drain; and (3) a complex mix of political, social, and economic factors impinging on practice.26 They recommend on-the-ground exploration that incorporates local practice theory, grounded theorizing that is not bound by existing concepts and literature, and collaborative insider/outsider research that generates knowledge that is context-specific.

Connecting Theory to Practice In the introductory chapters, we presented engaged scholarship along a continuum. At one end of the continuum is research that produces knowledge about practice. The literature is replete with foundational theories of human and organizational behavior, strategy, and the behavior of the firm in different operating environments. When the practice implications are drawn out, these theories tell practitioners what they should know about leadership, employee relations, staffing, career development, job design, teamwork, compensation, organization structure, strategic choices, and so forth. At the other end of the continuum is research that produces knowledge for practice. Here, you find theorizing about methods, procedures, and processes used in doing things, such as diagnosis, planning, design, problem solving, continuous improvement, or managing change. These theories are often built out in interaction with practitioners. The findings are keyed to usability by practitioners and highlight how to put theories about practice into action. Exhibit 5.6 illustrates characteristics of these two different types of theory. Exhibit 5.6 Two types of theory–practice connections Theory about Practice

Theory for Practice

Build Theory from Practice (Abstraction)

Build Theory in Practice (Interaction)

Useful Knowledge

Usable Knowledge

Informative to Practice

Actionable in Practice

What to Do

How to Do it

Theorizing about practice Our interviewee Bob Sutton studies the “theory–practice” gap and gives research-based advice on crossing it. From one angle, he “connects mountains of peer reviewed literature to practice.” From another angle, he conceptualizes practice by “reverse engineering, finding a frame,

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and locating the ‘on ramps’ that activate [behavior]” (he is in an Engineering School after all). Yet Sutton acknowledges that while he provides ideas and evidence-based prescriptions for managers, he doesn’t get involved in implementing them or really know much about it. “I am like a sex therapist who is abstinent.” Organizational theorists have also taken a practice turn. Bourdieu set one frame for practice theory in defining a practice as a set of repeatable actions informed by the knowledge shared among those situated in a field. 27 In organizations, fields of “bundled practices” can be found in the boardroom, shop floors, and sales offices; they involve communication, decision making, and managing. Martha Feldman has theorized routines as “flows of connected action, ideas, and outcomes” that give people a tacit understanding of how their practice field operates and what to do. Her studies find that routines, presumably codified to be stable and constant, are instead open to adjustments as people perform and improvise which, in time, influences their rules.28 This is a great example of theorizing from practice, and provides “food for thought” for practitioners about how organizations adapt. Nevertheless, it leaves them few clues as to how to make their organizations more adaptable.

Theorizing for practice Many who operate in this space engage with practitioners in framing a problem, thinking through its components in both theoretical and practical terms, and putting the ideas that emerge into practice. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön developed their theories in interaction with practitioners. They joined forces in clinical studies with practitioners to reveal differences between “espoused theory” versus “theory in use”, which in turn stimulated their theorizing on single- and double-loop learning.29 The results of this theorizing have been translated into action strategies and practices (e.g., balancing advocacy and inquiry, ladder of inference, generative dialogue, after action reviews) used in personal coaching, team development, and interventions to promote organization learning. We saw earlier how a model of corporate citizenship stages emerged from theorizing about practice. Let’s take a different example to see how theory is built in practice.

Example: theorizing agility in practice When Worley was at the NEOMA Business School, a French grande école, a panel discussion on leadership, change, and agility with the Regional Director of Enedis, the French electric utility, resulted in an opportunity. The regional director told him, I listened to what you said about change and agility. I want you to come to our organization and help us think about this subject. We face any number of challenges, not the least of which are digitalization and deregulation in an industry and company that hasn’t had to change for decades. Worley assembled a multi-faceted team comprised of researchers from different cultures (American and French) and disciplinary backgrounds (organization design and development, human resource management, labor relations, strategy-as-practice, innovation, customer service, and leadership). As their action research process began, the team engaged the phe-

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nomena and the literature simultaneously. The key digital disruption at Enedis was the implementation of an integrated smart metering system called “Linky”. It would not only create a national “smart grid”, it would radically change the way technicians worked in the field and the organization’s design. Mindful of hierarchy, traditions, and cultural cynicism about change (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose), Enedis HQ suggested that the region “try some experiments”—which launched early field research. Although the research team was familiar with agility research, there weren’t many studies on how to make a bureaucracy more agile! But research by Paul Adler and colleagues on coercive versus enabling bureaucracies sparked some thought-trials.30 Adler’s research suggested that work process changes in bureaucracies were more apt to be accepted when they built on workers’ expertise and put authority in the hands of the front-line (with clear rules) rather than the hierarchy. This stimulated the researchers to reconceptualize how models of agility might be applied to a slow, heretofore inflexible utility—a new theory-to-practice application. With regional managers, the research team framed the research and practical problem as a paradox: could Enedis be both bureaucratic and agile? This question drove collective theorizing. One set of thought trials asked, “How might we use the strengths of the bureaucratic form—clear top down goals, emphasis on expertise—to make the system faster or better?” A second set of thought trials were guided by the practitioner’s points of view: executives acknowledged the need for change but were adamant that they couldn’t think about a large transformation project. HQ would never support it and the organization lacked the capabilities. On the contrary, HQ was insisting that the region lower costs, keep safety high, and achieve performance targets. On top of that, the labor unions were very sensitive to the likely impact of technology on jobs. What emerged from the conversations were three “experiments” (not a full makeover of the utility) where researchers, managers, and staff would conduct action learning: 1. A “purpose and values” project would leverage top-down strengths to clarify purpose and provide guardrails for empowerment; 2. A “transversality” project would help the organization increase the effectiveness of cross-functional and cross-unit coordination required to implement Linky and operate an agile organization; 3. An “agency of the future” project would address uncertainty about the future by envisioning the future organization and building some change management capability. In this instance, too, we can see the advantages of tapping into knowledge networks. Worley was connected to the Regional Director of Enedis through a panel discussion at his French business school. Academics and consultants staffed the multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary research team, and the results of the study are being disseminated to academics and practitioners in publications, presentations, and blogs in both English and French.

THEORIZING AND PRACTICAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS Research questions punctuate the framing and sourcing process. They identify what you will investigate and more or less determine what kind of research you will do. Sweet spot research

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questions often differ from those in traditional theory-driven research where questions are typically sourced and framed in an existing body of knowledge and the variables and their relationships clearly specified. Here the focus of inquiry is real-world phenomena and your theoretical frame will shift in the process of exploring phenomena, reviewing literature, and theorizing as you go along. This means that sweet spot research questions typically evolve over the course of a study—orienting you initially and becoming more focused and formal through field work. The process of linking theory to phenomena and formulating research questions in motion is uncertain and can send you on a journey filled with roundabouts and blind alleys. The thinking required is non-linear, recursive, time consuming, and alternately frustrating and satisfying. Doing it well means investing “sweat equity” and exercising patience. Give yourself time to generate insights—make napkin notes of your ideas, put together an “investigation board” like detectives do, talk things over with colleagues, and talk with yourself. It also helps to “strategically disengage”—particularly when you get stuck or your wheels are spinning. Try galumphing, working on a different project or problem, which can give your wheels some traction and may provide insights into the original problem.31 Your research question ideally represents a novel combination of knowledge from practice and theory. It should be interesting to you and the stakeholders in your networks; it should be feasible to investigate in terms of time, financial resources, and access to the right kinds of data; and it should be important in the sense that research findings can contribute in meaningful ways to theory and practice. But sourcing your work in practice does not mean that theorizing and the theory you choose to work with is a secondary consideration. On the contrary, your choice and use of theory will be judged on several traditional scientific criteria as well as its believability and beauty. Sweet spot research adds additional criteria—its relevance to practice in terms of clarity, applicability, and usability (see Exhibit 5.7). Exhibit 5.7 Characteristics of good theory and its application for practice A GOOD THEORY IS…

APPLICABLE TO PRACTICE IF…

Parsimonious, Efficient, Elegant

Clear, Digestible, Informative

…explains a given phenomenon in the simplest way possible with the fewest variables and assumptions.

…clarifies a situation or problem; enhances understanding; cuts through the clutter and provides focus.

Logical and Internally Consistent

Specifiable, Translatable, Actionable

…logically models relationships among concepts; predicts future behavior; no assumptions violated in explanation or prediction.

…concepts can be translated to phenomena or practices; links to outcomes of interest; has action implications for practice.

Generalizable

Applicable

…identifies range of situations (broader is better) and contingencies under which theory applies.

…defines and delimits areas of application; helps to customize action and tailor it to circumstances.

Verifiable

Testable in Practice

…can be operationalized (observed and/or measured); tested in empirical research; confirmed or falsified.

…practices and their impact can be observed (empirically or interpretively) and judged effective or not.

Original, Revelatory

Innovative, Motivating

…provides a new, unique or different perspective versus prevailing theories.

…helps practitioners think “out of the box” and approach problems in creative and innovative ways.

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Collaborative Theorizing Theorizing need not be a solo act. Many practical problems can benefit from the application of concepts and frames from multiple disciplines. As described in Chapter 3, knowledge generation in the sweet spot often involves collaboration with academics from different disciplines and/or with practitioners who themselves may come from different organizations, functions, and frames of reference. Consider some of the challenges posed by different collaborative configurations and how to address them.

Theorizing with academic colleagues Joining with a co-theorist from another discipline is tricky and can yield what some characterize as a “Tower of Babel” or “semantic swamp” when it comes to talking and thinking together. Barriers to a co-mingling of academic minds include: z Each discipline has its own preferred ontology and epistemology; z Each discipline has its favored theoretical perspectives and research methods; z Different disciplines frame research problems at a meso-, macro-, or micro-level of analysis. One way to reconcile these differences is through multidisciplinary research where you and a colleague bring your own distinct perspectives to the phenomena you are studying. There are, for example, a slew of studies that look at the same organization problem through each of the Burrell and Morgan lenses and compare and contrast findings from, say, a functionalist versus radical structuralist perspective. Drawing from competing perspectives, we have learned that resistance to change can be dysfunctional and something to overcome or, seen another way, as functional and suggestive of ways to improve a change process.32 In true interdisciplinary research, by contrast, the aim is to meld different perspectives into an integrative or overarching theory. Many multi-level theories in organization studies model, for example, how emotional intelligence interacts at the level of the individual and organization or how organizational processes operate across intra- and inter-firm boundaries. How do you co-theorize with a colleague from another discipline? Academic collaborators recommend dialectical inquiry, where you examine and interrogate competing perspectives, and metatriangulation, where you look at phenomena, review the literature, and frame research questions from different theoretical perspectives.33

Theorizing with practitioners Scholars who have successfully co-created knowledge with practitioners repeatedly emphasize the importance of shared “dialogue”.34 Mohrman and Shani find that at the start of a collaborative research project the gap in mutual understanding between academics and practitioners is wide but, as time goes on, the gap decreases.35 One factor that speeds things along is to become bilingual: swap stories with practitioners, look for mutually resonant metaphors, and iteratively work from examples to concepts and from concepts to examples to build a mutually conversant vocabulary and shared understanding.

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We illustrated in the study by Sharma and Bansal how researchers and practitioners at the Network for Business Sustainability learned to think together better as they shifted from “talking at” to “talking with” one another. But while talking and thinking together are integral to co-theorizing, it needs to be augmented by actually working together to unpack a situation, practice, or problem. This includes presentational forms of expression, such as storytelling, illustrations, and mind maps, to tap into and represent people’s tacit knowledge of themselves and their world. Propositional knowledge can, in turn, make this more explicit in the form of abductions and theories about the link between problems and possible solutions. Taken together these two kinds of knowledge give inquirers from different perspectives a shared and fuller understanding of the situation at hand.36 Other methods for combining the practical and theoretical and for harmonizing different voices and views can be found in the literature on how to co-theorize in the back-and-forth of collaborative research.37

Co-theorizing in action Mohrman undertook collaborative research with The Cleveland Clinic to build the ability to improve its health care delivery process and reduce its environmental footprint continuously. In the context of technological advances, the leaders in this system recognized the increasing demand for wellness services and the industry’s poor ecological track record. Just throwing resources at a series of narrow, internal improvement projects was not going to improve health, lower cost increases, and contribute to sustainability. The Cleveland Clinic had initiated a wide range of activities where medical professionals and staff exchanged information and knowledge, and collaborated with one another in and across their units, with various interests and organizations in the community, and the health care industry. Although the managers were not using the language of complexity theory or network methodology, Mohrman and her practitioner collaborator, Christina Vernon, applied network concepts and visualizations (see Exhibit 5.8 for an example) to better conceptualize the connections and dynamics entailed in working across the organization and with the broader eco-system to bring about change.

Exhibit 5.8

Network model of organization

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They then began to theorize how specific change networks produce “small changes” that would, in turn, reverberate and produce system-wide changes in health care delivery, lower costs, support public health and the local community, and protect the environment. Change emerged from within, as networks self-organized to carry out change efforts with others in the organization, the community, the industry, and more broadly. This is a case where a researcher brought theoretical knowledge into a situation and co-theorized with practitioners. They studied and learned from the networks that were naturally emerging to deal with the performance challenges the organization was facing. As a result of the research, the organization became more intentional in the application and design of such networks. The researchers went on to examine other organizations to advance understanding of network-based approaches to developing continuous change capability and to investigate the design implications for the operating model of the organization.38

POINTS TO PONDER In this chapter, we looked at how sweet spot researchers source and frame their work and how to generate and draw on theory to investigate topics of interest to you and organizations. Remember Lewin’s famous dictum, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory!” How you theorize depends on your personal research philosophy, your interests, aptitudes, and skills, and your career and life circumstances. Sweet spot research calls for sourcing and framing research in ways that may seem complex and ambiguous, that you are not trained for or good at, or that could be suicidal for getting a dissertation done or advancing in your career. Markides argues that doing relevant research requires “ambidextrous mind-sets and attitudes”. He cautions early career academics to build the requisite perspective and know-how via their teaching and in dialogue with practitioners and to wait until they are tenured to move fully into this kind of engaged scholarship.39 Another option, followed by many of our interviewees, is to follow your interests and passions from the get-go and draw on a knowledge network to fill in any gaps. As a practical theorist: • How can you get close enough to practice to know and theorize about it? • Who in your knowledge network can help gain access to practice and bring different knowledge and expertise to better study practice-based phenomena and problems?

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NOTES 1.

Peirce, C.S. (1934). How to theorize. In C. Hartshorne et al. (eds), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 413–22; Dubois, A. and Gadde, L.E. (2002). Systematic combining: An abductive approach to case research. Journal of Business Research, 55(7), 553–60; Van Maanen J., Sørensen J.B. and Mitchell T.R. (2007). The interplay between theory and method. Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1145–54.

2.

Prahalad, C.K. (2011). Can rigor and relevance coexist. In Mohrman, S. and Lawler, E. (eds), Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, pp. 137–46.

3.

Sandberg, J. and Tsoukas, H. (2011). Grasping the logic of practice: Theorizing through practical rationality. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 338–60.

4.

Kates, A. and Galbraith, J.R. (2010). Designing your Organization: Using the STAR Model to Solve 5 Critical Design Challenges. John Wiley & Sons.

5. Edmondson, A. (2011). Crossing boundaries to investigate problems in the field: An approach to useful research. In Mohrman, S. and Lawler, E. (eds), Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, p. 50. 6. Sharma, G. and Bansal, P. (2020). Partnering up: Including managers as research partners in systematic reviews. Organizational Research Methods, 1094428120965706. 7. Kerlinger, F.N. (1964). Foundations of Behavioral Research. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, p. 11. 8.

Whetten, D.A. (1989). What constitutes a theoretical contribution? Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 490–495.

9.

Sutton, R.I. and Staw, B.M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, 371–84.

10. Doty, D.H. and Glick, W.H. (1994). Typologies as a unique form of theory building: Toward improved understanding and modeling. Academy of Management Review, 19(2), 230–51. 11. Miles, R.E., Snow, C.C., Meyer, A.D. and Coleman Jr, H.J. (1978). Organizational strategy, structure, and process. Academy of Management Review, 3(3), 546–62. 12. Mohr contends that variance models reflect efficient or “push-type” causality (since X causes Y to occur) while process models reflect “pull-type” causality where Y invariably implies X, but the reverse is not true (X does not necessarily cause Y). Mohr, L.B. (1982). Explaining Organizational Behavior. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 13. McEvoy, G.M. and Cascio, W.F. (1985). Strategies for reducing employee turnover: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 70(2), 342. 14. Weick, K.E. (1974). Amendments to organizational theorizing.  Academy of Management Journal,  17(3), 487–502. 15. Hernes, T. (2007).  Understanding Organization as Process: Theory for a Tangled World. Abingdon: Routledge; Hernes, T. (2014).  A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Van de Ven, A.H. and Poole, M.S. (1995). Explaining development and change in organizations.  Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 510–40. 16. Lincoln, Y.S. and Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. 17. Greiner, L.E. (1998). Evolution and revolution as organizations grow. Harvard Business Review, 76(3), 55–64. 18. Weick, K.E. (1989). Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 516–31.

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19. Mirvis, P.H. (1988). On the crafting of a theory. In  Quinn, R.E. and Cameron, K.S. (eds),  Paradox and Transformation: Toward a Theory of Change in Organization and Management. Ballinger, pp. 279–88. 20. Argyris, C. (1988). Crafting a theory of practice: The case of organizational paradoxes.  In  Quinn, R.E. and Cameron, K.S. (eds),  Paradox and Transformation: Toward a Theory of Change in Organization and Management. Ballinger, pp.  255–78; Mirvis, P.H. (1988). On the crafting of a theory.  In  Quinn, R.E. and Cameron, K.S. (eds),  Paradox and Transformation: Toward a Theory of Change in Organization and Management. Ballinger, pp. 279–88. 21. Waddock, S. and Graves, S.B. (2006). The impact of mergers and acquisitions on corporate stakeholder practices. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, (22), 91–109. 22. Cohen, M.D., March, J.G. and Olsen, J.P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25. 23. Tsui, A. (2004). Contributing to global management knowledge: A case for high quality indigenous research. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 21, 491–513. 24. Marshall, A. (2017). Two-eyed seeing—Elder Albert Marshall’s guiding principle for intercultural collaboration. Thinkers Lodge, 28. 25. Evered, R. and Louis, M.R. (1981). Alternative perspectives in the organizational sciences: “Inquiry from the inside” and “inquiry from the outside”. Academy of Management Review, 6(3), 385–95. 26. Nkomo, S.M., Zoogah, D. and Acquaah, M. (2015). Why Africa Journal of Management and why now? Africa Journal of Management, 1(1), 4–26. 27. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 28. Feldman, M.S. and Pentland, B.T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94–118. 29. Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 30. Adler, P.S. and Borys, B. (1996). Two types of bureaucracy: Enabling and coercive. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 61–89; Adler, P.S. (2012). Perspective—the sociological ambivalence of bureaucracy: From Weber via Gouldner to Marx. Organization Science, 23(1), 244–66. 31. Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 32. Gioia, D.A. and Pitre, E. (1990). Multiparadigm perspectives on theory building. Academy of Management Review, 15(4), 584–602; Ford, J.D. and Ford, L.W. (2009). Resistance to change: A reexamination and extension. In Research in Organizational Change and Development. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. 33. Shaw, J.D., Tangirala, S., Vissa, B. and Rodell, J.B. (2018). New ways of seeing: Theory integration across disciplines.  Academy of Management Journal, 61, 1–4; Klein, K.J., Tosi, H. and Cannella Jr, A.A. (1999). Multilevel theory building: Benefits, barriers, and new developments.  Academy of Management Review, 24(2), 248–53; Lewis, M.W. and Grimes, A.I. (1999). Metatriangulation: Building theory from multiple paradigms. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 672–90. 34. Beech, N., MacIntosh, R. and MacLean, D. (2010). Dialogues between academics and practitioners: The role of generative dialogic encounters. Organization Studies, 31, 1341–67; Cunliffe, A.L. and Scaratti, G. (2017). Embedding impact in engaged research: Developing socially useful knowledge through dialogical sensemaking. British Journal of Management, 28, 29–44. 35. Mohrman, S.A. and Shani, A.B. (2008). The multiple voices of collaboration: A critical reflection. In Shani, A.B. (Rami), Mohrman, S.A., Pasmore, W.A., Stymne, B. and Adler, N. (eds), Handbook of Collaborative Management Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 567–82.

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36. Heron, J. and Reason, P. (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 274–94. 37. Schultz, M. and Hatch, M.J. (2005). Building theory from practice.  Strategic Organization,  3(3), 337–48; Nenonen, S., Brodie, R J., Storbacka, K. and Peters, L.D. (2017). Theorizing with managers: How to achieve both academic rigor and practical relevance. European Journal of Marketing, 51(7/8), 1130–52. 38. Mohrman, S.A., Vernon, C.E, and McCracken, A. (2013). Sustainability at the Cleveland clinic: A network-based capability development approach. Building Networks and Partnerships, 3, 65–100. 39. Markides, C. (2007). In search of ambidextrous professors. Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 762–8.

6

Research and practice The previous chapter addressed how to theorize about problems and actions in the practice world. In this chapter we examine how to integrate academic and practitioner interests when doing your research. The orienting question: As I conduct my research, how will my methods and approaches achieve both rigor and relevance? (See Exhibit 6.1.) Different standards apply to judging quantitative versus qualitative research and to research in the positivist versus interpretivist tradition. Say, for instance, you want to study whether employees approve of an organizational policy or practice or to what extent different employee segments like or dislike it. Perhaps you hypothesize that two or more aspects of behavior are related or you have introduced an intervention into an organization and want to gauge its impact. Each of these studies calls for a different type of research Exhibit 6.1 Sweet spot research standards design (e.g., descriptive, comparative, correlational, experimental). To establish its rigor, you will be asked: Is your sample sufficient? Are measures reliable and valid? How significant are the relationships you found? Has the research controlled or accounted for other factors that might influence the findings? You’ll need solid answers to these questions for your research to meet the standards. Alternatively, you may want to study what a policy, practice, or strategy seems to “mean” to those whom you are studying or whether repeated patterns of behavior are episodic or continuous. Here phenomena may not be measured so easily and your job is to qualitatively assess and interpret them. Again, you will be asked: How and how often did you observe this phenomenon? Were you an insider or outsider in this setting? What makes your observations and inferences trustworthy? Did you account for your own subjective “biases” as an observer? You’ll need defensible answers to these questions, too. Research methods classes and texts address these topics and we will not delve into the merits and limits of every possible research design or the different types of reliability and validity here. Our aims instead are to surface how research methods have to be adapted and tailored

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when you do your research in the real world and where you are producing findings that will be judged on their practical as well as scientific merits. In this environment, for example, you may have to sacrifice textbook definitions of research rigor to gain access to certain populations, situations, or events. You may need both quantitative and qualitative data gathering strategies to measure phenomena, represent their relevant context, and speak authoritatively to any implications for practice. Venturing into the sweet spot often means engaging directly with research participants, collaborating with organizational practitioners, and sometimes working alongside researchers from different academic disciplines with their own favored research methods. Taking account of their interests can (and should) influence your research design, observations and measurements, analytic strategies, and how you interpret and communicate research results. They can also help you to generate deeper insights into what is going on and develop useful conclusions about practice. Still, if you don’t attend to research rigor, your findings may be suspect and any conclusions false or misleading. We begin by reviewing the standards of research needed to achieve rigor and relevance and describing how these inform sweet spot research.

STANDARDS IN SWEET SPOT RESEARCH Sweet spot research calls for attention to academic standards of rigor and practitioner desires for practical and relevant knowledge. Meeting these twin demands sometimes calls for compromises. Yet there are also complementarities; both scholars and practitioners favor rigor and relevance in research. Indeed, one study found that when scholars and practitioners rated specific research articles along these two dimensions, they often agreed with one another as to their rigor and relevance!1 Nevertheless, the two groups use different criteria in making their judgments. Scholars operationalize rigor in the traditions of science. Quantitative data should demonstrate reliability and validity; qualitative data scrutinized for its dependability and potential biases; and evidence gathered from different sources or through different methods ideally triangulate to produce a clear and coherent picture of the phenomena under study. Practitioners may have a general sense of these scientific standards but seldom dig into the details when consuming research. Instead, they judge research on its face validity, a subjective estimate of whether methods and findings seem to be trustworthy as well as the credibility of the researcher and the publication. They also compare the research with their own experiences and intuition: to what extent do the findings jibe with their sense of things and, if not, do they provoke interest, curiosity, and deeper consideration? Both groups also want relevant research. For scholars, relevance involves first and foremost contributing to scientific knowledge. Naturally, the biggest kudos goes to researchers who fill a substantial gap in theory, but replicating or extending existing research is also valued. Sweet spot researchers contribute to scholarship by validating a theory and producing evidence for practice or by building theory from an on-the-ground study of practice. For practitioners, relevance is a function of whether the results are applicable and actionable. Managers want to reduce uncertainty and welcome knowledge that is supported by data or case examples when

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it helps them to better understand a situation or problem, make more informed decisions, and/or take more effective action. Even more compelling are research findings that contradict existing beliefs or practices and open up new perspectives in thought and action. The foregoing can leave you with the uneasy realization that the relationship between rigor and relevance can be both conflicting and complementary. Indeed, all of the researchers we interviewed for this volume have experienced this tension and adopted strategies to address it. First, given that it is difficult to maximize rigor and relevance in a single study, they often conduct multiple or parallel studies, using different methods, which can yield research that passes muster with both academics and practitioners. Second, sweet spot researchers adapt their methods to the situations they encounter. For instance, research in the field often means sacrificing a random assignment of participants to experimental and control conditions and may even preclude the use of a control group. As we shall see here, alternatives include the study of “natural” experiments in organizations or the use of “adaptive experiments” where you compare the impact of changes in multiple groups. Similarly, structured questionnaires which yield standardized data across a population may have to be complemented by unstructured interviews or observations that allow you to delve into the history, context, and rationale behind survey responses. Finally, remember you have a knowledge network to draw on. Co-researchers can bring a different eye and different methods to your studies. Practitioners can help you design research that meets joint interests and is doable in their organizations. Moreover, various research partners and sponsors can help you to gain access to research sites or data and to communicate intelligibly to a non-academic audience (subjects covered in Chapters 7 and 8).

RESEARCH METHODS: THE BASICS Methodologists and their texts use many and often different terms when they talk about research designs, measurement, and analysis. To simplify matters, we reference four different (but often related) aspects of research methods in this chapter: 1. Research design: comprises a chosen type of research (e.g., descriptive, explanatory, action research) with its associated ontological and epistemological assumptions; 2. Measurement methods: encompasses sampling procedures, data collection processes and instruments, and the raw data itself; 3. Analysis: how the data is organized, manipulated, modeled, and represented as findings; 4. Interpretation: how the findings are understood, evaluated, and translated into implications for theory and practice. Naturally your choice of research methods hinges on your research question, the current state of theorizing and practical understandings of the phenomena you wish to study, your own personal proclivities, and what you hope to contribute to theory and practice. The four elements listed above work together in a pattern matching process to yield conclusions and interpretations. Donald Campbell introduced the idea of “pattern matching” when he argued for a “holistic” method for analyzing data within their context.2 As sweet spot researchers study phenomena

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from the complex world of practice, it provides an ideal way for framing the aims of research work. The challenge for researchers, Campbell argued, is to construct two distinct patterns: z Conceptual Pattern. To form this pattern, researchers often take an existing theory, combine it with ideas and hunches, and develop a model, framework, or map of their phenomenon of interest (as described in Chapter 5). z Empirical Pattern. The idea here is to take data, qualitative or quantitative or both, organize and analyze it to produce an empirical representation of your phenomenon—as you observed and measured it. The key question: Do the patterns match? This logic applies to research that starts with theory or starts with observation and has been used in validating quantitative research and multi-method case study research.3 Sweet spot research adds a third pattern to attend to in your research: the specific connection of your research to practice (see Exhibit 6.2). z Practice Pattern. Attention here turns to how your concepts and methods actually track the world of practice. Do your concepts have face validity to practitioners? Are your methods clear and convincing to practitioners? Do they see how your findings might be applied?

Exhibit 6.2

Pattern matching in sweet spot research

In Chapter 5 we described the importance of incorporating “practical rationality” or the logic of practice into your theorizing. The same considerations apply to your empirical work. In constructing a survey, the words and items must be understandable by and accurately capture the thoughts and doings of the people you are studying. This is sometimes referred to as “context validity”. Do your concepts have referents to what is actually said or done in organizations? When it is evident from your findings what practitioners should know or do, the study has “operational validity”. Connecting your concepts and empirical work to the practice pattern is vital in research sourced in practice and focused on producing results relevant to practice.

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THE PATTERN MATCHING PROCESS A clear first issue to address in considering research methods is the link between your theorizing and research. Are you: (1) working from theory and testing it in the field (or laboratory) or (2) starting with phenomena and building theory from your results? There can be elements of both in your studies, of course.

Empirical Theory Testing Methods The classic hypothetico-deductive model has you working with theory to formulate hypotheses that will be tested through observations, measures, and quantitative analyses. Graduate students often use this approach in their dissertations and many continue to use it throughout their academic careers. This model can be connected to the practice world by using concepts that are, at minimum, informed by what you have noticed and investigated in the practice world. The conceptual pattern, in turn, represents attitudes, experiences, or actions in individual or organization behavior and the hypotheses link logically to observable sequences of action or practice therein. On the empirical side, what you measure manifests these phenomena. This can involve direct data collection by surveys, interviews, or focus groups, by observation, or by accessing documents, performance records, and databases. You can also collect data from sensors and smart tracking devices, website clicks, text messages and tweets, and on-line purchases. In turn, hypothesized relationships are analyzed via standard statistical tests or by making comparisons between experimental and control groups or across different populations. In sweet spot research, these empirical tests apply to data from the world of practice and the results are interpreted with attention to the implications for practice. Worley’s conception of agility (with Ed Lawler) began when they noticed that select companies were successful at continuously adapting to fast-paced changes. Digging into the phenomena, they found that adaptability seemed to hinge on disparate aspects of flexibility and nimbleness that they conceptualized as “agility factors”. What emerged was a dynamic systems model where strategizing, perceiving, testing, and implementing routines → timely and effective changes in differentiated capabilities → sustained performance. They populated these general concepts with specific change and design factors predictive of sustained performance in turbulent situations. The result is a conceptual pattern map that: (1) highlights “action points” (or levers) for practitioners and (2) is generalizable across a broad base of organizations. Exhibit 6.3 illustrates a sample agility profile that provides an organization with knowledge of the framework and its current positioning on the agility factors. Note here how the concepts in this model clearly connect to practice—they are expressed in the language of practice and represent phenomena easily recognized by practitioners. On the empirical side, the authors developed and validated a survey instrument measuring a company’s agility profile.4 Several scholars have tested this model (or aspects of it) using data from this survey. A study in a hospital, for instance, used regression analyses and found that ratings of agility factors were predictive of both individual and work unit performance. Another study in IT and financial service companies showed how agility factors worked through resilience

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Exhibit 6.3

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Sample agility profile

(a value-creating capability) to predict clarity and confidence in strategy. A third, in 126 business units, found agility factors associated variously with visionary leadership, employee empowerment, and organizational learning.5 Empirical theory testing methods continue to evolve. Many researchers now use Bayesian methods to analyze data collected over multiple waves. Unlike traditional “frequentist” methods, Bayesian methods work with existing probabilities and beliefs (“priors”) about phenomena, events, or activities and add intelligence, new information, or events to come up with new expectations or probabilities (“posteriors”). Gibson and her colleagues used these methods to study how the introduction of communities of practice (CoPs) affected the number of procedure changes at multiple refineries. They showed how the frequency of procedure changes declined after CoP introduction, which suggested that the sharing and application of expert knowledge allowed the organization to make fewer, more intelligent, and more effective changes.6

Empirical Theory Building Methods Suppose you are studying phenomena that have not been fully theorized or situations that represent exceptions or anomalies that need to be understood. Here you start with the close and careful study of practice and make detailed notes on your in situ observations and peruse documents, records, letters, photos, videos, and other artifacts from the research site. Theory builders often conduct conversations and use semi-structured interviews to gain a better understanding of what is going on. Some researchers attend and/or participate in key meetings, events, and rituals to gain “first hand” insights. All of this creates an empirical pattern grounded in practice. Many theory builders follow the “hermeneutic circle” by focusing first on the “parts” (data from observations, interviews, field notes) to build an interpretive picture of the “whole”

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which further contextualizes examination of the parts. The aim, over repeated cycles, is to develop a more complete conceptual representation of phenomena. Others use a dialogic approach where they make sense of data and build conceptual understanding together with research participants. The empirical pattern and your own sense making about the originating phenomena in practice form the conceptual pattern that emerges. Take, as an example, this research question: How do you interpret and make sense of what is going on in twenty-first-century organizations? Scholars have drawn from traditional organization theory to examine structural features like minimal hierarchy and loose boundaries, processes of agility and adaptability, and how organizations “do things with words”. Mary Jo Hatch envisioned an intriguing image of these phenomena by seeing organizations as jazz bands.7 In her research, the measurement methods involved listening to, observing, and taking detailed notes on how members of jazz bands improvised. She also interviewed various musicians. Observational codes on how musicians took turns, imitated, experimented, and “played the head” revealed (inductively) the operating dynamics in jazz bands. She then applied (abductively) the emergent concepts of spontaneity and intuition to interpret four different ways the jazz musicians operate in the “empty spaces” in their performances (Exhibit 6.4). This type of research involves “exploratory” pattern matching where data can yield a categorization scheme, as in this case, or hypotheses for further testing.8 Exhibit 6.4 Jazz in the empty spaces  

Low Spontaneity

High Spontaneity

Low Intuition

Copying

Faking

High Intuition

Interpreting

Improvisation

Connecting these concepts to patterns of practice, Frank Barrett, Karl Weick, Deniz Ucbasaran, Paul Newton, and David Grayson have applied the jazz metaphor to organization learning, sense making, teamwork, leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship.9 Seeing organizing as jazz has also drummed up interest in such practices as “woodshedding” (how people develop social and technical skills); “comping” (how to support another player); “trading fours” (how to coordinate workflow); “playing outside” (how to disrupt routines); and various ways people “call, listen, and respond” to one another as they improvise.

Sweet Spot Considerations The foregoing may seem to imply that positivist, quantitative research is geared to theory testing while interpretivist, qualitative research is best suited to theory building. While this is a rule-of-thumb, there are many exceptions. Colquitt and Zapata-Phelan coded empirical articles in terms of their theoretical contributions via theory building and/or testing. Positivist studies added to theory by introducing moderator or mediator variables, demonstrating that previous relationships seen as linear were curvilinear or contingent on other factors, or adding robust

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new concepts. And while no purely interpretivist study was credited with theory testing, many interpretivists used both qualitative and quantitative methods to formulate their theories.10 How you analyze research data depends, of course, on your research questions, the kinds of data you have collected, your frame of reference, and whether you are building or testing theory. Pattern matching, as illustrated in the top of Exhibit 6.2, involves comparing your conceptual and empirical patterns. In traditional positivist research, theorizing structures your data collection and leads naturally to some form of statistical modeling or goodness-of-fit tests. In symbolic-interpretive research, by comparison, the data structures your theorizing and you often use some form of content analysis and grounded theorizing to create empirical and conceptual patterns. Sweet spot research adds a third consideration: How do your concepts and data match patterns of feeling, thinking, or doing in the world of practice (bottom of Exhibit 6.2)? A typical positivist study involves abstracting and simplifying phenomena into discrete variables. Yes, these variables are amenable to quantification, statistical modeling, and testing, but they must also map on to practice. A practitioner should be able to make sense of your theorizing and have confidence in your data analysis. A typical interpretive study takes account of the history, context, and complexity inherent in phenomena in their fuller expression in individual and organizational behavior. But, again, your conceptualization should reflect the world of practice as well and your interpretations of data should make sense to those who provided that data. Whether you embrace a positivist or interpretivist approach in a research study, or post-modern, critical, positive, or aesthetic one, it is important to recognize that practitioners put a pragmatic lens on your research, findings, and implications. How will your research connect to them? Does it provide them: Evidence? Understanding? Inspiration? Caution? Concern? Here are some additional pragmatic considerations. Am I asking the right questions? Survey construction in sweet spot research is shaped by theoretical concepts and the lived experiences and practices of those whom you are studying. Just as theorizing is guided by noticing and engaging phenomena, so also should this inform what data you will collect and by what methods. Consult with practitioners and research participants as you build survey or interview questions to ensure that words and phrases are understandable to respondents. By all means pre-test your survey and talk with a few respondents to learn what your questions mean to them. Otherwise: garbage in, garbage out. Am I working with the right concepts? Many positivists test the simple, linear relationship between independent → dependent variables. Adding moderating or mediating variables into your quantitative study adds realistic complexity. In going to the sweet spot, remember the practice pattern: How do these phenomena look, feel, and smell on the ground? A comment section in a survey allows you to contextualize your data and generate some “spicy” quotes. In grounded theorizing, you first make statements about what was said, heard, and observed and stay as close to the data as possible in theorizing concepts. Qualitative data is puzzling. Don’t force-fit the pieces into a familiar or popular frame: are you sure institutional theory is the best way to interpret, say, everything? Take advantage of the so-called “Zeigarnik effect”—put the puzzle away for a while, sleep on it, and then explore it afresh and let it speak to you. Are my data reliable and valid? Interview data help you to build a conceptual and operational picture of what is going on. But interview participants may be mouthing what they per-

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ceive to be the “right answer” or one that is “socially acceptable” or provide a distorted or even self-serving version of events. In Brown and Eisenhardt’s multiple case study of how firms bring multiple products to market, they coded interviews to reflect key events and dynamics in each organization, then searched through the coded data to identify common dilemmas and practices across the cases, cross-checked their emergent findings via a “reliability check” by an independent third-party, and, subsequently, had research participants at each company complete a survey to further validate their findings. Am I a source of bias? Whatever data you are working with, your subjectivity can shape its collection, analysis, and interpretation. Among the factors that might bias you or your research participants are: (1) your motivations for undertaking this research; (2) your perceived place in relation to the power hierarchy in organization studies; (3) similarities or differences between your own and research participants’ gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status; and (4) other psychological factors, such as identification with (or rejection of) particular research participants and emotions you experience (from joy to anxiety). These motivations and biases can affect your “stance” vis-à-vis research participants and your interpretation of data from or about them. Data interpretation can be influenced by your own life experiences and cultural background but also by any preconceived notions about the phenomena you are studying. As a result, qualitative researchers stress the importance of “bracketing” or setting aside your own assumptions and preconceptions lest they contaminate your interpretations of data.11 At the same time, there is a strong case that your inner experiences can be a source of insight into what is going on among people in a setting. Tapping into that awareness enables you to comprehend more fully the meaning of others’ experiences. Rather than set your orientations and emotions aside, consider “self-full” research where you strive to empathize with research participants and use your own thoughts and feelings as data.12 Tools in this process include writing research “memos” or keeping a journal during data collection and analysis. By recording your subjective feelings about what you have found, you can reflect on how these might influence your conceptualizations and interpretations. This kind of self-reflection has been labeled “first person” research or more generally autoethnography. The intent is to use your “self” as a research instrument. Naturally, this self-scanning needs to be incorporated into accounts of your research process and findings. As you do research: • • • •

Do you see yourself doing theory testing, theory building, or both? How do you connect your concepts and methods to the “practice pattern”? Which “biases” are you alert to when doing your research? When do you rely on your own intuitions?

  From this base, we next examine the research methods associated with four different kinds of studies: (1) exploratory and descriptive research; (2) research on differences, relationships, and processes; (3) explanatory research; and (4) practice research keyed specifically to improving work and life in organizations.

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EXPLORATORY AND DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH Exploratory research is typically used when our understandings and theorizing about a phenomenon are in a nascent stage; it can also be a starting point for a research program. It begins with noticing and exploring phenomena and continues with theoretical sense making. Unstructured observations, conversations, and interviews are common elements in this kind of research. For example, when personal computing was first introduced (the 1980s), questions abounded about its potential impact on organization design and management, let alone everyday life. Accordingly, Sherry Turkle observed children and adults encountering computers in schools, video arcades, and hacker subcultures to formulate some initial propositions on different uses of computer technology. Similarly, Shoshanna Zuboff’s observations on the first generation of computer-mediated work in offices and factories as well as among professionals and executives yielded a cornucopia of new concepts and frameworks.13 Later, Turkle extended her work to how smartphones can diminish people’s capacity for empathy and Zuboff examined surveillance by companies like Google, Facebook, and others.14 Exploratory research can thus sharpen your research questions and open up a long-term program of research. In addition, exploratory research can bring emerging issues and challenges to the attention of practitioners, their organizations, and the public at large. Turkle’s research, for instance, has influenced how schools (and parents) set cell phone policies for children and informed policies on the conduct of Zoom meetings in businesses worldwide. Such research earned her the sobriquet “Margaret Mead of Silicon Valley”. Meanwhile, Zuboff features in on- and off-line conversations on digital surveillance. In 2019, she testified before Congress on surveillance capitalism—alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Descriptive Research Descriptive research zeroes in on the “what” of a situation, behavior, or phenomenon but can also address questions of “who, when, and where”. Scholars use it to name and classify populations or phenomena based on either qualitative characteristics (e.g., democratic, authoritarian, or laissez-faire leadership styles) or quantitative ones (e.g., early, majority, and late adopters of technology). It is welcomed by practitioners as it can describe the contours and prevalence of phenomena and practices, provide diagnostic and benchmark data, and focus attention on what needs to change. Leading consultancies, pollsters, and research centers conduct annual or periodic surveys on topics pertinent to research and practice: technology trends, consumer habits and purchases, compensation practices, employee diversity, corporate strategies, HR investments, and many more. Listen to how John Boudreau used such data to frame his research on the use of HR analytics: Managing HR-related data is critical to any organization’s success … [A] Harvard Business Review analytics study of 230 executives suggests a stunning rate of anticipated progress: 15% said they use “predictive analytics based on HR data and data from other sources within or outside the organization,” while 48% predicted they would be doing so in two

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years. The reality seems less impressive … a global study by Tata Consultancy Services showed that only 5% of big-data investments were in human resources.15 Descriptive research can be used as a “call to action” for practitioners. It can also demonstrate the business case for taking action. For instance, Lawler and Boudreau surveyed over 100 HR leaders to investigate their use of HR analytics (and other HR practices). They found that many firms were not using their HR systems effectively to “educate business leaders on their human capital decisions” (rated 2.5 on a 5-point scale) but showed that those who do performed more effectively.16

Naturalistic research In this type of research, you describe organizational phenomena, practices, and activity in their natural setting. Qualitative data is collected in situ. The intent is to produce a “thick description” of what is going on that situates actions, words, and things in a cultural context.17 This enables those who read your research to experience vicariously and make meaning of the behaviors you describe. We described one type of naturalistic research in Hatch’s study of jazz bands. The full portfolio of interpretive research types can be arranged along a subjective to objective continuum based on their underlying ontology, epistemology, and assumptions about human nature.18 At one extreme, this type of research is free-flowing and informed by empathy and intuition; and at the other it is rigorously structured and guided by detachment and rational analysis. Each of the different types—ethnography, narrative, and phenomenology—is associated with particular analytic methods and has its own favored interpretive language.

Case studies Another popular form of descriptive research is the case study. It requires comprehensive research using multiple methods and measures to construct a description of phenomena within a setting. Case studies combine the words and experiences reported by persons from the case with archival data and the researcher’s reading of their meaning. Organizational researchers take different approaches to constructing case studies. Some favor a more objective approach where propositions and logic guide data collection and interpretation. Eisenhardt, for example, uses deductive theorizing by approaching multiple case studies with preconceived questions, a sampling strategy designed to create variability, and pre-identification of main constructs of interest.19 By comparison, others use a more interpretive approach where the researcher has a freer hand to explore the data and explain what’s going on in a particular situation.20 Glaser and Strauss, pioneers in grounded theorizing, recommend open-coding of data to identify observed themes that are then subject to “constant comparisons” against emergent theoretical constructs.21 Along the way, induction shifts to abductive reasoning as data analysis is increasingly informed by your theory-of-the-situation. Case studies provide rich descriptions of current issues and real-life activity, making it easy for practitioners to see the application to practice. Yet case studies often fail the external validity criterion because it is hard to generalize from N = 1. To counter this, one can conduct comparative case studies in multiple organizations or assemble and compare case material

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from multiple researchers. This was the strategy of a research consortium exploring the organization design implications of sustainability. Researchers from CEO, California Polytechnic, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), and Politecnico di Milano (Italy) invited colleagues and practitioners doing cutting-edge work on sustainability to share their experiences in a conference format. Eventually, five volumes in the Emerald Press series Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness were produced.22 Each volume consisted of detailed case studies— co-authored by researchers and practitioners—describing how organization design concepts were applied to build sustainability in different contexts as well as cross-case, integrated interpretation. Each volume progressively developed an understanding of the design features that can accelerate the transition to sustainable effectiveness.

Sweet Spot Considerations Practitioners look favorably on exploratory and descriptive research because these types of studies speak of and to what is going on in their worlds. Whether it is a quantitative report on how managers are using (or not) HR analytics or a qualitative account of improvising in the workplace, they can, by degrees, picture themselves in these situations and translate from what you found to what they might do. We know how this works in the classroom. Students learn theories because they are on the test but relish a case study because it immerses them in the action and foreshadows decisions they will make in their working lives. Much of the knowledge in organizational research comes from studying large samples, using established and reliable instruments, and producing knowledge about regularities in behavior often based on statistical averages. How about the study of anomalies, positive deviants, outliers, or originals? This is a great way to examine people and practices that embody something new and different from the norm and develop findings that challenge conventional wisdom. Take Adam Grant’s explorative and descriptive research on successful entrepreneurs. Based on research with non-conformists, Grant makes a case for “strategic procrastination” in service of waiting for ideas to jell and debunks the advantage of first movers versus fast followers in the example of Netflix. His research yields many counter-intuitive findings: “When I thought of an entrepreneur, I thought of a swashbuckling pirate or a daredevil, the kind of person who would basically leap before he or she looked. The data tell a completely different story … What a lot of them are doing is … managing risk portfolios.”23

STUDYING DIFFERENCES, RELATIONSHIPS, AND PROCESSES HR managers are very interested in knowing if employees of different races, genders, and sexual orientations are treated in the same way in their workplace. Marketers wonder how important social responsibility is in their brands relative to price, quality, marketing spend, and promotions, and can they charge a price premium for such offerings? Operations managers worry that their supply chains are not optimized and want to better understand the relative risks of sourcing materials from Latin America or Africa versus Asia. Each of these questions links to theories—on demographic and psychographic differences in employees’ work expe-

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riences, on the relative payoff of different product and market strategies, or on the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of supplier networks. How do you study these types of researchable questions?

Studying Differences The study of individual differences is a staple in I/O psychology and OB research. Sundry studies report differences based on age, race, gender, ethnicity, and personality type when it comes to motivation, supervision, and rewards and recognition. Studies on how organizational policies and practices bear on different “classes” of employees are used by companies to, for example, remedy differential pay rates for men versus women or inequities between whites and non-whites. Theorists and managers alike can learn from research on the psycho-social versus structural sources and consequences of differences in the workplace. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s mostly qualitative studies taught us that the different experiences of men and women at work may reside not in their psychological makeup but in their access to resources based in the opportunity structure in firms and to the proportional distribution of different kinds of people in various positions.24 Along these same lines, researchers have found that work groups and organizations that have more diversity seem to perform better than those with less diversity. But comparative research by Bernardo Ferdman has found that diversity alone doesn’t differentiate between high- and lower-performing teams and organizations. What is key is to greet diversity with practices that also promote “inclusion”. This refers to people’s personal sense that they can contribute, participate, and have voice in their work group and to egalitarian organization-level practices concerning recruitment, selection, socialization, recognition, and rewards.25 Whether you study differences qualitatively or quantitatively, the usual criteria of rigor apply to your sampling, observations and measurements, and analyses. But also be mindful of relevance. Kanter’s research reminds us that a questionnaire study focused on psychological differences between demographic groups in a firm can blind you to structural and situational differences in their organizations. This could lead you to over-interpret your findings and thus misguide practitioners and what they do with your findings.

Variance Theory Methods Studies using correlations or regression analyses enable you to test the strength of relationships between independent and dependent variables and the added variance accounted for by introducing mediating/moderating variables. With these methods, you shift from descriptive to theory-testing research. Adam Grant’s research on “prosocial” motivation began when he, Jane Dutton, and Brent Rosso used qualitative data and grounded theorizing to discern how employees who participated in a volunteer program (giving) saw themselves and their companies as more caring (via “prosocial sense-making”). In the second wave of research, they analyzed survey results from a random sample of 249 employees to test a model linking “giving behavior” to organizational commitment. A structural equation model affirmed that prosocial

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interpretations mediated the relationship between giving and commitment (giving behavior → prosocial sense making → commitment).26 Textbook stuff!

Process Theory Methods Process theories shift attention to how phenomena develop, change, or grow over time. Process theories have been explored using ethnographic methods, longitudinal and comparative case studies, event history analyses, and the real-time tracking of events as they occur. Process models can be analyzed qualitatively through narration (which tells a story about how a process unfolds), by comparative case research (showing similarities and differences in process patterns in different situations), or with quantitative methods. To model and test patterns, variables need to be measured continuously or at intervals, and then analyzed to determine if movement is (1) secular—regularly moving upward, downward, or flat; (2) seasonal—with regular repeated fluctuations; (3) cyclical—with longer waves of upward or downward movement; or (4) irregular—as in punctuated equilibria. Michael Tushman and Elaine Romanelli proposed that organizational evolution is characterized by long periods of incremental change that are punctuated by relatively short bursts of simultaneous and discontinuous change in a firm’s strategic orientation.27 These periods of transformation are triggered by key events, such as CEO succession, technological change, or drops in performance. Because the triggers for transformation are organization and industry specific, the researchers sampled 25 firms within the volatile microcomputer industry. To operationalize changes in strategy, structure, and controls, they coded information from newspaper articles, 10K forms, and annual reports to construct event histories of each company as well as measures of the various trigger events. The researchers proposed a series of if–then hypotheses about preconditions and consequences of transformations in the industry and then tested these hypotheses by analyzing them with logit regressions. Rigor guided their sampling, measures, and analytic techniques, but the researchers were deliberate in building relevance into their study. They studied firms within an industry, a choice that provided good internal validity (and an easy identifier for practitioners). Concepts used in the research were derived from theory but also chosen for their use and leverage in practice. Clear operational definitions made it obvious what companies were doing (or not) that led to their transformation. Analyses were logical and easy-to-follow: sets of statements, conclusions, and interpretations were made pertaining to each proposition. And, to achieve external validity, the researchers replicated this study in other industries. Practitioners learned that, as hypothesized, levels of organizational change increased significantly after a trigger event and that performance improved when a firm adapted successfully. The researchers also described the implications for practice: pay careful attention to the occurrence of triggers and initiate organizational and strategic change quickly.

Sweet Spot Considerations Whether you are studying differences or working with variance or process models, and using quantitative or qualitative methods, sweet spot researchers must attend to this key criterion:

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Are your methods and data manipulations trustworthy to practitioners? This calls for speaking openly to the assumptions underlying your choice of research methods and their limitations (e.g., what surveys or observations can and cannot tell you about organization life; the strength and weaknesses of your sampling strategies; other threats to the reliability and validity of your findings). It also helps to educate a practical audience about common misinterpretations of research findings. Remind non-scientific readers that correlation is not indicative of causation; and that regression analyses merely connote cause and effect. Alert them to the “ecological fallacy”—that differences observed between groups, say men versus women, do not imply that any individual will conform to the average characteristics of his or her group. Finally, complex statistical analyses can make how you arrived at your findings incomprehensible to some practitioners. Yes, use them in your academic writings, but use graphs, high– medium–low comparisons, and other devices to get your message across in communicating with practitioners. When Tushman and colleagues published an article on their punctuated equilibrium research in the California Management Review, they focused on practical issues associated with managing the “unsteady pace of organization evolution”.28 Rather than reporting regression results, the CMR article used current and classic case studies to demonstrate punctuated patterns of incremental and transformational change.

EXPLANATORY RESEARCH Explanatory research enables us to address questions about why concepts and phenomena are related with progressive certainty from formal hypothesis testing to true experiments. This may include traditional laboratory studies on college campuses—where students, representing humanity at large, might be given judgment tasks, incentives to do something, or respond to different kinds of stimuli—and field experiments, often using quasi-experimental research designs.29 The on-line world has opened up new possibilities for experimentation. Take Airbnb, where property owners can peruse potential clients’ profiles with their names, pictures, and rental history before offering them a booking. Questions were raised as to whether property owners were discriminating against African Americans when accepting bookings. A research team of an academic and in-house practitioners created fake guest profiles with either white or black sounding names and randomly sent out inquiries to hosts. They found that Airbnb property owners were 16 percent less likely to book a guest with an African American sounding name. Airbnb thereupon conducted further studies on how to incentivize property owners to accept instant bookings (making it harder to see a guest’s picture), and now claims to have reduced racial discrimination in its bookings significantly. Still, it is difficult (though not impossible) to conduct true experiments involving random assignment of individuals to experimental and control groups in field-based organizational research. One practical option is to “piggyback” on a naturally occurring experiment. Worley, Mohrman, and Nevitt seized on this opportunity at Alegent Health, a hospital system in Omaha, Nebraska, that was transforming its organization through large-group interventions (LGIs). Each of the six major clinical areas was formulating a vision, strategy, and action plan using this highly participative change process. The LGIs were nearly identical in their

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objectives, agendas, and processes, were launched within weeks of each other, were designed and facilitated by the same people, and took place in the same physical space. The researchers had access to complete transcripts, archival documentation related to each LGI, work products, and recommendations. The LGIs did vary in two important ways: (1) the work unit’s technology and responsibilities (e.g., cardiology, women’s and children’s, orthopedics, etc.) and (2) the composition of people involved in the LGI (different mixes of physicians, patients, community members, administrators, nurses, and regulators). The Alegent situation presented the researchers with a natural experiment with implications for theory and practice. Each clinical area received the same general “treatment” and they were matched on factors that might otherwise explain the results, such as industry, setting, time, and so on. This allowed the researchers to investigate two specific research questions: (1) do differences in a group’s composition impinge on change processes during the LGI and (2) do composition and process differences change the nature of the outcomes? The researchers found that LGIs with more diverse participants considered many more issues and topics in formulating their vision, strategies, and plans. LGIs with higher percentages of non-medical participants had the most heated “debates” on these matters. Groups with more stakeholder diversity came up with more novel, comprehensive, bold, and congruent (supportive of Alegent’s purpose and culture and aligned with other changes in the system) changes. This experiment gave weight to the importance of “getting the whole system in the room” in LGIs and to the value of heated debate as a source of creativity.30

DIRECT ENGAGEMENT WITH PRACTICE There are a number of research approaches that give explicit attention to the problems facing organizations. Research that directly engages with practice, including diagnostic, clinical, intervention, action research, and change assessments, aims to help people and organizations improve their situations. These approaches exemplify engaged scholarship because organizational members are deeply involved in framing, doing, and interpreting the research. But research in these settings means that theoretical formulations and rigorous research methods must be adapted to practical interests and exigencies.

Diagnostic and Clinical Research In this arena, research hews to the model used in medicine, psychology, and education: an individual, group, or whole organization goes through a diagnostic “check-up” and, when warranted, undertakes expert-supported remedial action. This research moves toward the sweet spot when: 1. Theory informs the components of diagnostic models and the protocols used to guide and support action; and 2. Research on its application helps to refine foundational theorizing behind a diagnosis or informs practice models that guide treatments, counsel, and interventions.

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On the diagnostic front, some researchers develop survey instruments keyed to team work, leadership, decision styles, communication, and numerous other aspects of personal and organization functioning. Dan Denison, for example, designed his Organization Culture Survey based on foundational concepts (e.g., beliefs, assumptions, values) and operational aspects of culture as expressed in vision, customer focus, team orientation, and strategic intent. After testing survey questions in diverse populations, and validating the results through the usual statistics, the final instrument covers twelve concepts measured by five questions each.31 Besides providing an individual organization with a diagnostic “snapshot” of its current culture, the instrument has been used to understand cultural similarities and differences between companies involved in a merger to help managers plan cultural integration. In Ed Schein’s “clinical” approach to studying and helping organizations, the clinician-researcher typically assumes a consulting role specifically to effect change in an organization. Research participants are understood to be and treated as clients rather than “subjects” in this endeavor.32 In the diagnostic mode, objective data is often collected but particular attention is given to the client’s deeply felt and subjective experiences (Schein shudders at the use of surveys to measure organization culture). The researcher and client jointly inquire into phenomena of interest, jointly formulate hypotheses about what is going on, and then develop ideas about what might be done to improve things. Beyond its immediate problem-solving benefits to clients, this kind of research informed Schein’s theorizing on organization culture because, as he told us, when clients felt they were being helped they were willing to reveal what was really going on in their organization, aired their “dirty laundry” so to speak, and, thereby, provided data that would not have been otherwise revealed to a researcher. Only participant observation, ethnography, or helping relationships create enough psychological safety for the client to reveal what the researcher really needs to know.

Interventions and Action Research “You cannot understand a system until you try to change it,” so said Kurt Lewin, who introduced a diagnostic framework (force-field analysis) and a first model of change stages (unfreezing, movement, refreezing) into the scholarly literature and practice fields. Some intervention research fits into an ∆X → ∆Y model where you study the extent to which specific manipulations in organizational practices produce beneficial (or not) effects. Interventions that have been studied range from new hiring and orientation methods, job designs, and compensation systems to new organizational arrangements, strategies, and supply-chain management practices. Other change studies involve the introduction of multiple interventions, as in organization development or transformation efforts, where more complex patterns of change are produced. Many theories about change practices and processes have been tested using quasi-experimental research designs or longitudinal analyses of multiple waves of data. Still, the number of philosophical and theoretical explanations of change continues to grow.33

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Some change researchers favor action research—which involves “a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action.”34 It relies on “practical” theorizing where both scholarly knowledge and practical know-how combine to inform definitions of a situation, hypotheses about what has led to problems and what might ameliorate them, and the formulation and execution of action plans. Researcher and research participants contribute jointly to theorizing, research, and action. What do we learn from action research? A central contribution is “actionable” knowledge. As Shani and Coghlan point out, “action research generates localized theory through localized action.” While this is of primary benefit to practitioners, it provides scholars with important information about contextual factors that might impinge on the generalizability and implementation of theorized prescriptions and applications. It also informs the “science of practice”. A review of action research in business and management finds that “the quality of relationships formed between organization members and researchers” and the “quality of the action research process itself (joining action and inquiry)” are integral to achieving successful results. On these counts, they advise action researchers to consider: 1. Is contextual data captured in a rigorous, systematic manner so that the rationale for the action and the research is solidly grounded? Does the action research build on both the organization’s experience and previous research? 2. Is there an explicit discussion of how the action research relationships were formed, built, and sustained, with an account of enablers, obstacles, and difficulties that may have arisen? Is the work evaluated in terms of the quality of the relationships? 3. Does the account demonstrate a rigorous and collaborative engagement in the action research project’s design, and subsequent enactment of cycles of planning, taking action, and reflection, so that the path to the organizational and theoretical outcomes is transparent? 4. What actionable knowledge has been co-generated? What are your criteria for actionable knowledge?35

Assessing Organizational Change To deal with the complexity of change research, Lawler proposed and developed a framework for “adaptive experiments”.36 The idea is to conduct a broad assessment of organizational conditions and functioning prior to the launch of a change program and continue with repeated measurements over time. Observing and tracking the overall change process, researchers then hone in on specific interventions and developments, formulate models in real-time of what is going on and the potential effects (conceptual patterns), and then, drawing on both the broad-based measurements and specific ones tailored to the situation, assess the impact of such changes (empirical pattern). The result, over time, is a series of “mini-models” of specific changes and an overall evaluation of the progress and impact of a change program. This approach fits the complexity of organizational life, marked by intentional and unintentional changes, and controllable and uncontrollable forces. To capture such dynamics, and

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their interplay in an organization change program, requires creating a broad measurement “net”. It has the following methodological features: z Measures should be longitudinal; z Measures should cover a broad range of phenomena potentially impacted by change and the processes and implementation of change activity; z Measures should be introduced to examine the nature of change as it evolves and to test specific hypotheses about the effects of change; z Assessment involves multiple research methods and both quantitative and qualitative data; z Sampling should cover all parts of the organization, including units and individuals that are and are not included in a change effort. Lawler and his research team at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR) employed the approach in third-party assessments of change efforts undertaken in over twenty companies where they monitored (qualitatively) and measured (quantitatively) the impact of multiple interventions over time. A team of psychologists, sociologists, engineers, cost accountants, and statisticians developed a variety of research methods and instruments to assess organizational characteristics and individual attitudes as well as work performance, absenteeism, and turnover in behavioral and financial terms (Exhibit 6.5). To capture features of each intervention and the more qualitative aspects of change, a scheme for workplace observation was developed. Exhibit 6.5 Assessing organization change Conceptual Variables

Research Method

Attitudes

 

Work Environment: Jobs, Roles, Supervision, Work Groups, Rewards, Decision Making

Questionnaire, Pre and Post Measurement

Psychological States: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, Job Involvement, Organization Identification; Individual Differences

Questionnaire

Socio-Technical Systems

 

Social System: Influence and Relationship Structures

Questionnaire, Network Analyses

Technical System: Technology and Training; Job Structure

Questionnaire, Structured Observation

Change Processes

 

Events and Meetings

Structured Observations

Union–Management Collaboration

Interviews, Questionnaire

Process and Progress of Change

Interviews, Unstructured Observations, Periodic Questionnaires

Results

 

Responses: Job Effort, Satisfaction

Questionnaire

Responses: Productivity, Work Quality, Absenteeism, Turnover

Production and Personnel Records Cost Accounting

Comparative Analyses—across different kinds of work redesigns or depths of change

Questionnaires, Production and Economic Data

Costs/Benefits

Accounting and Market Data

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Taken together, these tools provided a way of recording and, in some cases, quantifying the impact of change on organizational effectiveness and the quality of work life. Each of the instruments had its own logic and operations. Where feasible a comparison group within the organization was also studied or constructed ex post facto where, for any number of reasons, changes did not take hold. Detailed case studies of most of these experiments were published and the methods, measures, and research practices were reported in Assessing Organizational Change.37

Sweet Spot Considerations These several types of engaged research hit the sweet spot in their focus on practice and in generating knowledge that directly helps practitioners do their jobs better. Yet research involving direct engagement with practice is sometimes faulted for a lack of theoretical footing and empirical rigor. Engaged research misses the sweet spot when it relies on simplistic concepts and underspecified conceptual patterns or fails to develop the inter-rater reliability of observations, triangulation of data from multiple sources, and measurement of change implementation as well as any second- and third-order consequences. It can also lack controls for or tests of alternative explanations. Some of these trace to the rigor/relevance tradeoffs you can encounter in field research. The organization you are studying may not welcome a long and comprehensive survey, give you unabridged access to real-time activities, or be responsive to the use of a control group in your research. Research assessing organizational change and practical approaches in general dramatically increase pressures on your measurement and analysis methods. First, whether you are studying (1) adaptations within a system, (2) changes to the system overall, and/or (3) changes in the surrounding super-system, you need to adjust the scope of your research, work with different concepts, and tailor your instruments and methods accordingly. Second, the kinds of change you are observing—first-, second-, or third-order change—requires attending to how the “mental models” of participants shift during a change effort and to what extent the organization you are studying is engaged in incremental, transitional, or transformational change.38 How do you capture these complex dynamics? One approach is through systemic change assessment and evaluation of the type done at ISR. But change research need not be limited to longitudinal projects in complex organizations. Laboratory and small-scale experiments have revealed some of the micro-dynamics of change. Leveraging insights from their lab studies of bias in decision making, for instance, psychologists and behavioral economists have developed practical applications of “nudging” as a means of change and identified the pros and cons of thinking slow and fast.39 In a nifty experiment on how to promote hand-washing among medical personnel, researchers posted one of three signs to soap dispensers in a hospital. The personal-consequences sign read, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases.” The patient-consequences sign read, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.” The control sign, which was developed by hospital managers, read, “Gel in, wash out.” The researchers then assessed hand hygiene by measuring the amount of soap and hand-sanitizing gel used from dispensers (Experiment 1) and conducted covert, independent observations of health care professionals’ hand-hygiene behaviors

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(Experiment 2). Results showed that the hand hygiene of health care professionals increased significantly when they were reminded of the implications for patients but not when they were reminded of the implications for themselves. The practical relevance of this research was demonstrated more broadly in an article “A trick to stop touching your face” in The Atlantic during COVID-19.40

POINTS TO PONDER In this chapter we looked at how researchers deal with rigor and relevance in their studies. In designing sweet spot research, you sometimes encounter tradeoffs between these two standards. If you are new to this kind of research, tap into your knowledge network. Your advisors, more seasoned field researchers, and practitioners can help you think through your methods and help to gain access to research sites, data, and participants (as we did in connecting with Alegent and with other colleagues doing case studies on sustainable effectiveness). We’ve noted throughout how our interviewees did rigorous studies of different types but also tailored their presentations of methods and findings to a practice audience. We take up sweet spot communications in the next chapter and crucial issues about managing research relationships and ethical quandaries in Chapter 8. As a practical researcher: • Which research approaches and methods most appeal to you? • Have you had any experience in practice-based research? How can you get some? • Who in your knowledge network can help you to optimize rigor and relevance in your research methods or help to gain access to research sites?

NOTES 1.

Ford, E.W., Duncan, W.J., Bedeian, A.G., Ginter, P.M., Rousculp, M.D. and Adams, A.M. (2005). Mitigating risks, visible hands, inevitable disasters, and soft variables: Management research that matters to managers. Academy of Management Perspectives, 19(4), 24–38.

2. Campbell, D.T. (1966). Pattern matching as an essential in distal knowing. In K.W. Hammond (ed.), The Psychology of Egon Brunswik. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 81–106. 3. Trochim, W.M. (1989). Outcome pattern matching and program theory.  Evaluation and Program Planning, 12(4), 355–66. 4.

Worley, C.G. and Lawler, E.E. (2010). Agility and organization design: A diagnostic framework. Organizational Dynamics, 39(2), 194–204.

5. Gagel, G. (2018). The Effects of Leadership Behaviors on Organization Agility: A Quantitative Study of 126 US-based Business Units, 2000–2019-CSU Theses and Dissertations.

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6. Cordery, J.L., Cripps, E., Gibson, C.B., Soo, C., Kirkman, B.L. and Mathieu, J.E. (2015). The operational impact of organizational communities of practice: A Bayesian approach to analyzing organizational change. Journal of Management, 41(2), 644–64. 7. Hatch, M.J. (1997). Commentary: Jazzing up the theory of organizational improvisation.  Advances in Strategic Management,  14, 181–92; Hatch, M.J. (1999). Exploring the empty spaces of organizing: How improvisational jazz helps redescribe organizational structure. Organization Studies, 20(1), 75–100. 8.

Sinkovics, N. (2018). Pattern matching in qualitative analysis. In C. Casssell et al. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 468–85.

9.

Barrett, F. (2012). Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press; Kao, J. (2009). Jamming: Art and Discipline of Business Creativity. HarperCollins; Grayson, D., McLaren, M. and Spitzeck, H. (2017). Social Intrapreneurism and All that Jazz: How Business Innovators are Helping to Build a More Sustainable World. Abingdon: Routledge.

10. Colquitt, J.A. and Zapata-Phelan, C.P. (2007). Trends in theory building and theory testing: A five-decade study of the Academy of Management Journal. Academy of Management Journal, 50(6), 1281–303. 11. Steedman, P. (1991). On the relations between seeing, interpreting and knowing. In F. Steier (ed.), Research and Reflexivity. London: Sage Publications. 12. Mirvis, P.H. and Louis, M.R. (1985). Self-full research: Working through the self as instrument in organizational research. Exploring Clinical Methods for Social Research, 229, 246. 13. Turkle, S. (1984). The Second Self. New York, NY: Touchstone; Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York, NY: Basic Books. 14. Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York, NY: Penguin; Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York, NY: PublicAffairs. 15. Boudreau, J. (2017). HR must make people analytics more user friendly. Harvard Business Review, 16 June. 16. Lawler III, E.E. and Boudreau, J.W. (2015). Global Trends in Human Resource Management: A Twenty-year Analysis. Standard, CA: Stanford University Press. 17. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Basic Books. 18. Morgan, G. and Smircich, L. (1980). The case for qualitative research. Academy of Management Review, 5(4), 491–500; Cunliffe, A.L. (2011). Crafting qualitative research: Morgan and Smircich 30 years on. Organizational Research Methods, 14(4), 647–73. 19. Eisenhardt, K.M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532–50. 20. Yin, R.K. (2002). Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications; Stake, R.E. (1995). The Art of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 21. Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. 22. See Mohrman, S.A. (2017). Partnering to advance sustainable effectiveness at the Center for Effective Organizations. In Bartunek, J. and McKenzie, J. (eds), Academic Practitioner Research Partnerships: Developments, Complexities and Opportunities. London: Routledge Press Organizational Change and Development Series, pp. 217–33. 23. Grant, A.M. (2017). Originals: How Non-conformists Move the World. Penguin; quoted in https://​knowledge​ .wharton​.upenn​.edu/​article/​how​-non​-conformists​-move​-the​-world/​.

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24. Kanter, R.M. (1977). Men and Women of the Corporation. New York, NY: Basic Books. 25. Ferdman, B.M. (2014). The practice of inclusion in diverse organizations. In Ferdman, B.M. and Deane, B. (eds), Diversity at Work: The Practice of Inclusion. New York, NY: Wiley, pp. 3–54. 26. Grant, A.M., Dutton, J.E. and Rosso, B.D. (2008). Giving commitment: Employee support programs and the prosocial sensemaking process. Academy of Management Journal, 51(5), 898–918. 27. Tushman, M.L. and Romanelli, E. (1985). Organizational evolution: A metamorphosis model of convergence and reorientation. In L.L. Cummings and B.M. Staw (eds), Research in Organizational Behavior (Vol. 7). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 171–222. 28. Tushman, M.L., Newman, W.H. and Romanelli, E. (1986). Convergence and upheaval: Managing the unsteady pace of organizational evolution. California Management Review, 29(1), 29–44. 29. Eden, D. (2017). Field experiments in organizations.  Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 91–122; Grant, A.M. and Wall, T.D. (2009). The neglected science and art of quasi-experimentation: Why-to, when-to, and how-to advice for organizational researchers. Organizational Research Methods, 12(4). 30. Worley, C., Mohrman, S. and Nevitt, J. (2011). Large group interventions: An empirical field study of their composition, process, and outcomes. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(4), 404–431. 31. Moving beyond descriptive research, Denison studied how these measures of organization culture predict corporate profitability, growth, innovation, quality and customer satisfaction. Denison, D.R. and Mishra, A.K. (1995). Toward a theory of organizational culture and effectiveness.  Organization Science,  6(2), 204–223; Denison, D.R., Janovics, J., Young, J. and Cho, H.J. (2006). Diagnosing Organizational Cultures: Validating a Model and Method. Ann Arbor, MI: Denison Consulting Group. 32. Schein, E.H. (1987). The Clinical Perspective in Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. 33. Smith, A.C., Skinner, J. and Read, D. (2020). Philosophies of Organizational Change: Perspectives, Models, and Theories for Managing Change. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. 34. Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34–46; Bradbury, H. (ed.) (2015). The Sage Handbook of Action Research. London: Sage Publications. 35. Shani, A.B. and Coghlan, D. (2019). Action research in business and management: A reflective review. Action Research. doi:​10​.1177/​1476750319852147. 36. Lawler, E. (1977). Adaptive experiments: An approach to organizational behavior research. Academy of Management Review, 2(4), 576–85. 37. Seashore, S.E., Lawler III, E.E., Mirvis, P.H. and Cammann, C.E. (1983). Assessing Organizational Change: A Guide to Methods, Measures, and Practices. John Wiley & Sons. 38. Bartunek, J.M. and Moch, M.K. (1987). First-order, second-order, and third-order change and organization development interventions: A cognitive approach. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 23(4), 483–500; Golembiewski, R.T., Billingsley, K. and Yeager, S. (1976). Measuring change and persistence in human affairs: Types of change generated by OD designs. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 12(2), 133–57. 39. Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin; Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan. 40. Grant, A.M. and Hofmann, D.A. (2011). It’s not all about me: Motivating hand hygiene among health care professionals by focusing on patients.  Psychological Science,  22(12), 1494–99; See https://​www​.theatlantic​ .com/​ideas/​archive/​2020/​03/​trick​-stop​-touching​-your​-face/​608050/​.

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Communicating research to scholars and practitioners How do you communicate your research such that it reaches and benefits both the scholarly community and practitioners? This is no mean feat. We have talked about how people with different perspectives on what is knowledge, what makes it valid, and whether or not it is useful populate these two worlds. There are clear differences, too, in the goals, motivations, and time frames of researchers and practitioners. Some scholars don’t even try to communicate to practitioners and when others do they may not be very good at it. Bartunek and Rynes reviewed the “implications for practice” sections in five top-tier management journals and found that only half of the articles reported any implications.1 When practitioners reviewed these so-called implications, they found that fewer than 10 percent were of any practical use. Are we any better at communicating amongst ourselves? Dennis Tourish’s recent critique of management scholarship quotes Anthony Hopwood: so much of the theorizing seems to be a repetition of existing theoretical work, summarizing time and time again what is already known and usually doing more to add to the publication listings of the authors than to advance wider understandings of the managerial craft and its organizational and societal contexts. Tourish then goes on to complain that academic research written in a “bombastic style, starved of metaphor, wit, or irony has become commonplace.”2 Remember the orienting question posed in Chapter 1: “As I disseminate my findings, do I want to speak primarily to scholars, practitioners, or both?” The central focus of this chapter is how to communicate research to both scholars and practitioners (Exhibit 7.1).

COMMUNICATING SCHOLARSHIP: MULTI-PRODUCTS AND MULTI-CHANNELS Our interviews with Lawler, Porter, Edmondson, Sutton, and other sweet spot scholars revealed a common three-prong strategy for communicating research to scholars and practitioners: 1. Write academic articles for scholarly journals with clear, fully referenced theoretical foundations, high-powered statistics as appropriate, and a nuanced discussion of the theoretical contributions of the study, plus some implications for practice.

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2. Write practitioner-friendly articles for professional journals that speak to a problem at hand and how to think about it (in the form of a conceptual map, model, or 2×2) and what to do about it—with plenty of examples. Statistics are presented in the form of graphs or charts. 3. Write a professional book that expands on practitioner-friendly material and gives clear directions or “best practices” on how to address the problem at hand. Key ingredients include colorful book and chapter titles, catchy concept labels, and engaging stories. The research methods can be detailed in an appendix.3

Exhibit 7.1

Communicating with the consumers of research

You can also leverage your network of professional service firms and communities of practice to expand your reach and audience. Multiple communication forms and channels, such as podcasts, blogs, LinkedIn posts, slide sharing, infographics, images, videos, and tweets, are increasingly used. While all this sounds simple, it takes imagination, time, and effort to pull it off!

COMMUNICATING RESEARCH FINDINGS If you want your research to reach people, you had better put together a communication plan. A key question: What do you want to accomplish with your communications? For scholarly purposes, beyond simply getting a publication, you may be staking out the contours of a longer-term research program, seeking visibility and citations, angling for a promotion or tenure, or you just want the gratification of seeing your work in print. All are fine motivations. To the extent you want your research to be put to use, however, your communication goals need further consideration. For instance, does your communication aim to: z z z z

Inform your audience(s) of your findings; Advise them on how to apply your findings (to future research and/or practice); Influence them to use your findings in their own work; and/or Show them how to use your findings?

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Answers to these questions help to guide your messaging and communication channel choices when communicating knowledge that is relevant and actionable. Moving beyond one-way communication, you may have further aims. Would you like to: z Exchange knowledge with your audience(s); z Interact with them to build on and/or implement your research; and/or z Consult with them to effect research-based change? Answers to these questions are pertinent not only to the design and conduct of your research but also to what you communicate and how. Aristotle is credited with the first model of communication which broke it into three components: speaker, speech, and audience. We adopt a modified version of Harold Lasswell’s communication process to describe (1) Who is communicating (credibility); (2) What you have to say (message); (3) How you say it (form); (4) Who your audience is (academics, practitioners, or both); (5) What channels you use; and with (6) What effect.4

CREDIBILITY OF THE COMMUNICATOR Communications studies emphasize that the sender’s credibility, as much as the message that is being sent, is key to a receiver’s attention, receptivity, and digestion of communications. Applied to sweet spot communications, key components of credibility are (1) Ethos: Your perceived expertise; (2) Logos: The validity of your knowledge; and (3) Pathos: How your audience experiences your message.

Ethos As a research communicator, your affiliation and credentials as a scholar, whether university-based or not, signal your competencies. Beyond publishing, you can build your credibility by presenting at academic conferences and sharing your research at developmental and final stages with relevant peers and exemplars. A practitioner audience will also expect that you know their world. For academics, this means spending time reading the business press, talking with executive MBA students and managers who visit your campus, and participating in practitioner conferences. Doing field research, consulting in organizations, and engaging in joint academic–practitioner research not only builds credibility, it deepens your knowledge of organization life and helps to develop a practitioner network.

Logos For an academic audience, research that meets standards of rigor makes you and your communications more trustworthy. As to relevance, it helps to communicate clearly and by examples to show how your research represents and contributes to practice (e.g., the practice pattern). The aim, particularly in naturalistic research, is to establish verisimilitude—your account needs to “ring-true” to practical readers. Speaking from experience builds trust with both

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scholarly and practitioner audiences that you know what you are talking about. In addition, conceptual models, action frameworks, and principles drawn from your research enable consumers of your research to track its logic and imagine its applications. Speaking to the social construction of knowledge, one researcher observed, “We have no idea about the ‘real’ nature of things … The function of modeling is to arrive at descriptions which are useful.”

Pathos Scholars who want their work to register with an audience turn to the counsel of Murray Davis, who famously stated: “The first criterion by which people judge anything they encounter, even before deciding whether it is true or false, is whether it is interesting or boring.” To be interesting, Davis suggests that a new theory or finding needs to deny an old truth, common sense, a proverb, or best practice. If it does not challenge some previously held or taken-for-granted belief, your audience will “reject its value while affirming its truth.”5 As our many interviewees told us, having interesting, counterintuitive, and useful results engages a practice audience, too.

YOUR MESSAGE: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEORY AND PRACTICE Sweet spot research aims to contribute to both theory and practice. As you contemplate communicating your findings to these two worlds, remember that academics are looking for clear descriptions of your theoretical contributions and practitioners want concrete suggestions for how to apply them.

Contributions to Theory The top half of Exhibit 7.2 highlights three potential theoretical contributions. If your research is primarily oriented toward building new theory, highlight whether it represents a fresh eye to or considers phenomena from an alternative perspective. Specify whether it adds new details to existing concepts, reconfigures prior categorizations of variables, introduces moderator or mediating variables, or shows that a relationship among variables previously seen as linear is instead curvilinear or contingent on other factors. You want to make both a logical and phenomenological case for new concepts and relationships you are introducing. If your research is more about testing existing theory, state affirmatively whether it validates the underpinning concepts or categorizations of existing theory or tests the logic and relationships in a model. These types of studies become more interesting when they fail to replicate an established finding and you offer a different logic that would explain what you found. Also be clear if you are testing a theory using a different methodology than prior studies or with multiple research methods. Finally, you can also make a theoretical contribution by highlighting the generalizability of your work. Early stage research often aims to replicate an established finding. More advanced studies test how an established theory applies in a new context or within a different population. This helps to identify boundary conditions for theory—who, when, and where it may be

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(and might not be) valid. Another significant theoretical contribution is to extend a theory to explain phenomena to which it has not been previously applied. Exhibit 7.2 How findings contribute to theory and practice Contribution to Theory Theory Building: To What Extent do your findings? Add Details to or Refine Existing Theory Concepts/Categories

Add Moderator or Mediating Variables to Existing Theory

Introduce New Concepts or Relationships into Theory

  Theory Testing: To What Extent do your findings? Validate Theoretical Concepts/ Categories

Test Theoretical Logic

Test Causal Relationships

  Generalizability: To What Extent do your findings? Replicate Existing Research

Extend Research to New Situation or Population

Extend Research to Other Theoretical Domains

Contribution to Practice Relevance to Practice: To What Extent do your findings? Add Details to Existing Understandings of Practice

Reconceive or Reframe Existing Understanding of Practice

Introduce New Understandings of Practice

  Actionable in Practice: To What Extent do your findings? Provide Recipes/Rules to Improve Existing Practices

Provide Frameworks/Tools to Change Existing Practices

Introduce New Practices

  Applicability: To What Extent do your findings? Apply to Single Practices/Situations

Apply to Multiple Practices/ Situations

Apply to Entire Practice Field

>-------------------------------Significance of Contribution------------------------------->

As a research communicator: • Have you clearly identified your contribution to theory? • Have you convincingly connected your conceptual and empirical patterns? • Are the limits of your research and findings clearly stated?

Contributions to Practice In practice, there is also a cyclical process of knowing and doing where knowledge is assembled and codified, applied in practice, and then, on the basis of results, either discounted or refined for further application. Based on his experience in industry and academe, our interviewee Mike Beer urges researchers to develop and communicate findings that are (1) useful to practitioners (informing them what to do) and (2) actionable (how to do it). Another feature is (3)

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applicability—when, where, and under what conditions your findings apply to practice.6 The bottom half of Exhibit 7.2 highlights three potential practical contributions. Your writing should provide practitioners with insight into what they should be aware of, know, or understand to solve practical problems and achieve specified results. A basic contribution of relevant research is a model or framework that enables practitioners to think more deeply about current practices and their consequences. With fresh thinking, careful observation, and creative modeling, your research might also reconceive an existing problem and identify different and new ways to address it. Using a metaphor or portraying a situation through different “lenses” can stimulate practitioners to see their world anew and motivate them to introduce changes and innovations. Effective communication gives guidance to practitioners on how they should go about doing things. One basic contribution of actionable research takes the form of recipes and rules to guide effective practice. Findings that contribute to a body of evidence-based management knowledge are particularly relevant. Research that translates findings into action-oriented frameworks and tools helps practitioners to implement new ways of doing things. Examples include rubrics, frameworks (e.g., six-sigma and quality management protocols or the balanced scorecard), decision trees, problem solving tools, diagnostic and assessment instruments, and workbooks and templates for thinking through situations and decisions.7 The “gold standard” contribution here is action-research where new practices have been developed and tested in a collaborative researcher–practitioner relationship. The applicability of practice-relevant research findings also needs thoughtful attention. Often the research you read in the practice literature seems to imply that this “new” idea or approach is relevant in every organization or to every manager. More often, it is only applicable in certain situations, for certain kinds of people, and under specific boundary conditions (e.g., strategic, economic, political, or cultural). Contingency theories are a prime example. Again, rate your research contribution to practice in Exhibit 7.2. As a research communicator: • • • •

Have you explained what challenges your research helps practitioners to address? Have you linked your concepts and results to the “practice pattern”? Do your findings tell practitioners how to manage or operate differently? Have you specified which situations your findings apply to? When they don’t apply?

Four Examples of Theory–Practice Communications To illustrate how to produce and communicate findings that speak to both theory and practice, look at research studies by four of our colleagues using different concepts and methods.

Getting multiple products to market Shona Brown and Kathy Eisenhardt studied decision making across case studies in six high-tech companies to inductively identify how firms bring multiple products to market

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through “rhythmic, time-based transitions”. This research introduced new concepts into strategy and organization theory and guidelines for practice on the “balancing acts” needed to “structure chaos”. Eisenhardt took the lead on theoretically oriented academic articles, such as “Linking complexity theory and time-paced evolution”, and the two published practice-friendly articles illustrating time-pacing, patching, and related practices in HBR. Brown was first author on Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, which used case study vignettes to exemplify key practices. The volume neatly highlighted ways to communicate theory and data to practitioners with its simplifying illustrations and graphs and a conversational account of complexity science with interesting analogies to art and music. Research methods were presented, but in an appendix.8

Psychological safety and team learning Amy Edmondson developed and tested a model of work team learning in a series of studies. The model proposed that team structures → team beliefs → team learning behaviors → team performance. Edmondson developed a series of hypotheses about causal linkages in this model, tested them, and analyzed the mediating effects of team psychological safety. Her book, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, clearly explains practical management concepts for increasing learning capability. It introduces a framework clarifying how learning processes must be altered for different kinds of work, offers tips on how collaborative learning works, and exemplifies this with case material from her field studies.9

The power of experiments Max Bazerman runs experiments on negotiation, decision making, and most recently on the “unintentional unethical behavior of even good people.” His studies are classic randomized, control group research—many set in the lab but increasingly so on-line. His book with Michael Luca, The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World, reveals how e-commerce companies Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Booking.com, and others regularly use experiments to configure their web pages, develop customer offerings, and even monitor their own behavior.10 We described one of their studies at Airbnb earlier. Bazerman regularly contributes to academic journals but his book with Luca gives practitioners an engaging history of experimental thinking (beginning with the Bible’s report of the experiments of Daniel of Judah), accounts of its uses in psychology and economics, and details on its applications today in e-commerce companies. To promote the research, they published a step by step account of the Airbnb study (#AirbnbWhileBlack) in Fast Company, made a case for experimentation in Sloan Management Review, and worked with social media maven Andreas Aristidou to summarize and publicize the key points and takeaways from each chapter of their book. They also relied on research teams in the companies studied to publicize their findings throughout the e-commerce ecosystem.

Effecting change through appreciative inquiry In an action research project, Frank Barrett and David Cooperrider helped employees in a medical center hotel to work through dysfunctional conflict through appreciative inquiry

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(AI). This was one of the first applications and tests of AI which, in contrast to the traditional problem-solving model of “fixing”, has people build on their organization’s strengths and positive potential.11 These two have extended this work to new problems and settings. Cooperrider has applied the 4D model of AI (Discover, Dream, Design, Deploy) to sustainability, peace, and humanitarian efforts and supported the development of an extensive, practitioner-friendly website called the AI Commons that is full of tools, process descriptions, and articles. Barrett (with Ron Fry) wrote a practice-oriented volume, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity. These four research studies score well on the criteria of theoretical and practical significance presented in Exhibit 7.2. We hope your current or proposed studies do too! Now let’s turn to how to get the message out.

COMMUNICATION FORMS: RESEARCH AS STORY It’s not a stretch to say that all research communication is about telling a story. Unfortunately, storytelling has a checkered reputation within management science. Seen as unscientific by some, stories have been put down with statements such as, “the plural of anecdote is not data.” But many audiences find narratives easier to comprehend and more engaging than traditional “just-the-facts” communication. “Science is messy, full of plot twists and competing interpretations—and the way we talk about it should reflect that truth,” writes Jim Kozubek in Scientific American.12 Jerome Bruner (Actual Minds, Possible Worlds) distinguishes between two different modes of thought: Logico-scientific and Narrative.13 The former is theory-driven and engages the world with if–then, cause–effect logic (it’s very logos-like). It operates with reason, sound argument, and tight analysis in seeking and explaining “truth”. The latter is meaning-centered and interprets the world experientially and vicariously. It operates with intuition, metaphors, and practical knowledge in search of the appearance of being real or true. While this can leave scholars with an either/or decision, a move to the sweet spot encourages you to find a middle ground. John van Maanen writes this way, and he describes three different types of tales: z Realist Tales are research accounts written from an objectivist point of view. This type of story is written in a third-person, matter-of-fact, almost journalistic style. z Confessional Tales are written with the goal of putting the researcher—and his or her perspective—within the account of what was studied and what was discovered. This can include how the researcher gained access to a research site and how interaction with participants was used to generate data. Confessional stories are written in the first person and the author notes personal biases or flaws that may have influenced what was observed. z Impressionist Tales are written to convey the drama of what occurred. They can be written as a series of clues in an unfolding mystery and describe both the researcher’s thought process as well as the participant’s actions. They maintain the audience’s attention by focusing on unique or interesting aspects of a situation or setting.14

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The Anatomy of a Story A story consists of the people and events involved in a situation. There is a plot—a chain of events—showing how everything is somehow connected and related to each other. The narrative is the description of these events and the way all of it takes place. Narratives follow a particular structure that imply cause-and-effect relationships between events over a particular time period and impact particular characters. This triumvirate of causality, time, and character represents a standard definition of narrative communication. Also important in narration is taking into account what Bruner calls the “landscape of action” or what happens in the setting you are studying, and the “landscape of consciousness” or what the characters in your study think, know, and feel and “how their secrets play themselves out”. Well-written stories keep these two landscapes intertwined, linking what is known and who knows it in tension. Good stories not only describe a world but also produce insights into those who are trying to give it meaning. Barbara Czarniawska points to the pragmatic and aesthetic validity of narrative research reports. “Something ‘works’ because it touches me, because it is beautiful, because it is a powerful metaphor” and, she adds, because it is “edifying” and takes the reader to a new place.15 With this in mind, note some parallels between a generic and sweet spot research story (Exhibit 7.3) and consider how they might bring your research communications to life: z Setting: A successful narrative relies on a consideration of time and place. The reader wants to know where and when something is happening. z “Thick Description”: In contrast to “thin” descriptions of coded data, thick descriptions are about “what is happening” in your fieldwork, informed by field notes, observations, the details of meetings and events, quotes from interviews and recordings, and text data. z Narrative Perspective: A first-person narrator is a typically stronger narrative presence than a third-person narrator. When you speak directly to an audience, you can also use the second-person (like we are doing now). z Sensory Language: Language that appeals to the senses or emotions creates a connection with the reader to the work. z “Logical linkages”: Concepts, interpretations, and additional explanatory material let the reader see how the researcher sees things. z Appeal: What is the point of this work? A narrative can include some form of commentary about and evaluation of “what happened in the end”. It can also end with thoughts on implications for theory and for practice.

A Realist Tale If you are writing a realist tale in the logico-scientific mode, consider using a “storyboard”. It represents a sequence of drawings (often including words or dialogue) that convey your story in a logical order over time. While they have traditionally been used by screenwriters and filmmakers, storyboards are now used to plan managerial and academic communications.

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Exhibit 7.3 Comparing traditional and sweet spot stories Traditional Story

Sweet Spot Research Product

Plot, Characters, Setting

Theme, Background, Relevance “phenomenon of interest”

Tension, Rising Action

Problem, Investigation

Climax

Findings, Conclusions

Falling Action

Implications for Theory and Practice

Resolution

Limitations, Next Steps

Start with character and setting: the main character in your research is the phenomenon of interest—the object of your study. Ideally, there will be an element of mystery to your investigation. Perhaps there is a massive gap in the literature, on the theory side, and a vexing problem facing practice. Who should care about this? Why? As for setting, this is your background research and literature review: What do we know and what don’t we know about the phenomena? Why don’t current practices suffice? Now add dramatic tension: What is the puzzle, controversy, or problem that this study will investigate? The action rises as you get into your detective work. Here you describe your methods and apply them to investigate the mystery. Your methods can be framed, à la Sherlock Holmes, as logical deductions and hypotheses, or more like detective Colombo, with evidence unearthed and patterns deduced from observation. Finally, a climax occurs, your findings emerge, and the mystery resolves. The action falls as contemplation deepens with your conclusions—how do your findings fundamentally change, challenge, or advance what is known about the phenomena? Then, what are the implications for theory and practice? How generalizable and applicable are your findings? Then, resolution: What have we learned from solving this mystery? What new ones await? Look at a storyboard for communicating the results of a practice-based study of organizational agility by Worley and his practitioner co-author, Gillian Pillans (Exhibit 7.4).

Panel 1: What is the problem? The road to success is circuitous and filled with obstacles and competitive challenges that call for new ways of doing things. Studies on fast-paced change, complexity, and VUCA (volatile, uncertain, chaotic, ambiguous) environments suggest a cautionary tale: companies without the ability to change failed to adapt.

Panel 2: What is the big idea? Agility is an advanced and dynamic management capability. It allows the organization to make timely, effective, and sustained changes, to stay ahead of the competition in a fast-changing business context, and deliver sustained high performance relative to peers. Whoa, management concepts are complex and an illustrative chart can simplify, summarize, or simply repeat information in a way that makes it more accessible and memorable (see panel).

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Exhibit 7.4

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An agility storyboard

Panel 3: What are the key concepts/components? Breaking the big idea into some manageable parts, agile organizations possess four routines— strategizing, perceiving, testing, and implementing—that allow the organization to develop and execute strategy and accelerate/drive change. Each routine gets defined and illustrated.

Panel 4: How was this investigated? The authors conducted an on-line survey, consisting of 19 agility-related items and questions on perceived organizational effectiveness (financial performance, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction). The results reported are based on 181 responses from roughly 150 different organizations that are members of the Corporate Research Forum (CRF), a group of global companies that supports and draws from research on organizational effectiveness. Describe the methods and, in an appendix, put statistical analysis.

Panel 5: What are the findings? When compared against the self-reported levels of performance, the survey results showed that the more of these routines an organization had, the better its perceived performance. Tables, with their rows and columns of data, interact primarily with our verbal system. We read tables. Graphs, on the other hand, interact with our visual system. Graphs can present an enormous amount of data quickly in an easy-to-consume fashion. They are especially helpful when the “shape” of the data conveys additional information (see panel).

Panel 6: What’s the key takeaway? For this study, the primary audience was senior HR executives from CRF’s membership. Interviews with HR executives from high and low scoring firms suggested HR in agile organizations had two distinct features: (1) flexible processes that were able to deliver results under

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different circumstances and (2) appropriately fast processes that reflected the cycle time of the business, the pace of change in the external environment, and high levels of transparency. In practice, flexibility might mean managing talent differently in a new venture compared to a well-established business within the same organization. Speed may require moving away from default annual processes in areas such as goal setting, resource allocation, and rewards.

A Confessional, Impressionist Tale Mirvis took a stab at confessional/impressionist storytelling in a “novel-like” book about the makeover of Unilever’s business in Holland, To the Desert and Back: The Story of One of the Most Dramatic Business Transformations on Record (with Karen Ayas and George Roth).16 The authors worked hand in hand with managers in a type of action research called a “learning history” developed by MIT researcher George Roth and author Art Kleiner to help to close the gap between action and reflection.17 It tells an organization its own story. As an account manager in Unilever explains it, “This interview is for the learning history. So it is meant for understanding and learning from the past. But I can only tell you things from my perspective, how I saw them through my glasses. Perhaps it’s not the truth, but it’s my truth.” Roth and Kleiner define three “imperatives” for a learning history: 1. The Research Imperative—stay true to the data (so that everything in the document is recognized as valid); 2. The Mythic Imperative—stay true to the story (so that the text captures people’s attention); and 3. The Pragmatic Imperative—stay true to the audience (so that it is cast in a way that helps an organization to learn and move forward). The Desert book recounted how Tex Gunning and his tribe of young leaders turned their business around over five years, joined together in a series of learning journeys in the Dutch Ardennes, Scotland, and Middle East to take stock of their progress, and built a “community of leaders” in the organization. To develop the learning history, nearly 200 team leaders constructed timelines of key events, delved into significant highs and lows, and identified a roster of lessons learned to carry forward. These lessons and the stories behind them were shared over a roaring campfire in the desert of Jordan and over two days of travel together to Petra where they bid their leader goodbye. Subsequently, the remaining 1800 employees added in their own history lessons at an all-company learning conference and parting ceremony. The researchers simultaneously worked with this material and co-theorized with the leadership and participants about how the change process was stimulated and given meaning through a series of dramatic “performances”.18 Our conceptual contribution was analogizing change-as-process to change-as-performance. A plan, for example, is similar to a script; the manager is like a director. Using a behind-the-scenes perspective, we wrote: In the language of the arts and the emerging discipline of performance studies, the events described might be termed performances. In each instance, the actions of the leaders and staff are more or less scripted and unfold through scenes. The events themselves are staged,

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with scenery and actors in place, costumes and props ready, and the chairman cum director exerting a strong or light hand, depending on the performance. The parallels between process and performance are striking: the latter also involves an arrangement of activities across time and space, dramatization with a beginning and end, and activity, termed by scholars of the genre as performativity, that pulls it all together. On the practical side, people often speak of the “art of leadership” and can read about management as a “performing art”, but to lift up and focus specifically on the performative aspects of leadership, we believe, offered a fresh, useful way to see, understand, and undertake organizational change.

THE AUDIENCE: SPEAKING TO RESEARCH CONSUMERS Although research reports can speak to logico-scientific and narrative modes of thought, a scientific audience typically expects you to drive your argument with theory, explicate it with cause–effect logic, and validate your findings with rigorous methods. An audience of practitioners, by comparison, will expect you to drive your argument in practical terms, illustrate your points with examples, and demonstrate how your conclusions can yield solutions to problems faced in the practice world. Representing the scholarly audience, board members of the Academy of Management Journal were asked to rate “what makes an article most interesting” for publication.19 Not surprisingly—and fully consistent with the storytelling perspective—a top factor was that the findings were counterintuitive: they either went against folk wisdom or created an “aha” moment for readers. Equally important was the quality of the scholarship—a well-crafted theory, adding something new to or synthesizing the literature, good sampling and data analysis, and a good fit between findings and their theoretical foundations. Also, good writing and generalizable results make research appealing to scholars. To learn more about writing for academic publication, see Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article and Anne Huff’s Writing for Scholarly Publication, plus a thoughtful series of seven articles on “Publishing in the Academy of Management Journal”.20 If you are new to all this: (1) try out different titles before submission; (2) write your introduction after you see what you’ve written; (3) cite references that speak directly to your research and explain how they relate to your study; (4) speak clearly to the study’s limitations; and (5) have a practitioner read your implications for practice—are they relevant, useful, and actionable? When the practitioner is your audience, things change. There are several “bridge” journals, such as the California Management Review, Sloan Management Review, and Organizational Dynamics, that target both scholars and scholarly practitioners. Although the quality of ideas, research methods, analyses, and argument and conclusions are important, relevance to practice becomes a primary, rather than secondary, consideration. The Harvard Business Review remains the Holy Grail as the most widely subscribed and useful practitioner journal for managers. Relevance to practice is sine qua non for its readers.

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Bob Sutton’s popular HBR article, “More trouble than they’re worth”, featured the memorable guideline: The No Asshole Rule. The theorizing behind this dictum referenced “emotional contagion” whereby “if you work for a jerk, odds are you will become one.” Evidence included a survey of 800 employees where 10 percent witnessed daily incivility on their jobs and 20 percent were direct targets of incivility at least once a week. Another study found that 25 percent of the sample witnessed incivility of some kind on the job every day and 50 percent reported being direct targets of incivility at least once a week. Sutton also described studies on workplace bullying. The title and tone of his treatment created an “aha” moment for practitioners. In its guidelines for contributors, HBR highlights the importance of the author’s expertise, using evidence behind practical messages, and writing in a way that is “persuasive and a pleasure to read.” Sutton’s article certainly fills the bill.

Make Your Findings “Sticky” Penn Jillette, author and one-half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, says it bluntly: “No one cares about what you write or say. They’re looking for any excuse to not read or listen. You have to make sure they don’t have one.”21 The likelihood of your research message being read, heard, digested, and found useful is a function of its “stickiness”—results that grab attention, gain credibility, and are readily shared.22 The Heath Brothers, Chip and Dan, popularized the concept of stickiness. Scholars need to hear Chip’s key point, “The curse of knowledge is the great villain in our book … as soon as we become experts, we become bad communicators because we can’t really imagine the position of our audience.” To make your message, contributions, or findings sticky, consider energizing them with one or more of the following: z Keep it Simple: Strong messages strip your research down to its core. Take your big idea and main finding and express it as a maxim. Much of Jim Collins’ success was attributable to the way he framed his principles (e.g., “First Who, then What”). z Emphasize the Unexpected: Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. One of Adam Grant’s counterintuitive findings was that giving is more engaging than receiving. z Make it Concrete: The most memorable messages are expressed in terms of vivid pictures, analogies, and human actions. Chip Heath calls this the “Velcro” theory of memory: the more hooks in your idea, the more chances it will stick. z Credibility Counts: Sticky ideas carry their own credentials and connect to real life experiences. Listen to Bob Sutton on his No Asshole Rule: “I was determined to use the word asshole in the title because, to me, other words like ‘jerk,’ ‘bully,’ ‘tyrant,’ ‘despot,’ and so on are just euphemisms for what people really call those creeps.” z Link it to Emotions: Can scholarly writing make you laugh or cry? Not often, but Don Roy made us laugh with his study of “banana time” on the factory floor and John van Maanen caused a shudder with “The Smile Factory: Work at Disneyland”. z Build a Story: Cognitive scientist Roger Shank contends, “Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.”

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Talk and Visual Messaging Talking is different from writing; spoken and written language come from two, somewhat independent, brain systems. A presentation includes words but also tone, inflection, non-verbal communication, and, of course, audience engagement. There are plenty of guidebooks, videos, and such on how to give a good presentation—and how to tailor your talk to a public, educational, professional, or scientific audience. It also helps to listen to good talkers. For our part, nothing works better than you being you—most live (including Zoom) audiences can smell a fake. As for the associated visuals, remember the adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words”; this turns out to be a complex assertion whose answer hinges on visual versus verbal information processing. Research finds that both can trigger similar cognitive schemas we might have about the world but stimulate different neural processes in the left (verbal) versus right (visual) brain. Studies in education confirm that individuals differ in their visual versus verbal learning capabilities. At the same time, people seem to retain information better when they are exposed to both verbal and visual stimuli via what is called the “additive” effect. Worley and Pillans’ chart on the “agility pyramid” visualized a conceptual idea. So does an iceberg, which communicates that cultural elements above the waterline obscure the many more that are unseen below the surface. In turn, scatterplots and line, bar, and pie charts enable a practical audience to see and digest data more readily than with, say, its portrayal in a regression analysis or structural equations. Cristina Gibson was part of a collaborative project team with a large global mining company. The project explored the efficacy of developing and introducing improved operating practices through community of practice teams which evolved into global virtual teams. The researchers employed growth modeling techniques and Bayesian analysis to map three years of data showing how 60 different teams developed over their lifespan.23 The smart data visualization that continuously tracked the development and implementation of new practices directly engaged the technically proficient mining engineers who were partners in the research. As Gibson explains, “When working with engineers and knowledge workers, growth modelling and the graphic depiction of results shows them what happens at inflection points. We could look at the slope, and variation around the slope, and then start to interpret what’s going on together.” Clearly, the world of practitioners is as diverse as the big tent of researchers. There are lots of different orientations toward learning and ways of valuing and interpreting information, and this means that deciding how to visualize and engage practitioners in research is a critical part of bridging the gap between theory and practice and shapes the relationship between the researchers and organizational practitioners. Looking for more ideas on visualization? Look at guidebooks and videos on what graphic visualist Scott Berinato calls “dataviz”.24 Edward R. Tufte, variously described as the “the Leonardo da Vinci of data” and “the Galileo of Graphics”, provides a treasure trove of material and reminds us that “Evidence is evidence, whether words, numbers, images, diagrams, still, or moving.” His charting philosophy: “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.”25

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Creative Communication Finally, there is a long line of literature on how the creative process of artists is comparable to that of scientists and inventors. This raises questions as to what extent the arts can be a creative medium of expression for scholars. One set of clues comes from Taylor and Hansen who differentiate “presentational knowing” from more formal propositional knowledge. They contend that presentational forms of expression, such as storytelling, drawing, music, and drama, are ideally suited to tapping into and representing people’s tacit knowledge of themselves, other people, and the world around them. Gagliardi suggests that rational representations of reality can grow out of aesthetic experiences and understanding.26 How does this apply to communicating ideas and research? Nancy Adler is an organizational scholar, researcher, and visual artist. Her 2017 article, “Twenty-first century leadership: A return to beauty”, begins with a quote from Aristotle, “The soul never … thinks without a picture.” Her article, co-authored with the late Andre Delbecq, makes a logical case for incorporating beauty into practice and their argument is supported throughout by evocative quotes and poems and duplications of Adler’s paintings.27 This scholarly thread has assembled under the banner of AOMO—the Art of Management and Organization. Scholars and practitioners who affiliate with this group explore and promote the arts as a means of understanding management and organization life. Several of them use “art” to communicate their insights and research findings. Consider some of these artful communication possibilities used by creative organization and management researchers: z z z z z

Dramatic plays (comedy or tragedy) about organization life. Cartoons, visual scribings, and illustrations. Painting, sculpture, photos, films, and assemblages. Songs and symphonies. Novels, short stories, and poems.

COMMUNICATION CHANNELS: SPREADING AND AMPLIFYING YOUR MESSAGE Papers and presentations remain the main communication channels for disseminating research to scholars and practitioners. New outlets have emerged, however, that can broaden its exposure. Google Scholar lists your journal publications and books, counts your citations, and rates your research productivity. ResearchGate and Academia.edu are social networking sites for scholars and researchers (from students to seasoned professors) to share their papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. This makes your work more broadly accessible: it is easy to upload and download academic papers on both sites (though journal copyright provisions make some papers inaccessible without a fee). The research offices of many universities promote and publicize their faculty’s scholarship, and departmental or personal websites enable scholars to describe their work in “user-friendly” ways and provide links to papers, blogs, presentations, and the like. In addition, to get your work out also consider the growing

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number of “open-access” e-journals or choosing the “open access” option offered by journal publishers. Academic publishers are also getting more active in promoting scholarship with early e-publication (well before print), article sharing resources, and posts on social media. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular The Tipping Point gives us three other ways to think about channels for pushing your ideas to a broader audience: be a maven, connector, or salesperson.

Be a Maven Mavens are “information specialists” who freely, willingly, and enthusiastically share information and knowledge. Nadya Zhexembayeva, who grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan, runs a digital idea factory. She has written two research-based books: Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage (with Chris Laszlo) and Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World and has contributed to both the academic and practice literature. To promote her own and to alert her followers to others’ research, she is a TED-talker, podcaster, tweeter, and publishes a monthly e-newsletter, “The Reinvention Officer”, that offers tips and links to blogs, books, videos, and academic work on how to “Reinvent yourself. Reinvent your company. Reinvent your world.” Want your work noticed? She has nearly 70 000 Twitter followers. From Eindhoven, Jan Spruit, who studies open innovation and digital entrepreneurship, creates games and runs innovation labs and contests through his innovativedutch.com. Every few months he issues an infographic on, for instance, 71 innovation models, innovation thinking methods, or the corporate innovation ecosystem, to name a few. An entire body of literature, or thinking, or concepts on one page, in a clever and compelling graphic display. An engaging infographic on your research (like a poster presentation at a conference) increases its accessibility and exposure. Electronic presentations can also include animation, emojis, and interactivity.

Be a Connector Connectors are “networkers” who know and connect large numbers of people. Adam Grant has nearly 3.4 million followers on the social connector platform LinkedIn (and 320 000 Twitter followers). Although he has strong credentials as a scholar, teacher, and popular scientific author, what makes him a connector? Listen to an article about him in the New York Times: “Helpfulness is Grant’s credo. He is the colleague who is always nominating another for an award or taking the time to offer a thoughtful critique or writing a lengthy letter of recommendation for a student…” When we interviewed Grant, he talked about “what makes my day.” “Someone sends me an email. They write ‘I’m looking for a study on (fill in the blank)’. I immediately think, ‘do I know somebody’ and try to make the connection. That’s how good science works. That’s how problems get solved.” What is the key to building a personal knowledge network? When Grant joined LinkedIn in December 2003, he began making three introductions per day. By now he has facilitated over 15 000 connections within his network. A colleague refers to Grant as a “quiet” connector.

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Susan Cain, author of Quiet, says that quiet connectors “go through the world looking for kindred spirits.”28

Be a Salesperson Salespeople are “persuaders” who, in this context, get people to consume their ideas and opinions. Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive among six other cleverly titled volumes, is a top-selling management book writer. What does he have to offer practitioners? “Popcorn”—or so his publisher puts it because his readers want practical ideas in “bite-size nuggets”. Popular management book writers, like Spencer Johnson (Who Moved my Cheese) and his co-author Ken Blanchard (The One Minute Manager), also understand that practitioners are busy and easily distracted. Blanchard admits that the Cheese book was really “a children’s book for adults.” Now you might object that these sales people are not communicating “research” to practitioners. There are, however, academics who do practical research and market it skillfully. A search on YouTube finds hundreds of Henry Mintzberg’s video clips on his research about managers’ roles, decision making, lonely leadership, and building a better world. Many are self-authored; others are TED talks and interviews (in English and in French). Both unabashedly promote his research. Textbook authors Lee Bolman and Terry Deal reach a broad audience with their “four frames” of organization behavior. Their work is research-based, widely cited, and includes a Leadership Orientations Instrument self-assessment. Faculty can access relevant videos, teaching cases, and exercises, plus an Instructor’s Manual, PowerPoint slides, and a test bank. Included in Bolman and Deal’s oeuvre are a short “how-to” book (How Great Leaders Think), a fable-and-story driven work (Leading with Soul), and The Wizard and the Warrior, which is also available as an eight-page briefing from Soundview Executive Book Summaries, an organization that provides “Concentrated Knowledge for the Busy Executive”. These scholars aren’t selling popcorn so they work hard at packaging their knowledge for use by otherwise preoccupied practitioners. As a research communicator: • Do your research communications “tell a story?” What kind? • Have you made effective use of visual messaging? • Can you be a maven, connector, and/or salesperson to promote your research? If not, who can serve these functions for you?

COMMUNICATING TO IMPACT PRACTICE To close this chapter on communicating research, we describe how a program combining research and practice got an unlikely start and then stretched over forty years.29 The unlikely start: while in graduate school, Mirvis began (with Ed Lawler) a study of the quality of work life in a public US company. The intent was to publish a work life audit in the company’s annual

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report to investors by drawing from an employee survey and personnel records. Shortly before the report was issued, however, the company was hit by an unfriendly takeover bid and was thereafter acquired by a conglomerate in a “white knight” acquisition. Mirvis suggested to the acquired CEO, reeling from the loss of independence and characterized as a “wounded leader” by his peers, that his company engage in a collaborative research effort about its handling of integration and the impact on employees. Over the next year, Mirvis regularly interviewed the firm’s senior executives and met with them to review the findings and implications using the “clinical” research model described in Chapter 6. A fellow graduate student, Mitchell Marks, conducted a second survey of employees (post-acquisition) to gauge how people perceived management’s handling of the integration and to determine if there were any changes in employees’ quality of work life. Following a year of study, we had a good case-based understanding of the human impact of an acquisition, but with an n = 1, it was hard to generalize conclusions. Accordingly, we scoured the literature on the human side of M&A and the change research in general. We found references to three broad human reactions that also appeared in the case: (1) the impact of stress and uncertainty on people and decision making; (2) movement toward crisis management; and (3) dynamics of ethnocentrism, stereotyping, and polarizing that amplify the “clash of cultures” in M&A. Truth be told, the findings garnered with these methods were not the stuff of “A” level journals. So, in the interest of disseminating useful knowledge, we published our first “theory” papers in a trade journal Mergers & Acquisitions and the popular magazine Psychology Today. We termed these three reactions “The Merger Syndrome”. Barbara Blumenthal, a doctoral student at Michigan’s business school in the early 1980s, read the Merger Syndrome. She forwarded our research to her husband, W. Michael Blumenthal, then CEO of Burroughs, who in 1986 put a “bear hug” on Sperry when his company took over its historic UNIVAC computing business. At the time, it was the largest unfriendly takeover in history. He recognized that the combination needed the technology and talent from both sides to be successful. Hence, he proposed this become the Sperry/Burroughs partnership. He called each of us shortly after the deal and invited us to study and assist him in making the merger work. Our prior study had focused on the social dynamics from the acquired side of the deal. In this one, we had the chance to study (and affect) the doings of the lead firm. In an action research role, Mirvis and Marks worked with leaders of Unisys (the combined company) to develop merger principles, establish a joint company integration steering committee, and bring the “whole system” of transition teams together for progress reviews. This research opened up a goldmine of new experiences to theorize a more complete picture of the human side of M&A. Drawing on these two cases, we identified three phases of a deal (i.e., the precombination, combination, and postcombination periods), the operational tasks and psychological dynamics from the buyer and supplier sides, and their interactions at each phase. The work at Unisys led to “fifteen minutes of fame” when we were featured in a cover story in Fortune about the deal and dubbed “merger mavens”. Thereafter, each of us began to do research and consulting with companies involved in combinations. Theorizing based on our first two case studies and stories from these subsequent deals featured in our first quasi-academic book Managing the Merger (1992).

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We got kudos for the merger book but, frankly, it did not make much of a dent in practice. To extend our reach, we participated in seminars on M&A with the American Management Association and Marks took the lead on a practice-oriented volume Joining Forces: Making One Plus One Equal Three in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Alliances (1998; updated in 2010 with some newer research and examples). We also published focused articles on select M&A practices—strategic-and-psychological preparation, managing transition structures, dealing with survivor sickness, and monitoring the impact of combinations—in bridge journals like Organization Dynamics, Human Resource Management, and Personnel Journal. As noted throughout this volume, practitioners gravitate toward practical knowledge manifest in frameworks, tools, and decision aids. Accordingly, we also partnered with a community of practice, The M&A Leadership Council, to develop and disseminate The Employee Handbook for Navigating Mergers & Acquisitions. With scholar-practitioner Ron Ashkenas, we devised a “toolkit” for managing M&A and wrote two employee-centered articles for HBR, one of which included a self-assessment survey on “rebounding from career setbacks”. Finally, to stay current with academic research and test it against our experience, we joined a group of post-merger integration scholars that meets annually at the Academy of Management conference to review scholarly publications for the year, discuss theoretical and research trends, and take a deep-dive into selected topics.

POINTS TO PONDER This chapter has explored some of the not-so-obvious aspects of communicating your research externally. Nowadays you can use multiple mediums and channels to reach a practice-oriented audience as well as academic colleagues. Note, too, that research communication can be a continuous process with initial ideas and early findings shared via conferences and social media to garner “buzz” and gain feedback to refine your thinking and research plans. What is your strategy for reaching and affecting practice? As a research communicator: • Does your research connect to the Zeitgeist—with what is going on in society and in professional practice and organizations? • Have you found intermediary institutions and audiences in your knowledge network who can partner with you in knowledge creation and dissemination? • Are you providing frameworks, tools, and guides that enable practitioners to use your knowledge in practice?

  Do you plan to exchange knowledge with practitioners in your study or consult with them about the results? At a minimum, this involves briefings or workshops where you and practitioners dialogue about your research findings and their meaning and implications. It can also involve collaboration in the research effort up to and including participatory research where both sides have some say-so over what is studied and how, and co-determine how to apply

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what is being learned to the situation at hand. We look at variants of the research role in the next chapter on managing relationships in the field.

NOTES 1.

Bartunek, J. and Rynes, S. (2010). The construction and contributions of “implications for practice”: What’s in them and what might they offer? Academy of Management Learning and Education, 9(1), 100–117.

2.

Tourish, D. (2020). The triumph of nonsense in management studies. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(1), 99–109; Hopwood, A. (2009). On striving to give a critical edge to Critical Management Studies. In M. Alvesson, T. Bridgman and H. Willmott (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 515–24.

3. See Benson, G.S. (2011). Popular and influential management books. In  Mohrman, S. et al. (eds), Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler, pp. 289–308. 4. Lasswell, H.D. (1948). The structure and function of communication in society. In Bryson, L. (ed.), The Communication of Ideas. New York, NY: Harper. 5.

Davis, M.S. (1971). That’s interesting! Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 309–44.

6.

Beer, M. (1992). Strategic-change research: An urgent need for usable rather than useful knowledge. Journal of Management Inquiry, 1(2), 111–16.

7.

Consider, as examples, Tichy’s practice workbooks in Control your own Destiny, The Leadership Engine, and Judgment; Kouzes and Posner’s leadership assessments; Senge’s Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Osterwalder’s business model canvas; and Verne Harnish’s templates on Scaling Up.

8. Brown, S.L. and Eisenhardt, K.M. (1997). The art of continuous change: Linking complexity theory and time-paced evolution in relentlessly shifting organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42(1), 1–34; Brown, S.L. and Eisenhardt, K.M. (1998). Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Harvard Business Press; Eisenhardt, K.M. and Brown, S.L. (1998). Time pacing: Competing in markets that won’t stand still. Harvard Business Review, 76(2), 59–70. 9. Edmondson, A.C. (2012).  Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. 10. Luca, M. and Bazerman, M.H. (2020). The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-driven World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 11. Barrett, F.J. and Cooperrider, D.L. (1990). Generative metaphor intervention: A new approach for working with systems divided by conflict and caught in defensive perception.  The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 26(2), 219–39. 12. Kozubek, J. (2018). The future of science storytelling. Scientific American. 30 April. Accessed at https://​blogs​ .scientificamerican​.com/​observations/​the​-future​-of​-science​-storytelling/​. 13. Bruner, J.S. (2009). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 14. Van Maanen, J. (2011). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 15. Kociatkiewicz, J. and Kostera, M. (2016). Grand plots of management bestsellers: Learning from narrative and thematic coherence.  Management Learning,  47(3), 324–42; Hatch, M.J., Kostera, M. and Kozminski, A.K. (2009).  The Three Faces of Leadership: Manager, Artist, Priest. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons;

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Czarniawska, B. (1997). Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 16. Mirvis, P.H., Ayas, K. and Roth, G. (2003). To the Desert and Back: The Story of One of the Most Dramatic Business Transformation on Record. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 17. Kleiner, Art and Roth, George (1997). How to make experience your company’s best teacher. Harvard Business Review, 7(5), September–October. 18. Carlson, M. (1996). Performance. London: Routledge. 19. Bartunek, J.M., Rynes, S.L. and Ireland, R.D. (2006). What makes management research interesting, and why does it matter? Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 9–15. 20. Becker, H. (2007). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Huff, A. (1999). Writing for Scholarly Publication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 21. See https://​hbr​.org/​2016/​10/​penn​-jillette. 22. Rousseau, D.M. and Boudreau, J.W. (2011). Sticky findings: Research evidence practitioners find useful. In Mohrman, S. et al., Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler, pp. 269–87. 23. Collins, C.G., Gibson, C.B., Quigley, N.R. and Parker, S.K. (2016). Unpacking team dynamics with growth modeling: An approach to test, refine, and integrate theory. Organizational Psychology Review, 6(1), 63–91. 24. Berinato, S. (2016). Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. 25. Tufte, E.R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Vol. 2). Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press; Tufte, E.R. and Robins, D. (1997). Visual Explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. 26. Shlain, L. (1993). Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light. New York, NY: Perennial; Taylor, S. and Hansen, H. (2005). Finding form: Looking at the field of organizational aesthetics. Journal of Management Studies, 42(6), 1211–31; Gagliardi, P. (1996). Exploring the aesthetic side of organizational life. In Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C. and Nord, W.R. (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage. 27. Adler, N.J. and Delbecq, A.L. (2018). Twenty-first century leadership: A return to beauty. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(2), 119–37. 28. Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. Broadway Books. 29. Mirvis, P.H. and Marks, M.L. (2017). Co-researching and – Doing M&A Integration: Crossing the Scholar– Practitioner Divide. In Research in Organizational Change and Development, vol. 25. Bingley: Emerald.

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Managing research relationships in the field The excitement of getting into the field, talking with practitioners about how they deal with challenges, seeing real work happen, and having the chance to produce useful knowledge is seductive. It is soul food for many sweet spot researchers. But, as we have portrayed, the worlds of academe and practice are different and they often bump into each other. This chapter concludes the “how to” section of the book and explores some of the practical, political, and ethical problems associated with doing research in the field. These issues are rarely presented, let alone discussed, in traditional research methods courses. We begin with basic entry issues and then consider challenges in defining and establishing roles in different kinds of research projects. We end with a look at challenges you will face in sweet spot research and suggestions for how to address them.

GETTING IN When scholars leave their laboratory or survey center to conduct research in organizations, they often enter an enterprise through a sponsor who has particular interests in the subjects to be studied and outcomes to be achieved. The relationship may be new or mature but two or more nodes in the knowledge-generating value stream are connecting. Once inside, researchers interact with and study people in different functions and power positions, and they produce findings that bear on the interests of management and employees but also other parties, such as unions, investors, consumers, NGOs, and the public. A host of social, political, and cultural dynamics is at play during the research process and researchers are a weak force in a field of strong ones. They have only limited means of ensuring that their study is done effectively, ethically (without harm), and of tangible benefit to scholarship and to the people involved. Sweet spot research distinguishes itself in this regard and demands that you engage these forces with your eyes open. Research engagement typically follows one of two routes: either the researcher initiates contact or the organization reaches out.

Researcher Initiated Projects As you get your research topic and methods identified, a key question arises: how do you locate an appropriate field site(s) for your study? If you are a graduate student or early career faculty

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member, your adviser, senior professors, academic peers, or even an alumni association may have good contacts and can arrange introductions to a potential sponsor in an organization. Remember: you are part of a network and need to learn to use it. However, even mid- to late-career researchers have to “work the network”. When Mohrman and Worley explored the organization design implications of sustainability, they initially drew on their network of sponsors at the Center for Effective Organizations. They screened sponsors to find the best candidates for study and then “sold” the research to them. That was the easy part. Not every sponsor was a good research site and so they also tapped into their scholar–practitioner network to identify colleagues who were working with organizations on sustainability issues, determine if the work included organization design changes, and then convince both the scholar and the company to be a part of the study. Whomever you contact, you will need to be prepared with a plainly written and short description of the research and its purposes, the benefits for the company and for science, and operational details, such as how many people should be involved in the study, what will be asked of them, how much time is needed, and so forth.

Organizationally Initiated Research Organizations interested in problem-solving research often contact a university researcher or research center. You improve your chances of being approached by being where practitioners are—at conferences, industry gatherings, or university events. The appeal of working with academics includes their presumed rigor and objectivity and the authority behind their conclusions. A key question arises for researcher and company alike: is the organization a “subject” of academic study or rather a “client” who sets the parameters for the study and expects particular benefits from it? When a company invites you in, it is crucial to understand the firm’s motives behind a study. What is the potential and expected impact on the research participants as well as on employees overall, management, and stakeholders inside and outside of the firm? To be sure, the vast majority of studies are handled professionally and ethically. But risks emerge when companies presume you serve management’s interest and expect “friendly” findings. We speak based on personal experience. A study of the factors influencing clerical workers’ job satisfaction was subsequently used by a corporate sponsor to shape an anti-union drive, and amidst a study of conflict in an executive team, a CEO queried one of us on which of two executives should be promoted and whether or not another one should be fired. On the other hand, studying and producing knowledge with organizations has its rewards. Positive results from a study on the introduction of robots into a factory were used to redesign worker training and to respond to the concerns of female employees that had heretofore been discounted. In an action research project, a young executive who successfully launched a fin-tech innovation was publicly praised by the CEO and, interest piqued by the research, decided to apply to a PhD program. Whether researcher or organizationally initiated, these kinds of risks and benefits are to be expected in studies in “real-life” settings. You are dealing with a complex social system where research questions, data, and its interpretations can variously evoke instrumental interest,

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curiosity, or concern, and research findings can confirm current organizational practices, guide new actions, or pose potential threats. Starting your research: • How did (or will) you locate a research sponsor and site? • What are your sponsor’s motivations? What are your aims? • How might your study impact research participants and other stakeholders?

MANAGING RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS: ROLE SYSTEMS We have emphasized the central place of knowledge networks in sweet spot research and the engagement between academic and practitioner communities. You are familiar with your own scholarly network, including your home institution (e.g., university, research center, academic department), the interests of your research colleagues, and associated expectations about how you do research, its products, and the standards that govern it. But as you enter into a research arrangement, you cross over into the practice world and often encounter different priorities on the import of theory versus practice or research rigor versus relevance. Whose sense of morality and responsibility ought to hold sway in your research effort? Whether your research arrangement is simple (one researcher/one organization) or complex (a multi-party research collaboration), you will need to build a productive relationship in this multi-sided knowledge network.

Research Role Systems Exhibit 8.1 illustrates the interface between a researcher’s role system and that of a partner organization in the simple case.1 As a starting point, researchers must carefully consider their roles and relationships with direct participants in the study but also with the full set of stakeholders (inside and outside the organization) who have an interest in or could be affected by the research and its results. All cultures, whether societies or organizations, provide standard role models that can be tentatively invoked and tested for their applicability to new situations. For example, a graduate student or young academic coming in to study an organization is likely to be perceived as an expert on a topic, but perhaps naive as to how things really work in organizations and unschooled in corporate politics. Cynically, they could be seen as targets for cooptation. By comparison, researchers employed by a consulting firm or an academic combining research and consulting might be seen as either potential allies or enemies. What is the perceived “agenda” behind the research: to increase productivity, make life better for people, eliminate jobs, clean up a mess, support management’s bidding, or what? Organization participants first look to who in their company is sponsoring the study—an HR representative, plant manager, or marketing executive—to suss out the situation and gauge intentions. Communiques and meetings may or may not clarify motivations behind the study

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and address participants’ unspoken hopes or concerns. Most often participants simply go along with proposed research protocols. This kind of informal role taking is generally workable in research studies—until something unexpected happens and/or conflicts erupt. There are institutional mechanisms that can forestall some predictable problems that confound the research process. Academic researchers, for example, are often required to submit research proposals to an Institutional Review Board (IRB) on their campus, prior to starting a study. Some organizations also have policies to protect the interests of employees who participate in research studies and many have guidelines to prevent the publication of sensitive, confidential, or competitive information that might harm the firm. A researcher studying an organization is sometimes obliged to disguise its identity in publications or give the firm “prior review” of the material in publications in which the firm is named.

Exhibit 8.1

The research role system

As sensible as this all sounds, in our experience, few researchers entering an organization have fully clarified what they are up to (even to themselves) or thought through the full range of risks and benefits to research participants and the organization overall. In turn, research participants are typically clueless about what to expect and unaware of their rights and responsibilities. Can an employee, for example, refuse to participate in a study even though the boss is sponsoring it and peers have joined in? What happens when a researcher, via a survey or interview, causes embarrassment by delving into what a respondent deems a “private” subject? Can employees count on assurances that their organization won’t use research findings to take advantage of them? Let’s be clear: it is the researcher’s responsibility to anticipate and address these kinds of issues. This requires not simply role taking but role making—clarifying the researcher’s role

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and the roles of all parties to the study and setting up ways to clear up misunderstandings and deal with role conflicts.

Establish the role set An initial challenge is to establish the research role set—the stakeholders (persons and groups) who should be considered a part of the research effort or might be affected by the results. In many cases, it is not clear. During the first weeks of a project, your contact is often limited to a few people in functional areas and in management. At the same time, there are often others in the organization who may have a legitimate “stake” in the study. How will their interests be represented in your study? Let’s revisit Mirvis’ study of the company hit by an unfriendly takeover attempt and then purchased in a “white-knight” acquisition. At the time, executives were reeling, the organization was in chaos, and work life was turbulent. Mirvis proposed doing a study of the “post-acquisition” experience of the top executive team and workforce at large. The firm’s CEO, a proponent of behavioral science research, favored the idea but only under conditions that the new owners were not informed of the study or involved in any way. The researcher tried to make a case for involving the new owners but the executive team saw it as “damn near suicidal”. Mirvis did the study without the new owner’s involvement. Was this research choice ethical or simply expedient?

Clarify roles What is your role in a study? At minimum, your role is to conduct research effectively and minimize harm to research participants. In so doing, you may develop or test hypotheses, gather data from organization members or other stakeholders, observe what is going on, or introduce an intervention. Surely your role as a scholar is also to produce knowledge in line with professional standards about objectivity in gathering data and reporting findings in publications. Beyond that, the organization may enact or perceive your role in the enterprise as an impartial seeker of truth, a scholar helping things to improve, or an agent of management. Which ones apply to you? Merely identifying the other actors and interests in the role set does not clarify the part they are to play in the study. Research participants need to understand whether they are to be uninvolved observers, passive subjects, active participants in a change program, or clients who should expect to receive specific benefits. It is incumbent on researchers to limit the guesswork by working closely with the participants to define their respective roles and to arrive at mutually understood (if not always initial or preferred) role definitions. Discussions about who has the final say-so over the research design, sampling, and data gathering, the contents of study publications, and the action implications of any results are also helpful. Before the study commences, all these matters need to be clarified—in your own mind and with your organizational sponsor/client.

Role conflict Research role conflicts are more likely when studying an organization already facing conflict. In these cases, the researcher should clarify his or her role with respect to labor and man-

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agement, supervisors and subordinates, competing departments, and so on. In most cases, you will assume the role of a neutral party. (The researcher’s role typically does not include mediating the conflict and/or carrying out the research in a way that advantages one side or the other.) Besides clarifying roles, it is incumbent on the researcher to build role relations with the participants and other stakeholders. This should provide for the joint and collaborative examination of the proposed methods and goals of the research (and unintended consequences) and establish procedures to acknowledge and resolve conflicts.

Situation awareness Field research is not conducted in a controlled or clinical setting, but rather in complex social systems where economic, social, and political dynamics can impinge on your desired research role and role relationships. We have talked about how role clarification and contracting can help to minimize the untoward impact of these dynamics. In addition, we believe it is useful to “preview” what can go wrong with your research such that you might anticipate problems that can arise and prepare yourself for responding to them. 1. Think through your research process. You are likely to have a research plan for entering your site, introducing your study, gathering data, maybe doing an intervention, making sense of it all, and disseminating the findings. Populate your plan with the people and interests that will be involved or affected at each stage. Identify their expected roles and role behavior and then consider what else might occur. 2. “What if” problems occur? What-if theorizing about potential problems heightens attention to unexpected events and can inform contingency planning. “Thinking the unthinkable” and “worst case” analyses prepare you for potential shocks. 3. Vigilance. Expect something to go wrong and attend to any deviation from an expected result because it can snowball into larger problems. This starts with “situational awareness” but includes regular monitoring and problem-finding skills. 4. Resilience. Still, not every problem can be anticipated and not every way of responding can be planned for and rehearsed. Scenarios, role-plays, and other sensitizing exercises help you to think through and act out how to deal with unexpected situations with fresh, rather than programmed, responses. 5. Periodic reviews. Formal error prevention, detection, and analysis procedures can also be useful. Medical centers conduct regular reviews of patient treatment where physicians, nurses, and attendants together reconstruct what happened, what complications arose, and what errors occurred and then develop what to do differently next time. And while these reviews are done retrospectively, they can also be done prospectively and mid-stream of a research effort. One could argue that doing research is hard enough and that adding in so much planning and attention to managing research and your research self makes it harder still. Thus, cost/benefit considerations should be taken into account and preparatory attention to problems should be scaled to the complexity of the research you will undertake.

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MANAGING RESEARCH IN A MULTI-PARTY KNOWLEDGE NETWORK As a sweet spot researcher, when you move from the simple case to multi-party networks, you may be a central node in their formation. Attention must be given to the roles, relationships, and operating ground rules to be applied to all members. It calls on you to be a proactive manager of research relationships; it is an ideal way to immerse yourself into practice and to increase the relevance of your research. Understanding the purpose and goals of the network allows you to contribute to its development and to attend to its maintenance and management.

Motivations to Participate In thinking through the practical and scientific issues of multi-party, collaborative research, begin by recognizing four different factors likely to motivate you and the participants: z New Phenomenon/New Situation. On the academic side, a new phenomenon that is under-studied and under-theorized calls for seeing it in different places and circumstances. On the practice end, learning from other organizations is most relevant when all concerned are confronted with a new challenge, often a discontinuity from the past, and there are no simple answers on what is happening, why, and what to do about it. z Knowledge is Intangible. On the scholarly side, tacit knowledge is made more explicit by observing a variety of practices, interacting with practitioners, and making collective sense of what is going on. Companies can learn from the models and frameworks produced in the research as well as from what other companies are doing. Just as important is gaining the “know how” to act on this knowledge. To distill all this requires exchange, including telling war-and-horror stories with fellow practitioners, comparing notes on shared and differing experiences, and even visiting one another’s organizations. z Professional Ties/Identity. What motivates practitioners to band together and share information is their professional, rather than their corporate, identities. To be sure, there are some risks in collaborating with other companies. Participants might reveal information about their circumstances, operations, and problems that would otherwise be deemed private or even proprietary. But the benefits of collaborating can be substantial. z Desire to Help. As a corollary, academics must have an affinity for practice and sincere desire to see practitioners do better. A joint forum won’t work if academics see members primarily as “subjects” for their study and companies don’t want to help each other.2

Multi-Party Relationships Let’s look at an example of a multi-party collaborative research effort to explore how research role systems are formed and managed in these settings. The Executive Forum on Corporate Citizenship (EFCC) case points to several practical challenges where the parties have distinct as well as common interests aimed at creating and communicating “actionable knowledge”.

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Managers at Petro-Canada who were seeking to develop a more holistic approach to corporate responsibility noted that many of the main issues were being addressed within the company, but in functional silos. Hazel Gillespie, Community Investment Manager, and David Stuart, of Environment, Health, Safety, and Security, recalled that their own activities were “contributing to the company’s internal and external reputation,” but observed, “We weren’t doing it in a coordinated, concentrated, focused, strategic way.” Even when efforts were aligned, “It was largely because of personal relationships, rather than any kind of systematic management system.” Other business leaders who joined the EFCC, hosted by Boston College (BC), to explore ways to advance and institutionalize social responsibility in companies, echoed these concerns. This research project was initiated by a team of researchers from BC (including Mirvis) to get “on the ground” data on how companies were integrating corporate citizenship policies and practices into their organization. Eight North America-based firms, chosen to reflect different industries, sizes, and customer bases and to encompass a variety of economic, social, and environmental challenges, joined the EFCC. At the outset, the research team conducted baseline interviews in each company among a range of individuals engaged in or knowledgeable about citizenship activity. The team did a similar set of interviews as the project was ending. The researchers hosted ten conference calls in which the participants were able to interact with each other while the project team gathered data on their perceptions and progress. Four in-person gatherings afforded practitioners an opportunity to share their progress and reflect on the researchers’ observations.

Identify the participants Typically, a research network (e.g., role set) emerges when, as in this case, a researcher or team and one or more organizations recognize that a problem or opportunity is worthy of study and that collaboration with other parties is useful. This phase has you “scouting” for other participants to include in the network by leveraging your contacts and institutional relationships that can serve as “attractors” to others. Exercising “due diligence” and considering the strategic, organizational, and cultural “fit” of potential partners is time consuming and often fraught with difficult choices of who to involve.

Convene the network This involves the initial coordinated activity of the network. Even at this early stage, a written agreement can frame and clarify the roles and responsibilities of the parties and define their respective “rights and duties”. There are also “soft” forms of contracting where informal norms govern members’ relationships. There is evidence aplenty that attention to “relationship building” is a boon to convening multi-party collaboration. An important output of the convening phase is agreement among the parties on the mission and commitments they want to make and building of trust among the partners. A key problem in convening is that the parties often speak a different language based on their different frames of reference. It is important to build a common vocabulary and shared understanding to exchange information. In the EFCC, various network members had a different “name” for their responsibility program—e.g., corporate citizenship, corporate

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responsibility, social responsibility, sustainability, or public affairs. The practitioners also came from different functions in their companies and had different reporting relationships. It took considerable time and discussion to sort through these different names and functions to reach a point where practitioners could understand one another’s jobs and ways of working. To complicate matters, one research team member took a “policy” perspective on corporate citizenship, another a managerial orientation, and a third a more agnostic, action oriented frame. With each team member interpreting data through his or her preferred lens and proposing incommensurate frameworks on what it all might mean for practice, it again took time and patience for the research team to clarify what exactly was being observed and what the implications might be.

Organize the network The network must be structured, studies conducted, data generated, and results shared. Collaboration strategies (coordination, cooperation, integration) have to be tailored to network purposes. Typically, researchers and organizations in a knowledge network create a research contract that addresses, among other topics: (1) scope of the research; (2) management and staffing of the research project; (3) schedules, milestones, and deliverables; (4) funding and budgets; (5) rights to publish and disseminate research results (internally and externally); (6) ownership of intellectual property arising from the research; (7) care of data and confidential information exchanged during the research; (8) protection of human research participants; and (9) rights and procedures to terminate the project. Although a research contract sets out the parameters of a multi-party study, the subsequent activities call for continuously assessing and improving collaborative processes and joint learning. Flexibility and adaptability among network parties is crucial. Other success factors center on whether or not the parties see tangible benefits to collaborating and value in the results.3

Exchange and develop knowledge We saw in Chapter 3 how researchers and practitioners in the Network for Business Sustainability progressed over time from talking at to talking with one another and finally to jointly exploring their distinct frames and understandings about sustainability and business. Paul Carlile identifies three boundaries to cross in the exchange of knowledge—syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic—and three ways to cross them: knowledge transfer, translation, and transformation.4 The EFCC provides a grounded example of each of them. As for transfer, clarifying similarities and differences in their titles, roles, and definitions of corporate responsibilities created what one called a “level set” among the corporate practitioners and sharing concrete examples of their work, challenges encountered, and both successes and failures gave them tangible material to chew over. These conversations also gave the researchers “food for thought” to dialogue over disciplinary differences in how they conceptualized the practice world. A translation problem cropped up in the EFCC during a discussion on how to effect organization change. One of the researchers, and some practitioners, spoke of planned change emanating from the “top down” through the hierarchy and effecting change through

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a rational, planned, step-by-step process—just like the textbooks say. However, this didn’t match the roles or experience of other practitioners who lacked CEO support and couldn’t rely on a top-down approach. Instead, they used more organic methods to exercise influence and move change forward in their companies. Using a rock-climbing metaphor, Laurie Regelbrugge, manager of corporate responsibility at Unocal, described her use of “handholds” to effect change in her company: In scaling a wall of rock, a rock climber must find and make effective use of the meager or substantial handholds along that wall. Some handholds that seem promising may ultimately lead the climber to a dead end, while others allow the person to reach the desired destination. Different climbers, presented with the same rock face, may choose a different set of handholds and, therefore, follow a slightly different path. The key is that there are often many options, and climbers choose certain holds for reasons having to do with their skills, experience, what results they can anticipate, and the plan they have for scaling the rock face. In interactive conversation, it was discovered that many EFCC participants used this kind of pragmatic approach of identifying and seizing opportunities for demonstrating success rather than establishing and adhering to an overarching strategy with prescribed steps and activities. Based on this exchange, the academics theorized differences between a planned top-down versus a more catalytic and improvisational change process.5 In the transformation problem, one group’s knowledge impedes the development of knowledge among another group, especially between researchers and practitioners. The EFCC research team originally set out to catalogue how practitioners align their responsibility efforts with business strategies, integrate responsibility into their organization structure and processes, and institutionalize it into the mindsets, values, and culture of their organization. This normative view of how corporate citizenship develops in companies has a prescriptive flavor. The research team was disappointed and frustrated by their lack of progress in getting others in the network to see “how things should work” in the first months of the EFCC. When the researchers let go of their favored framework, listened to and observed the participants moving things along in their companies, they tuned in to the practically difficult and politically charged realities of organization life. This opened them up to abductive thinking and fresh theorizing. The research team made a conceptual connection between the practitioners’ stories of building coalitions and creating coordination structures to support integration of responsibility functions in their companies with the emerging literature on complex adaptive systems (CAS). They then highlighted the importance of achieving “small wins”, of “re-using existing structures”, and of “balancing acts” (e.g., managers had to balance corporate interests against those of line managers, trade off the benefits of conforming to external codes versus developing ones unique to their own businesses). All of this translated practically in papers on how to “lead change from the middle”.6 Having multiple organizations involved in a collaborative study adds to the breadth and variability of data and informs the generalizability of conclusions. You can also benefit from engaging practitioners as co-interpreters and co-theorists. The chance to interact with so many

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practitioners, each with their own particular practices and understandings of them, yields a cornucopia of examples, anecdotes, and insights to inform theorizing. But it does require you to lay the foundation of trust and clarify the roles and responsibilities of the different parties. Forming research relationships: • How did (or will) you clarify roles and relationships among parties to a research study? • Have you encountered role conflicts in your research? How did you resolve them? • How do you handle knowledge transfer, translation, and transformation?

ETHICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN FIELD RESEARCH Ethical, scientific, and practical considerations are always in tension when doing organizational field research.7 At the core, ethical principles stress the need to: (1) do good (known as beneficence) and (2) do no harm (known as non-malfeasance). In practice, these ethical principles mean that you need to (1) explain the purpose of your research to participants; (2) obtain their voluntary consent to participate in the study; (3) ensure that individual data are anonymous and kept confidential (unless participants agree to disclosure); and (4) safeguard all data (e.g., completed surveys, research notes, and computer data files) in a secure location. Framing research in consideration of a practical problem raises a host of questions to which a researcher must attend: What is the nature of the problem? For whom is it a problem? Whose interests are served by generating knowledge to solve it? While you may consider your research question to be “scientific” and “value free”, the organization(s) you study will be full of values—some laudable and some not. The literature is full of examples of “partisan” definitions of problems, research questions that limit the scope of or predetermine conclusions, and researchers who, wittingly or unwittingly, collude with or serve vested interests.8 On this front, a cigarette company approached a research group about engaging in action research on organization redesign. The researchers understood the company was facing challenges of both theoretical and practical interest: How should they organize in response to market declines domestically, to market opportunities overseas, and to potential growth in vaping? All of this amidst sporadic public protests and a shifting regulatory environment. Were the researchers obligated, like lawyers and physicians, to study and work with any company seeking help? At the same time, action research might enable the organization to become more effective at (what?) doing “evil”! Where do you personally draw the line? Will you do research in companies that make alcohol, firearms, or tobacco? How about sugared soda pop? Drilling for oil and gas? Such questions underscore the extent to which organization and management research is not values free. Ethics in research calls on you to deal with a range of challenges regarding data collection, research methods, and publishing and disseminating results. Appendix 8.1 at the end of this chapter enumerates a broad list of potential problems and practical solutions.

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Data Collection When researchers collect data in an organization, they often have a high degree of perceived power in the eyes of research participants. Savvy participants may “use” you to convey a self-serving or misleading picture of what’s going on. You also have to be alert to “social desirability” biases whereby respondents try to figure out what the most desirable (or politically correct) answer to a question might be rather than express their true views. Broadening your sample and triangulating with others’ stories can help to moderate this bias. There can be instances when a research participant reveals unlawful or exploitative behavior in the organization (e.g., discrimination, harassment, bullying, financial crimes, etc.) or presents signs of personal disturbance (e.g., anxiety, depression, aggression). Under certain circumstances, often associated with IRB requirements, you may be legally obligated to report this. Any and all of these situations call for political acumen, empathy, and ethical judgment.

Socially sensitive research Special care must be taken if you are studying socially sensitive research topics. Recent years have seen an uptick in studies of sexual harassment, discrimination, exploitation, and organization misconduct. Researchers engaged in these types of studies must carefully consider how participants become involved and attend to a variety of risks and potential harms during data collection. For example, participants may risk physical, physiological, or emotional harm from being interviewed about past or current traumatic events. These risks could arise after they have finished their participation in the research. Other individuals, groups, or interests not participating in the research could be impacted just because the topic is being researched or because information provided by participants is revealed. Finally, there is risk of harm to researchers doing socially sensitive research because of the topic being researched, the location of the study (unsafe conditions), hostility from non-participants, or research methods being used. You are obliged to think through the likelihood of these risks occurring and the seriousness of their impact. Does the benefit outweigh any risks associated with the research? In any case, researchers conducting this kind of research also need to be versed in “distress protocols” to care for upset individuals and groups. In some instances, it may be necessary to have at the ready contacts with mental health and medical professionals and even law enforcement.9

“Insider” research It is not unusual for early career scholars and scholar practitioners to study their own organizations. There are many advantages of insider research, not least that insiders have a wealth of knowledge which an outsider is not privy to and greater familiarity with the organization’s context and culture. In addition, interviewees may feel more comfortable and freer to talk openly because of their familiarity with the researcher. Insider research has the potential to increase validity due to the added richness, honesty, fidelity, and authenticity of the information acquired.

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Nevertheless, there are important threats to validity with insider research. Consider: z Do the researcher’s relationships with participants lead them to behave in a way that they would not normally? z Does the researcher’s insider knowledge lead him or her to make assumptions and miss potentially important information? z Does the researcher’s perspective or loyalties lead to misrepresentations? z Do the researcher’s moral/political/cultural standpoints lead him/her to distort data subconsciously? There is considerable literature on research roles and ethical issues in ethnographic research of this type.10 Key points are to respect participants’ dignity and privacy, to obtain their consent when speaking with them, and to consider carefully what potential harms could arise.

Research Methods Organizational field studies, like laboratory studies, have demand characteristics. Research participants typically grant a researcher some “authority”. Be careful not to abuse this authority by intruding excessively on people’s work or private time or by making promises about the supposed benefits of the research over which you have no control. Protocols concerning voluntary consent, privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, and protection of participants’ welfare are integral to doing research ethically and well. Still, some participants may not wish to be involved but feel coerced to because their boss is the sponsor or someone has said, “it is part of the job”. Under these conditions, you may get bad data and engender resentment. Say you’ve done an employee survey, tested hypotheses, and shared the results with your sponsor. Are you also obligated to “debrief” the participants and report the results to them? Researchers and companies have learned that conducting employee surveys without feeding back the results leads to problems: questions are not read carefully by respondents, response rates shrink, companies are accused of lack of transparency, and the research is given a bad rap. Thus, many researchers insist that survey results be made available to employees. Careful attention needs to be given to the anonymity of respondents in feedback efforts—particularly when results are reported for smaller units. There is a large body of literature on the “ethics” of intervening in organizations that calls attention to manipulation and coercion.11 Organization change studies, in general, bring a researcher into the company’s doings. As the research moves into action, interventions and changes made in the organization can produce more harm than benefits and may benefit certain groups or people more than others. Addressing these issues in your research methods involves complex thinking and analysis along multiple dimensions. First, companies have many motives for change ranging from cutting costs (and head count), to fire-fighting, to following a fad, to a sincere and well-thought-through desire to improve things. You need to explore these motives and to map out the potential impact of intervening in the organization: What could go right and wrong? Who will gain and who will be disadvantaged? Consultations with experienced organizational change professionals can help inform this analysis.

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Second, there is a need to meet and talk with the various interests involved in and affected by a change process. Likely as not different interests will have more and less favorable views of proposed changes. It is also important to identify interests that will not be formally involved in the change process: how could they be affected by the results or how might their views alter the change effort if they were involved? Finally, you are also obliged to take into account how your research could be misused, such as by misrepresenting the purposes of the change or conferring a legitimacy to activities that manipulate or coerce people. These consequences are difficult to foresee and may be beyond your control to remedy. Ultimately, they may force you to abandon your change research on ethical grounds.

Dissemination and Publication A particular concern in some organizations pertains to the internal dissemination of research findings and their publication in outside venues. In our own studies, we typically allow prior review of any internal and public reports by management (and other interests) in the firm as to factual matters and to prevent the release of potentially confidential information, but not as to interpretations made by the researchers. We have highlighted the importance of debriefing research participants in organizations and sharing the results of research. What happens when professional responsibilities and client interests conflict? A survey of a large organization showed that significant numbers of employees agreed with the statement “getting ahead around here depends more on who you know, not how you do your job” and several respondents made comments (many rather oblique) about “favoritism” in the firm. The researcher, probing these findings, learned that the CEO was having an intimate (and non-public) relationship with a newly promoted employee. Should such data be divulged to the HR manager and others who asked the researcher what might be behind favoritism ratings and comments in the company? Should it be included in a publication about “work hard/play hard” companies? To further complicate matters, multiple researchers or a research team are sometimes engaged in a research effort. It is crucial that everyone be on the same page as to who is authorized to communicate about the study, its results internally and in publications, and what can and cannot be said. We have been in situations where confidential data has been disclosed by clueless fellow researchers without adequate disguise or anonymity. Finally, there are ethical issues in reporting results to the scientific community. Academics are asked to conduct studies because of their expertise in a subject area and, at times, because they are a proponent of a particular organizational theory or practice. When research findings challenge a favored theory or fail to confirm the benefits of a practice, pressures to fudge the data may arise not from the sponsor but from the researcher’s ego! Sadly, instances of scientific misconduct are all too common in the management sciences. A survey of management faculty found that 91.9 percent knew of colleagues who engaged in HARKing (i.e., hypothesizing after the results are known), selecting only those data that supported their hypotheses (77.6 percent), withholding data that contradicted their prior research

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(49.5 percent), and fabricating results (26.8 percent). Nearly three in four said they knew of colleagues who used others’ ideas without giving them credit.12 Dealing with dilemmas: • Have you encountered any risks or dilemmas in collecting data? • Have you been involved in change studies? Who benefited? Who did not? • Have you personally or do you know of scholars who have “fudged” their results?

POINTS TO PONDER There are seldom clear and clean answers to ethical dilemmas. Obviously, there can be legal factors to consider as well as rights and responsibilities, likely consequences, and matters of justice and the common good. As a researcher, there also has to be consideration and self-scrutiny of your values and moral compass.13 The argument here is that the more you know about yourself, the more apt you will be to engage in research suited to your interests and the more able you will be to anticipate and address ethical issues.

NOTES 1.

Mirvis, P.H. and Seashore, S.E. (1979). Being ethical in organizational research. American Psychologist, 34(9), 766–80; Mirvis, P.H. and Seashore, S.E. (1982). Creating ethical relationships in organizational research. In J.E. Sieber (ed.), The Ethics of Social Research. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 79–104.

2.

Mirvis, P.H. (2008). Academic–practitioner learning forums: A new model for interorganizational research. In A.B. Shani, S.A. Mohrman, W.A. Pasmore, B.N. Stymne and N. Adler (eds), Handbook of Collaborative Management Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp.  201–224; Pasmore, W.A., Woodman, R.W. and Simmons, A.L. (2008). Toward a more rigorous, reflective, and relevant science of collaborative management research. In A.B. Shani, S.A. Mohrman, W.A. Pasmore, B.N. Stymne and N. Adler (eds), Handbook of Collaborative Management Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 567–82.

3. Cummings, T. (1984). Transorganization development. In B. Staw and L. Cummings (eds), Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 6. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp.  367–422; Gray, B. (1989). Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; Huxham, C. and Vangen, S. (2005). Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage. London: Routledge; Mirvis, P.H. and Worley, C.G. (2014). Organizing for sustainability: Why networks and partnerships? In Building Networks and Partnerships. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 1–34. 4. Carlile, P.R. (2004). Transferring, translating, and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries. Organization Science, 15(5), 555–68. 5. Ford, R. (2008). Complex adaptive systems and improvisation theory: Toward framing a model to enable continuous change. Journal of Change Management, 8(3–4), 173–98.

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6.

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Mirvis, P. and Manga, J. (2010). Integrating corporate citizenship: Leading from the middle. In N.C. Smith, C.B. Bhattacharya, D. Vogel and D.I. Levine (eds), Global Challenges in Responsible Business. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 78–106.

7. Lowman, R.L. (1998). The Ethical Practice of Psychology in Organizations. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; Walker, B. and Haslett, T. (2002). Action research in management: Ethical dilemmas. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 15(6), 523–33. 8.

Guskin, A.E. and Chesler, M.A. (1973). Partisan diagnosis of social problems. Processes and Phenomena of Social Change. New York, NY: Wiley-Interscience; Johnsen, H.C.G. and Normann, R. (2004). When research and practice collide: The role of action research when there is a conflict of interest with stakeholders. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 17(3), 207–35; Lipton, S., Boyd, E. and Bero, L. (2004). Conflicts of interest in academic research: Policies, processes, and attitudes. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance, 11(2), 83–102; Shore, C. and Davidson, M. (2014). Beyond collusion and resistance: Academic– management relations within the neoliberal university. Learning and Teaching, 7(1), 12–28.

9. Taking care of oneself is also important when studying sensitive topics. Researching in sensitive areas has the potential to pose a threat to researchers’ wellbeing, particularly if they have strong feelings or have lived experiences of the phenomena under investigation. Attention has to be given to “vicarious traumatization” when a researcher begins to identify with victimized research participants. Discussion with a research advisor or peers is a crucial first step in responding to such feelings. 10. Van Maanen, J. (1991). The smile factory: Work at Disneyland. Organizational Culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications; on ethics see Christians, C.G. (2005). Ethics and politics in qualitative research. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), 3rd edn, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 109–64. 11. Bermant, G., Kelman, H.C. and Warwick, D.P. (1978). The Ethics of Social Intervention. New York, NY: John Wiley; Walton, R.E. and Warwick, D.P. (1973). The ethics of organization development. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 9(6), 681–98. 12. Bedeian, A.G., Taylor, S.G. and Miller, A.N. (2010). Management science on the credibility bubble: Cardinal sins and various misdemeanors. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 9(4), 715–25; Schwab, A. and Starbuck, W.H. (2017). A call for openness in research reporting: How to turn covert practices into helpful tools. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 16(1), 125–41. 13. Mirvis, P.H. (1982). Know thyself and what thou art doing: Bringing values and sense into organizational research. American Behavioral Scientist, 26(2), 177–97.

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APPENDIX 8.1 “ISSUES” IN ORGANIZATION RESEARCH AND HOW TO RESPOND Issues

Responses Questionnaires/Surveys

Unclear, double-barreled, or confusing questions

Pretest and debrief; Translate to respondent’s language

Socially desirable responses

Randomly order questions

Fear of identification—demographic questions

Advise respondents they may “skip” questions

Sampling biases

Random or full sample Interviews

Confusion, stress, resistance

Pretest; Debrief; Voluntary participation

Power/Identity differences (status, gender, ethnicity)

Ideally “match” interviewer/respondent characteristics (esp. if “hot” topic)

Probing “sensitive” subjects—privacy and/or vulnerability

Empathic stance; Reinforce confidentiality

Disclosure of unlawful or exploitative behavior

Confessor role, unless risks of serious harm or legal obligation Focus Groups

Anonymity, confidentiality

Chatham House or Las Vegas rules No notes/recordings without permission Observation

Complete observer—distanced, no interaction, role concealed (privacy concerns)

Face validity check, representative check

Complete participant—interacts with situation, role concealed (privacy, intervention)

Hawthorne effects; Debrief when possible, appropriate

Observer as participant—intermittent observation, interviewing, role known (intervention, sampling bias)

Is behavior “public” (ok to watch or listen) or “private” (need consent)?

Participant as observer—prolonged observation, involved in central activities, role known (intervention, observer bias)

Keep careful notes; Bracketing—reflect on own assumptions, views

Records & Artifacts Permission to access

Public, ok; Private, permission needed

Bias in performance records (subjective v. objective)

Investigate purpose/source; Triangulate with other data

Cultural sensitivity/exposure of historic/sacred

Do your “homework” on cultural rights

Ethnographic Case Studies Permission to enter; Public v. private behavior

Public, ok; Private, permission needed

Observer bias; Going native

Same “checks” as observations Data-based research: Descriptive, Correlational

Voluntary participation

Research agreement: participant “opt out” clause

Debriefing

Written or oral summary desirable (essential if deception involved)

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Responses Interventions/Action Research

Voluntary participation

Research Agreement: participant “opt out” clause

Participant voice

Participant input into interventions for better results

Control over harms

Research Agreement and reviews: Specify purposes, Impacts

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Debrief; Use comparison/control group where possible Evaluation Research

Independence of evaluators

Ideally a “third party”

Sensitivity of evaluators

Multiple evaluators, data sources, methods; Debriefs

9

Being a sweet spot researcher We started this exploration of sweet spot research with a thought experiment. Let us begin this concluding chapter with another one. Imagine you are nearing the end of your research career and being fêted for your scholarly contributions—another ideal day! Consider the three questions below about your contribution: Your research identity: • Do I want to be recognized for my contributions to theory, to practice, or both? • Will I be honored by colleagues from my academic department, a research center, a professional association, the world of practice, or some combination of these? • Will my research work truly represent who I am and my calling?

  The first question asks about the body of work you have produced over your career and its contribution to the literature and practical lore. The Academy of Management annually presents an award to an academic whose career produced outstanding “conceptual, empirical, or theoretical developments” and a different one for scholar-practitioners who successfully applied “theory or research in practice and/or contributed to knowledge through extraction of learning from practice.” Professional bodies like the Society for Human Resource Management, Strategic Management Society, and Society of Industrial and Organization Psychology also award scholars for contributions in their domains. What kinds of research and products would you like to be known for? The second question asks about your “home” institutions and reference groups. The sweet spot researchers we have featured have different homes. A majority of them are based in an academic department, but several work in a university or private research center, and have done stints in business, consulting, and NGOs. Sweet spot researchers operate from different bases and always have. Kurt Lewin founded a research center at MIT but never held a tenured faculty position; Eric Trist spent most of his career at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and came to academe late in life; and Sheila Bonini led researchers at McKinsey and Arizona State before joining the World Wildlife Fund. Operating in multiple spaces affords you a rich and diverse network of colleagues and a broader audience who knows and learns from your work. Who will gather to honor your work? This closing chapter invites you to reflect further on your own interests in, appetite for, and identity as a researcher. Does sweet spot research match your sense of purpose and evoke your

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passions? Consider the results of a survey of management academics on the fit between their research work and life orientations: 1. Doing research that is consistent with your central values and requires continuous learning keeps you energized and vital; and 2. Doing research that is not consistent with those values or conducted because of “social and/or political pressures” leaves you demotivated and burnt out.1 Sweet spot researchers tell us they felt “called” to this career—the work reflects their purpose in life. Denise Rousseau talked about how her father, a cable splicer for the phone company, really disliked his job. Upon reflection, she understood that it was no surprise that her major interest has been helping people to improve the quality of their work experiences despite being relatively low in power—not powerless, but low in power. She didn’t set out to be an industrial psychologist, but when Industrial Psychology found her, everything clicked.2 A consistent effort to build self-awareness can help you to identify more personally relevant research options and to develop a research practice that is consistent with your personal values. Of course, life in a university, a research center, or some other venue has its demand characteristics. But make no mistake about this: you are a practitioner in your own institutional setting, and yours is one of the purposes to consider in any research endeavor. Self-awareness can help you to address “social and/or political pressures” and other career conundrums, and adding reflective practices into your work contributes to continuous learning and getting better at doing it.3

BRIDGING TWO WORLDS If you decide to pursue sweet spot research, to advance knowledge about people and organizations that continually adjust along with the evolving trends in technology, the economy, and society, you will be called on to bridge the scholarly and practitioner worlds. You will have choices to make about how you traverse these two dynamic worlds and position yourself amidst contending interests and standards of usefulness. Academics who study and engage with practice—and practitioners with a scholarly bent and training—have been labeled “boundary-spanners”, people who have a foot in each world.4 Some take on an integrated or hybrid identity that enables them to operate in both realms. They are characterized as “pracademics”, practical scholars, or scholar-practitioners among their peers and see themselves variously as polyglots, chameleons, and shape-shifters. Others stand firmly in either the academic or practitioner community but see value in cross-community dialogue and scholarly research on practice. They operate as translators, interpreters, and knowledge brokers, and see themselves as cross-pollinators and sometimes as schizophrenic.5 Either way you fashion yourself, you must learn the language and ways of these two different worlds. Often, you may feel “betwixt and between”—too academic in the eyes of the business world and too practice oriented for the academic world.6 Your job as a sweet spot researcher is to navigate between a rock and a hard place and find a way of being and doing that enables you to produce credible, useful work that contributes to both theory and practice.

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How does a young researcher learn to operate in these two worlds? Sweet spot researchers tell us that mentors helped them and started their multi-stakeholder networks. As shared by Wayne Cascio, for example: I was in a traditional program at the University of Rochester. I was fortunate. Bernie Bass took me under his wing and took me out consulting with him, with Xerox, School Boards, and others. From this I got my first AMJ article in 1974—about changing attitudes in the work environment toward black employees. We collected data and did an intervention that moved 2000 Xerox managers more than a standard deviation in awareness of diversity issues. This was becoming a big societal issue. Other researchers began their post-graduate careers in industry. Rob Cross says: When I finished my doctorate, I had good job offers from universities, an offer to become a chief knowledge officer in a company, or to go to IBM to work with Larry Pruzak in its Institute for Knowledge Management. I chose the third and that experience made a big difference in that I learned to span the two worlds … Pruzak created space to experiment and get people involved. He taught me the importance of being a good speaker and engaging audiences. He would start out with an audience (even of 600 people) asking “What should we talk about today?” This taught me how to engage people with ideas. No one really cares how smart you are and how right you are – it’s the process of bringing them with you that matters. This creates connections and gets practitioners interested in participating in the research. By taking what his academic mentors may have seen as a career detour to get organizational experience, Cross developed knowledge and experience needed to frame his research questions in practice and to pursue a research career characterized by deep engagement with practitioners.

BOUNDARY MANAGEMENT As you do sweet spot research, you will also have to manage boundaries between yourself and those whom you study. Since Berg and Smith’s publication of the The Self in Social Inquiry, we know that self-identity and your personal makeup inform what you study, how you study it, and how you assemble and interpret findings. Personal ambitions and fears, and your character and values are reflected in how you deal with research participants and other parties in your research system. If our research teaches us that social relationships influence what we attend to, what falls into our blind spots, and the attributions we make, then it follows that the relationships we are involved in during the research will influence us in similar ways. Serious social science asks us to investigate ourselves while we are investigating others … this places the scrutiny of self in the center stage of social inquiry (p. 9).7

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As you build your network relationships, you also have to manage boundaries in relating to colleagues, academic advisors, research sponsors, and others. Managing these relationships, too, calls for self-scrutiny. In our experiences, for instance, developing close connections to research sponsors and participants enables you to get a better understanding of what is going on in an organization and sharper insights into data. At the same time, you can develop personal allegiances that can challenge your objectivity and judgment. In other situations, you may be working with research sponsors or other parties whose interests and values collide with your own, presenting ethical dilemmas for you about how to interpret data or report results that are accurate and objective, without violating professional standards and personal commitments to safeguard the health and safety of the system you are researching. Dealing with these dilemmas is difficult and can be exhausting. During these times, it’s important to remember why you are doing this kind of research and to be assured that getting through a sticky situation is easier if you know yourself. Researchers who have studied the process of bridging the gap between theory and practice point to the importance of “phronesis” (practical wisdom)—showing excellence of character, prudence, and good judgment when taking action.8 We gain practical wisdom through experience. So get out there. Find colleagues who are working in the field and ask if you can join them. Call your practitioner friends and ask them how they address the challenges you study. Think about the theoretical concepts you carry in your head, and then go into the field and examine how they really work in practice. Look at your academic publications and think about their practical implications for practitioner outlets that might be interested in them.

EXPANDING THE BOUNDS OF YOUR SCHOLARSHIP In introducing and exploring the sweet spot, we described three essential tensions: sourcing your work in both theory and practice, conducting your work with rigor and relevance, and communicating your work to scholars and practitioners. While some view these tensions as either/or choices, we encourage you to recognize the tradeoffs but also to seek out both/and solutions. As you tinker with these tensions, consider some options: (1) work with a colleague who has a different conceptual orientation or methodological skill-set; (2) do an exploratory, interpretive study then follow it up with a survey or field experiment (or vice versa); (3) replicate your study using different research methods or in a different setting; or (4) collaborate fully with practitioners in the design of the research and interpretation of results. Our sweet spot colleagues chose a variety of these options, not in doing a single study but rather in a series of them or in a larger research program. This type of scholarship asks you to work with multiple perspectives, across multiple disciplines, and in the messiness of real-world problems—to do research, as Eisenhardt puts it, “rigorously but without rigor mortis.”9

Combining Academic and Practice Knowledge John Boudreau has spent his career thinking about the HR function and how to generate both theoretically important and practically useful knowledge about it. Starting out applying

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decision-science frameworks to HR processes in rigorous quantitative research, he gravitated to a close connection to HR practitioners as head of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University, whose mission is to advance the field of HR in partnership with HR leaders. His aim was to reset the HR function by moving human capital concerns front and center in organizations. His strategy was to engage practitioners in research on “people analytics” and to move the field forward with new tools and frameworks. The result? In Beyond HR, written with practitioner Pete Ramstad, they placed HR on an equal footing with finance, marketing, and IT by viewing HR as a decision science that tracks human capital management in analytic and strategic ways. What next? After moving to the University of Southern California, Boudreau joined his colleagues Ian Ziskin (formerly Corporate VP and Chief HR & Administrative Officer at Northrop Grumman Corporation) and Carolyn Rearick, to organize the Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and Enterprise (CHREATE). Assisted by grants from the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), the National Academy of Human Resources (NAHR), and the Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources (irc4HR), his team assembled more than 50 senior HR executives from global corporations as well as consulting firm partners and professional society leaders. Over three years, different configurations of CHREATE members conducted action research projects in member companies and presented results at national and international conferences. They shared lessons, working papers and study findings on a dedicated website, wrote blogs for multiple outlets, and published Black Holes and White Spaces: Reimagining the Future of Work and HR.10 Recently, with Ravin Jesuthasan, a managing partner at Willis Towers Watson, Boudreau led a multi-method study involving case studies and cross-company quantitative analyses to generate systematic knowledge about how digitization and automation impacts the practical problem of Reinventing Jobs.11 Boudreau’s has been a career of continually expanding his focus beyond traditional theory-driven research and publication. He explored different ways of carrying out research and engaging with practitioners all along the value stream to generate and disseminate systematic theory and practice driven knowledge. All this in pursuit of his unwavering interest in reinventing the way in which human resources are managed in organizations to fit the changing world.

Scholarship Reconsidered Ernest Boyer (Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate) did us all a big favor by advocating expanding the bounds and definition of scholarship to include: z Scholarship of Discovery: conducting original research that advances knowledge; z Scholarship of Integration: synthesizing information across disciplines, across topics within a discipline, or across time; z Scholarship of Application/Engagement: connecting to society and applying knowledge to consequential problems; and z Scholarship of Teaching: transmitting, transforming, and extending knowledge.12

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Even as research universities have privileged the scholarship of discovery and marginalized these other forms, Boyer makes a case for a more inclusive view of scholarship and urges researchers to enact all four scholarly roles. As you reflect on your scholarship, and plan its next stages, think not only about your research studies but also how you can make connections across disciplines, put the knowledge developed into perspective, illuminate findings in revealing ways, and educate non-specialists on what it all means. This includes producing integrative reviews and meta-analyses of the literature, as well as frameworks, models, and visualizations that organize knowledge for understanding, interpretation, and application. Reflect, too, on whether that knowledge applies to problems that really matter, how you have engaged with practitioners, and what you have taught them, not only with your writings and teaching but also through workshops, conferences, leadership development programs, and knowledge-exchange forums. Along these same lines, Donald Schön has advocated for a “new epistemology” that encompasses action science, engaged scholarship, and collaborative inquiries. This has scholars move their research from the “high ground” of manageable problems amenable to framing and solution through disciplinary theory and rigorous research to the “swampy lowlands” where problems are messy and confusing and call for interdisciplinary theory and research keyed to practical relevance. Schön explains why: “The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or to society at large … while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern.”13 Boyer’s call for a scholarship of engagement and Schön’s recommendations for a new epistemology are being heard afresh today. They are echoed in Andy Hoffman’s call for scholars to fight “truth decay” and engage in public and political discourse and in clamor for responsible research and the study of “Grand Challenges” facing business and society.14 The swamplands of such challenges are fertile ground for sweet spot research. Can you apply your particular knowledge, skills, and passions to help solve the problems of income inequality, social justice, digital divisions, sustainability, responsible corporate governance, or globalization? Will you take the tools in this book to generate useful knowledge for practice and theory?

A CAREER WITH COMMITMENT A sweet spot research career path is rarely linear, as has become evident from many of our interviewees. They have purposefully chosen positions, collaborations, and affiliations, both temporary and continuing, that have provided them opportunities to develop the experience and knowledge and the network they rely on to achieve their purposes. Their interests and passions have evolved as the world and organizations have changed and as they have gone through different career and life stages. Douglas (Tim) Hall has advanced the idea of a “protean” career for our times because it is managed and “owned” by the individual rather than by an organization. Named for the Greek god Proteus, who could change shape at will, the protean career for researchers involves working in multiple projects, perhaps in multiple organizations or situations, and sometimes

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serving as a lead and other times in a supportive role. It can also have you change jobs, organizations, and what kinds of research you do.15 Hall sees two meta-competencies as essential to navigating such protean careers. The first is adaptability: the capacity and competence to change in light of new circumstances. The second centers in identity: “the ability to gather self-feedback, to form accurate self-perceptions, and to change one’s self-concept as appropriate.” A protean career is not for everybody and may not be for you. What is key in this type of career is that it aims toward “psychological success”. You are not “following the herd” or conforming to external standards of achievement. Rather, you are authoring your own career and defining your own goals and achievement standards.16 Some resources on research careers of all types are found in the Appendix to this chapter. Are you called to do research in the space between theory and practice? To be an engaged scholar? Graduate studies are a good time to start self-reflection and to develop the discipline to do so throughout your career. By all reports, the current advice to early researchers in our field is to be instrumental: “I think that young scholars ought to forget their own values and just do the work that will get them tenure,” says one grizzled mentor. In his roster of “suggestions for optimizing career success,” Arthur Bedeian counsels early career scholars to “hit-the-ground running”, “publish, publish, publish”, “achieve academic credibility”, and, oh yes, “have fun”!17 While some in academe question the merits of such pre-professional grooming, others simply shrug “it is what it is”.18 But there can be considerable costs to a single-minded focus on publishing. A recent study of over 1500 members of the Academy of Management put Bedeian’s suggestions to a test and found that role overload and work–family conflicts dampened the work engagement of faculty members and, especially among those at an early career stage, their career satisfaction. Meanwhile, getting a paper published in a top-tier journal was unrelated to work engagement and career satisfaction.19 Listen then to this very different advice on doing your early career: My advice is to interconnect the personal and professional as closely as you can. And then look for what feeds you and try to do work in that stream because good work takes a lot of effort, a lot of faith. If you do not do this … the quality is lower and … you will have a harder time persisting in the face of setbacks.20 As Denise Rousseau puts it, Young scholars should not underestimate the fact that they do have time. The tenure clock makes it seem like not enough time, but you do have time to become grounded in field settings and in practice. Don’t let the socialization pressure of careerism change and define the work you want to do. And, for those of you with tenure or other milestones behind you, there’s no time like the present to reimagine your research toward or redouble your efforts doing work that you feel makes a difference.

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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE A commitment to a research career that impacts practice, as has been evident through this book, requires awareness of your own philosophical and ethical beliefs and purposes, and of the values and purposes of those in organizations and their stakeholders. David Coghlan and Rami Shani urge researchers to leverage interiority—to attend carefully to your own thinking and interactions with others. The aim is not just to eliminate bias and ensure objectivity of your work, but also to better access your imagination, intuitions, and non-conscious ways of seeing and knowing yourself and the world.21 This reminds us that research is also an art form, can take you on a spiritual journey, and can tap into tacit knowledge, even inner wisdom, that enables you to better apprehend, understand, and speak about the workings of practice and organizations.22 Robert Quinn recalls the importance of self-reflection in his own scholarly journey when he began to write about Deep Change, a deeply personal and inspirational account of moments when people change their most tightly held assumptions and beliefs.23 He remembered Robert Fritz’s thoughts on the “path of least resistance” and saw that he himself would “have to move forward … step out of control and go on a journey of uncertainty.” He reports, When I started to write that book I thought it would be a different kind of book and entail some risk. I was going to have to be vulnerable—I was afraid. If I was going to write a book that was different, then what would my colleagues in the academic world think of me? I was violating expectations. Once I realized that was my fear, I asked myself “Is this dream worth it?” The book wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gone through that process. Now I have people who say “I’ve read your book when I was going through a crisis.” Kathy Kram suggests three ways for researchers to become more self-aware through a reflexive research process: (1) Systematic self-study, examining your purposes, emotional reactions and internal thoughts throughout the research process; (2) Seeking input—equivalent to clinical supervision—from a more experienced researcher about such issues as relationships and diagnostic approaches and to surface blind spots or biases; and (3) Creating teams with diverse perspectives where colleagues provide feedback and enhance each other’s learning.24 You may be drawn to “personally relevant” research. While some argue that research on topics to which you are personally implicated is “too close to home”, others find it ideal to generate insights from personal knowledge.25 One researcher we know became fascinated with M&A research. What motivated his interest—although somewhat unknown to him—was the experience of his father’s job loss during an acquisition and subsequent breakdown and death. Consultations with a fellow researcher, in turn, helped the researcher to mine his personal insights into M&A and also to separate what was going on with the executives he was studying versus in his own mind. Life in your own organization, events encountered during field research, and topics that resonate with personal experiences—good and bad—can all be legitimate areas of inquiry. But it’s important that you have a mechanism—a clinical supervisor or colleague—to help you sort yourself out in the data.

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Throughout this volume, we have asked you to reflect on your own purposes and approaches to research. We have also highlighted key practical points, provided frameworks and models (our own and from others), and told stories that reflect what we and others have learned about doing sweet spot research. As Atul Gawande reports in the Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, professionals like airplane pilots, brain surgeons, and big-time investors all use checklists to increase their effectiveness and reduce errors.26 Why not sweet spot researchers? In the spirit of practical wisdom, we’ve culled Twelve Guidelines for Sweet Spot Researchers, a “to do” list to help you assess whether there are ways in which you can enhance your capabilities to do work that delivers value to theory and practice (Exhibit 9.1).

Exhibit 9.1a

Your journey from the ivory tower to the real world (steps 1–6)

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Exhibit 9.1b

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Your journey from the ivory tower to the real world (steps 7–12)

MAKING A DIFFERENCE: AN ASPIRATIONAL VIEW Sandra Waddock is a lifelong boundary-spanner. She has worked with practitioners and organizations in a variety of collaborative and cross-sector studies. She has studied how academic “difference makers” helped to build the corporate responsibility movement and how “intellectual shamans” have actively engaged and influenced the world of practice.27 To par-

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aphrase, intellectual shamans and the associated “wayfinders” and “edgewalkers” archetypes can be characterized as follows: z Intellectual Shamans draw insights from within and from real world observations and inquiries. They do work (writing, teaching, theorizing, and research of various kinds) that crosses boundaries and integrates knowledge holistically. They use their knowledge to heal, tell stories that inspire, and inform sense making—all in service of making a better world. z Wayfinders read the landscape and navigate journeys (cognitive, spiritual, and practical) by spotting guiding signs and staying alert in relaxed vigilance. Along the way, they question their assumptions, discriminate among various sources and types of information, and look at the situation from different perspectives—all in service of finding a better way. z Edgewalkers “walk between worlds” and build bridges between them (intellectual and operational). They are “always visioning what is evolving in theory and practice and what trends in management are wanting to emerge”—all in service of enabling us to “see” and shape a better future. Waddock, and all of our interviewees, embody aspects of shamans, wayfinders, and edgewalkers. Each, in their own way, brings these into their engagements with the practice world. As Waddock reports, to have an impact and be a “difference maker” you have to connect deeply to the practical world, touch and be touched by people, form and leverage relationships, and work at getting your research informed by and out to practice.28 We add to that emphasis that to be a sweet spot researcher requires that you are grounded in knowledge, seek to combine your knowledge with that of others with relevant expertise, and seek to share broadly what you learn on your journey. Take a moment, then, to reflect on your current or future identity as a researcher, on the roles you play or hope to play in producing and disseminating knowledge, and on how you enact your scholarly roles. In so doing, remember that you can have multiple identities as a researcher, play different roles, and do different kinds of research in different research projects over the course of your career. All of this is indicative of a protean research life of continuous self-exploration and learning, and of taking risks to stay true to your values. People called to this kind of research aim to produce credible, relevant, useful, and actionable knowledge, knowledge that might challenge and even supplant current assumptions and ways of doing things that have been, frankly, partially responsible for the problems we are now trying to solve. This knowledge can also shape what organizations and management might become. The world of academic research won’t be immune to the fundamental changes that are unfolding and hopefully the “ivory tower” model of research will expand beyond its traditional and comfortable confines to connect differently with the world of practice and enable its scholars to bring their full range of expertise to bear on these complex problems. We concluded Part I with a call to adventure. Part II presented some ideas, tools, and tips for meeting the challenges associated with answering this call to sweet spot research. Here we’ve asked you to consider your calling carefully, to author your own career, and to be a reflective scholar and person. Bon voyage.

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NOTES 1.

Quinn, R.E., O’Neill, R.M. and Debebe, G. (1996). Confronting the tensions in an academic career. In P.J. Frost and M.S. Taylor (eds), Rhythms of Academic Life: Personal Accounts of Careers in Academia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 421–8.

2.

Mike, B. and Rousseau, D.M. (2015). Footprints in the sand: Denise Rousseau. Organizational Dynamics, 3(44), 243–52.

3. Bolton, G. (2010). Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 4. Bartunek, J.M. (2007). Academic–practitioner collaboration need not require joint or relevant research: Toward a relational scholarship of integration. Academy of Management Journal, 50(6), 1323–33. 5.

Kram, K.E., Wasserman, I.C. and Yip, J. (2012). Metaphors of identity and professional practice: Learning from the scholar–practitioner.  The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science,  48(3), 304–341; Carton, G. and Ungureanu, P. (2018). Bridging the research–practice divide: A study of scholar-practitioners’ multiple role management strategies and knowledge spillovers across roles. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(4), 436–53.

6. Wasserman, I.C. and Kram, K.E. (2009). Enacting the scholar-practitioner role: An exploration of narratives. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 45(1), 12–38. 7.

Berg, D.N. and Smith, K.K. (1988). The Self in Social Inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.

8. Kessels, J.P. and Korthagen, F.A. (1996). The relationship between theory and practice: Back to the classics.  Educational Researcher,  25(3), 17–22; Tenkasi, R.R.V. and Hay, G.W. (2007). Following the second legacy of Aristotle. In A.B. Shani, S.A. Mohrman, W.A. Pasmore, B. Stymne and N. Adler (eds), Handbook of Collaborative Management Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 9. Ferraro, F., Etzion, D. and Gehman, J. (2015). Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited.  Organization Studies,  36(3), 363–90; Eisenhardt, K.M., Graebner, M.E. and Sonenshein, S. (2016). Grand challenges and inductive methods: Rigor without rigor mortis.  Academy of Management Journal, 59(4), 1113–23. 10. Boudreau, J., Rearick, C.L. and Ziskin, I. (2018). Black Holes and White Spaces: Reimagining the Future of Work and HR with the CHREATE Project. Society for Human Resource Management. 11. Jesuthasan, R. and Boudreau, J. (2018). Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. 12. Boyer, E.L. (1990).  Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 13. Schön, D.A. (1995). Knowing-in-action: The new scholarship requires a new epistemology.  Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27(6), 27–34. 14. Hoffman, A. (2021). The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 15. Hall, D.T. (1996). The Career is Dead—Long Live the Career. A Relational Approach to Careers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 16. Mirvis, P.H. and Hall, D.T. (1994). Psychological success and the boundaryless career.  Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15(4), 365–80. 17. Bedeian, A. (1996). Lessons learned along the way: Twelve suggestions for optimizing career success. In P.J. Frost and M.S. Taylor (eds), Rhythms of Academic Life: Personal Accounts of Careers in Academia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 3–9.

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18. Pasco, A.H. (2009). Should graduate students publish? Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 40(3), 231–40. 19. Kraimer, M.L., Greco, L., Seibert, S.E. and Sargent, L.D. (2019). An investigation of academic career success: The new tempo of academic life. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 18(2), 128–52. 20. Quinn, R.E., O’Neill, R.M. and Debebe, G. (1996). Confronting the tensions in an academic career. In P.J. Frost and M.S. Taylor (eds), Rhythms of Academic Life: Personal Accounts of Careers in Academia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 421–8. 21. Coghlan, D. (2010). Interiority as the cutting edge between theory and practice: A first person perspective. International Journal of Action Research, 6(2–3), 288–307; Coghlan, D., Shani, A.B. (Rami) and Dahm, P.C. (2019). Knowledge production in organization development: An interiority-based perspective. Journal of Change Management. DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2019.1628086. 22. Mirvis, P.H. (1980). The art of assessing the quality of work life. In E. Lawler, D. Nadler and C. Camman (eds), Organizational Assessment. New York, NY: Wiley Interscience. 23. Quinn, R.E. (2010). Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. 24. Kram, K.E. (1988). On the researcher’s group memberships. In D.N. Berg and K.K. Smith (eds), The Self in Social Inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 247–65. 25. Jones, E.B. and Bartunek, J.M. (2019). Too close or optimally positioned? The value of personally relevant research. Academy of Management Perspectives, forthcoming. 26. Gawande, A. (2010). The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Penguin Books. 27. Waddock, S. (2015). Intellectual Shamans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Waddock, S., McIntosh, M., Neal, J.A., Pio, E. and Spiller, C. (2016). Intellectual shamans, wayfinder scholars and edgewalkers: Working for system change. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, (62), 35–58; Spiller, C. (2012). Wayfinding in strategy research. In C.L. Wang, D.J. Ketchen Jr and D.D. Bergh (eds), West Meets East: Building Theoretical Bridges, 8, 61–90. 28. Waddock, S. (2010). From individual to institution: On making the world different.  Journal of Business Ethics, 94, 9–12.

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APPENDIX 9.1 RESOURCES ON RESEARCH CAREERS There are many articles and chapters that speak to how scholars live a practice-oriented research career. Here we highlight collections of readings and books on these subjects, plus a few “self-help” books. FURTHER READING

Research Self-Reflections Frost, P.J. and Taylor, M.S. (1996). Rhythms of Academic Life: Personal Accounts of Careers in Academia (Vol. 4). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Frost, P.J. and Stablein, R.E. (eds) (1992). Doing Exemplary Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Stablein, R.E. and Frost, P.J. (eds) (2004). Renewing Research Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Researchers’ Lives and Careers Marrow, A.J. (1977). The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lounsbury, M. (2010). Stanford’s Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970–2000. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Witzel, M. and Warner, M. (eds) (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Management Theorists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waddock, S. (2015). Intellectual Shamans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szabla, D.B., Pasmore, W.A., Barnes, M.A. and Gipson, A.N. (eds) (2017). The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Self-Help Goldsmith, J.A., Komlos, J. and Gold, P.S. (2010). The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Berg, M. and Seeber, B.K. (2016). The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clark, A. and Sousa, B. (2018). How to be a Happy Academic: A Guide to being Effective in Research, Writing and Teaching. London: Sage Publications.

I NDEX abductive reasoning 74 action research 14, 16, 111–12, 123, 129 actionable knowledge 35, 112 Adler, Nancy 133 Adler, Paul 87 “affective event theory” 11 agency theory 34–5 agility 86–7, 99–100, 127–8 appreciative inquiry (AI) 124–5 Argyris, C. 9, 56, 63, 83, 86 Aristidou, Andreas 124 Aristotle 120, 133 Ashford, Susan 3–4 Ashkenas, Ron 137 Ayas, Karen 129 Bansal, Pratima 41, 49–50, 90 Barnard, Chester 56, 65 Barrett, Frank 101, 124–5 Bartunek, Jean 40, 118 Bayesian methods 100 Bazerman, Max 22, 32, 124 Becker, Howard 130 Bedeian, Arthur 164 Beer, Michael 59–60, 122 Theory E and Theory O 60 Berg, D.N. 160 Berinato, Scott 132 Beyer, Janice 9 bias, sources of 103 Birkinshaw, Julian 45 “bite-size” knowledge xx Blanchard, Ken 135 Blau, Peter 57 Blumenthal, Barbara 136 Blumenthal, W. Michael 136 Bolman, Lee 135 Bonini, Sheila 46, 158 Boswell, Wendy 10–11 Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) research 35–6 Boudreau, John 65, 105, 161–2 boundary management 160–161 boundary spanning career choices 159, 161–3, 167–8 knowledge exchange 148, 163 knowledge value stream 48–9 Bourdieu, P. 86 Boyer, Ernest 162–3 “bracketing” 103 Bradbury, Hilary 67 “bridging the gap”, theory/practice 39–40, 75–82, 159–60 Brinton, Crane 69

Brown, Shona 9, 79–80, 103, 123–4 Bruner, Jerome 125–6 Burrell, G. 24–5, 35, 89 business schools xviii, xxi–xxii, 34, 36, 40, 46–7, 56, 62, 86–7, 136 Cain, Susan 135 Campbell, Donald 63, 97–8 career anchors 24 careers xxi, 68, 158–71 Carlile, Paul 148 Cascio, Wayne 46, 52, 61, 64, 78–9, 160 case study approach 105–6 Cassandra culture 60 Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) research program 14–15, 41, 46, 106 Chandler, Alfred 79 change networks 91 change research 108, 111–14, 152–3 clinical research 110–111 co-creativity 41 co-theorizing 90–91 Coghlan, David 17, 44, 112, 165 Cohen, Debra 44, 83 collaborative learning 48 collaborative research 16, 31, 44–5, 60, 146–51 collaborative theorizing 89–91 Collins, Jim 5, 6, 10, 131 Colquitt, J.A. 101 communication channels 133–5 communications aims of 119–20 common strategy for 118–19 with consumers of research 119, 130–133 contribution to theory/practice 121–5 creative process of 133 effectiveness 123 examples of 123–5 forms of 125–9 multi-products 118–19, 123–4 to impact practice 135–7 communities of practice (CoPs) 100 Comte, Auguste 2, 61 conceptual pattern 98, 99, 101 conceptual value 9–10 confessional tales 125, 129–30 “Connected Commons” 48, 66–7 connector role 134–5 consultancy firms 45, 46–7 “context validity” 98 Cooperrider, David 124–5 CoPs (communities of practice) 100 coronavirus crisis management 7–8

INDEX

corporate branding research 47–8 corporate citizenship 80–82 corporations, purpose 34 credibility, components of 120–121 critical realism 29 Cross, Rob 48, 64, 66, 160 Cummings, Tom xviii Czarniawska, Barbara 126 data collection, field research 151–2 Davis, Murray 121 Deal, Terry 135 deductive research 72, 105 Delbecq, Andre 133 Denison, Dan 111 descriptive research 21–2, 78, 104–6 DeVoto, Bernard 69 Dewey, John 2 diagnostic research 110–111 “difference makers” 167–8 difference studies 106–7 disruptor organizations 6 Drucker, Peter 26, 49 Durkeim, Emile 61 Dutton, Jane 107–8 EBMgt see evidence-based management “ecological validity” 40 edgewalkers 168 Edmondson, Amy 59–60, 63–4, 74, 77, 124 Eisenhardt, Kathy 9, 79–80, 103, 105, 123, 161 emic knowledge 85 empirical pattern 98 empirical theory 99–101 engaged scholarship 27–32 continuum of 31, 85 direct approaches 110–115 epistemology 21, 22–3, 28 ethics 33–7, 150–154 etic knowledge 85 Etzioni’s typology of organizations 57 evidence-based management (EBMgt) 8, 10, 67, 159, 164 experimental research 109–10, 124 explanatory research 109–10 exploratory research 104–6 external validity see relevance Fayol, Henri 56 Feldman, Martha 86 Ferdman, Bernardo 107 field research 72, 140–157 Follett, Mary Parker 56 Forrester, Jay 80 Foucault, Michel 27

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Foundation AR+ 67 Frazier, Ken 10 Fritz, Robert 165 functionalism 26 Gagliardi, P. 133 Galbraith, Jay 57, 77 “garbage can” theory 83 Gawande, Atul 166 Ghoshal, Sumantra 34 Gibson, Cristina 15, 45, 100, 132 Gilbreth, Frank 65 Gilbreth, Lillian 65 Gillespie, Hazel 147 Gladwell, Malcolm 134 Glaser, B. 63, 105 Grant, Adam 8, 60–61, 106, 107, 131, 134–5 Gratton, Lynda 8–9 Grayson, David 101 Greiner, L.E. 80 grounded theory 102 groupthink 76 Hall, Douglas 163–4 Hamel, Gary 7 Hansen, H. 133 Hart, Stuart 35–6 Hatch, Mary Jo 26, 47, 105 Hawthorne studies 17, 62 Heath, Chip 131 Henderson, Lawrence 69 “hermeneutic circle” 100–101 Hernes, T. 79 High Reliability Organizations (HROs) 7–8 Hoffman, Andy 163 Homans, George 69 Hopwood, Anthony 118 HR see human resources HROs (High Reliability Organizations) 7–8 Huff, Anne 17, 130 human resources (HR) 10–11, 104–5, 161–2 humanist paradigm 25, 27 Huse, Edgar 59 hypothetico-deductive model 63, 99 I/O (industrial organization) strategies 59, 107 imperfect mobility 3 impressionist tales 125, 129–30 inductive research 72 industrial organization (I/O) strategies 59, 107 innovation studies 79 insider research 151–2 instrumental value 9–10 intellectual shamans 167–8 interactive knowledge exchange 14–16, 44–5

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interdisciplinary research 89 internal validity see rigor interpretivist research 26, 102, 105 intervention research 111–12 Jesuthasan, Ravin 162 Jobs, Steve 10 Johnson, P.E. 48 Johnson, Spencer 135 Kahn, R.L. 57 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss 107 Katz, D. 57 Kerlinger, F.N. 77 Kieser, A. 44 Kleiner, Art 129 Kluckhohn, Clyde 69 knowledge, usefulness 9–11 knowledge exchange 14–16, 47–8, 148, 163 knowledge generation 32 knowledge networks 41–2, 142–51 building/tapping into 65–7 connecting through 36–7, 134–5 joining with practice 66–7 organizing 148 sustainability research 50 sweet spot research 50–53 knowledge value stream xx–xxi, 11–16, 42–9 Kotter, John 5 Kozubek, Jim 125 Kram, Kathy 165 Kuhn, Thomas 4, 24 large-group interventions (LGIs) 109–10 Lasswell, Harold 120 Lawler, Edward xvii, 45–6, 66, 99, 105, 113, 135–6 learning histories 129 Leiner, I. 44 Lewin, Kurt 17, 56, 91, 111, 158 “linguistic turn” xix–xx Lippitt, Ronald 56 “logic of practice” 76 logico-scientific thought 125–6 Luca, Michael 124 McGregor, Douglas 4, 56, 58 Theory X and Theory Y 4, 59 Mackay, Harvey 135 McManus, S.E. 63 management research foundations of 55–7 fundamental considerations 22–4 repurposing xix–xx March, J.G. 63, 83 Markides, C. 91

Marks, Mitchell 136 Marshall, Albert 84–5 Maslow, A.H. 31, 56 mavens 134 Mayo, Elton 69 mentors 58–9 Merton, Robert 69 methodological approach 22–3, 28 Miles, R.E. 78 Milgram, Stanley 56 Mills, C. Wright 63 Miner, John 26 Mintzberg, Henry 17, 135 Mirvis, Philip H. 7, 9, 24, 45, 80, 129, 135–6, 144 models, advantages of 80 Mohrman, Susan Albers xix, 9, 14, 24, 34, 40–41, 46, 89–90, 109, 141 Morgan, G. 24–5, 35, 89 multi-disciplinary research 89 multi-party knowledge networks 146–51 multi-stakeholder research 44 Murray, Henry 69 Musk, Elon 10 narrative research 125–6 naturalistic research 105 Network for Business Sustainability (NBS) 41, 49–50 network model of organization 90–91 network thinking 65 networks see knowledge networks; practice networks Nevitt, J. 109 Newton, Paul 101 Nohria, Nitin 60 Nooyi, Indra 10 “nudging” 114–15 objective view, social science 25 Olsen, J.P. 83 ontology 21, 22–3, 28 “operational validity” 40, 98 organization research fundamental considerations 22–4 history of 55–7, 129 “issues” and responses 156–7 repurposing xix–xx organizational behavior (OB) research 56–7, 107 organizational change research 112–14, 152 organizational scholarship 4 organizations, typology 57 paradoxes 83 Pareto Circle 65, 69 Parsons, Talcott 69

INDEX

Pasternack, Bruce 45 “Pasteur’s Quadrant” 40 pattern matching 97–8, 99–103 Peirce, Charles Sanders 74 “performativity” 17 personal research philosophy 21–38 “perspective taking” 15 Peteraf, Margaret 3–4 Peters, Tom 5–6 Petriglieri, Gianpiero 6 Pfeffer, Jeff 57–8 philosophy of science 21–38 Pillans, Gillian 127, 132 pluralism 63–4 Poole, M.S. 79 Porter, Michael xvii, 3, 35, 66, 78, 82 “positioning” school 3 positivist theories 101–2 “pracademics” 159 “practical rationality” 76 practice-driven research 2–3, 5–7 applicability of 123 knowledge exchange 47 knowledge value stream 11–12 sourcing/framing 74, 76 sweet spot research contrasts 8 theorizing and 71–94 practice networks 47–8, 66–7 “practice theories” 17 “practice turn” xx practitioner-oriented books/articles 6–7 pragmatism 63–4, 149 Prahalad, C.K. 35–6, 76 prescriptive approach 21–2 “presentational knowing” 133 problem formulation connection with practice 60 sweet spot research 82–3 theory building 29 problem solving 29 problematizing 83 process theory 79, 106, 108 professional associations 45, 46–7 prosocial sense-making 107–8 protean careers 163–4, 168 psychological safety framework 124 Quality of Work Life (QWL) studies 45–6 Quinn, Robert 165 radical humanism 25, 27 radical structuralism 26 Ramstad, Pete 162 realist tales 125, 126–9 Rearick, Carolyn 162

reflective practice 103, 165–76 Regelbrugge, Laurie 149 relational view, value creation 39–54 relationship management 140–157, 160–161 relationship studies 106–9 relevance, standards of 2, 96–7 relevant scholarship xvii–xviii reliability 103, 114 research centers 66 research communication strategy 118–39 research institutes 45–6 research methods basic aspects of 97–8 for field studies 152–3 research paradigms 24–7 research relationships 140–157, 160–161 research role systems 142–4 resource-based view 3, 62–3 resource heterogeneity 3 rigor social constructs 61–2 standards of 2, 96–7 Roddick, Anita 10 Roethlisberger, F.J. 62 role conflict 144–5 role models 58–9 role systems 142–5 clarifying roles 143–5, 148 Romanelli, Elaine 108 Rosso, Brent 107–8 Roth, George 129 Rousseau, Denise xvii, 8, 39, 45, 67, 159, 164 routines, theories of 86 Roy, Don 131 Rynes, Sara 40, 118 Schein, Edgar xvii, 24, 26, 32, 58–9, 83, 111 scholarship models xvii–xviii Schön, Donald 9, 86, 163 Schultz, Majken 26, 47 Schumpeter, Joseph 69 science-related field research 150–154 scientific misconduct 153 Scott, William 57 Seashore, Stanley 63, 66 self-awareness 159, 165 Senge, Peter 67, 80 sensitive research topics 151, 155 Shani, A.B. (Rami) 44, 89, 112, 165 Shank, Roger 131 shareholder management approach 10 Sharma, Garima 41, 49–50, 90 Simon, Herbert 21, 63 Smith, K.K. 160 Snow, C.C. 78 social network perspective 49–53

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socially sensitive research 151 Society for Organization Learning (SOL) 67 socio-technical systems theory 56 sociological paradigms 24–5 SOL (Society for Organization Learning) 67 Spruit, Jan 134 stage models 80–82 STAR model 57 stakeholder management approach 10 Staw, B.M. 78 stickiness concept 131 storytelling 125–9 Strauss, A. 63, 105 strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) framework 59 strong ties 52 structuralist paradigm 26 Stuart, David 147 subjectivity 25, 103 sustainability research 50, 106 Sutcliffe, A.M. 7 Sutton, Bob 29, 32, 85, 131 Sutton, R.I. 78 sweet spot management research 2, 7–9, 17, 76 abduction 74 careers in 68, 158–71 contemporary scholarship 57–8 direct engagement 114–15 exploratory/descriptive approaches 106 foundations of 55 key criterion 108–9 knowledge networks 50–53 knowledge value stream 13, 48–9 pattern matching 98, 101–3 personal philosophy 26–7 practice perspective 83 relationship management 140, 160–161 sourcing dimension 71 standards 95 stories 127 theorizing 82–8 theory–practice bridge 39–40 SWOT (strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats) framework 59 symbolic value 9–10 systems thinking 80 Tapscott, Don 6 Taylor, S. 133 Taylor Society 65 Taylor’s scientific management 26, 34, 56 team learning model 124 theorizing 77–80, 82–8 about practice 85–6 from practice 80–82 “linguistic turn” xix–xx for practice 86

“practice turn” xx question formulation 72–3, 87–91 sourcing/framing strategies 71–6 theory building 3, 29, 100–101, 121 theory-driven research 2, 3–5, 8, 74 theory/practice links 73–5, 85–7 theory testing 3, 29, 99–100, 121 Theory X versus Theory Y 4 thick description 105, 126 Thorsrud, Einar 5 thought trials 84–5 Tourish, Dennis 118 Trice, Harrison 9 Trist, Eric 56, 158 Trump, Donald 7–8 Tufte, Edward R. 132 Turkle, Sherry 104 Tushman, Michael 108–9 typologies, characteristics of 78 Ucbasaran, Deniz 101 “unifying” paradigms 58 validity “context” 98 “ecological” 40 insider research 152 “operational” 40, 98 process theory 108 value creation 39–54 value stream 48–9 see also knowledge value stream values 33–7 Van de Ven, Andrew 27, 29–32, 48, 63, 79 van Maanen, John 58, 125, 131 variance theory 78–9, 107–8 Vernon, Christina 90 “vicarious traumatization” 155 Waddock, Sandra 33, 35, 65, 83, 167–8 Waterman, R.H. 5 wayfinders 168 weak ties 52 Weber, Max 61–2, 78 Weick, Karl 5, 7, 79, 101 Welch, Jack 10 Whetten, D.A. 78 Whitehead, Alfred North 69 Worley, C.G. 9, 14, 46, 86–7, 99, 109, 127, 132, 141 Zapata-Phelan, C.P. 101 Zhexembayeva, Nadya 134 Ziskin, Ian 162 Zuboff, Shoshanna 104 Zuckerberg, Mark 104