There has been growing recognition among academics and practitioners alike that we need to do something to bridge the gap between academic research and practice in the organizational sciences. Organizations like the Academy of Management (AOM) and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) have put efforts into solving the gap problem. While these efforts are certainly worthwhile, we won’t fully solve the problem until the top journals get involved. These journals must bridge the academic-practice gap because it is in these journals that the gap mainly exists.
What Is the Academic-Practice Gap?
The academic-practice gap is simply that academic research today rarely informs what practitioners do and what practitioners do rarely informs research. Academics initiate research programs to fill gaps in the academic literature. That research is highly theoretical, and a minority of studies these days are conducted inside organizations. Practitioners, even those who are industrial-organizational psychologists, do not rely on latest academic findings to do their work. For the vast majority of practicing managers who are not psychologists, the theoretical abstraction and statistical complexity of most academic papers is difficult to grasp.
Journals Must Bridge the Academic-Practitice Gap
Much of the academic-practice gap occurs in the published literature, so it stands to reason that the journals play an important role to bridge it. This means they should publish papers that are more concerned with real-life problems of organizations than developing theory. Such papers would focus on how to drive important outcomes and solve problems. For example, a paper might report on an intervention study to increase employee engagement. Such papers should use simple statistics that illustrate impact clearly. For example, it might report a comparison of employee engagement means between an intervention group and a control group. This might be as simple as a t-test, or a analysis of variance. Using complex statistical modeling to test an intervening series of theoretical mediators is not of much value to the practitioner. I recently read an interesting intervention paper that did just that. There was no statistical comparison of means, only tests of a complex mediation model. The academic in me found it interesting–the practitioner in me found it disappointing because I don’t know if the intervention improved the outcomes. I assume the authors chose their method because that is what it took to get the paper published. Clearly, we need a reset.
Reviewer Resistance to Change
About 30 years ago the incoming editor of Journal of Applied Psychology wrote his new-editor essay that one of his goals was to start publishing qualitative research. I-O psychology is a quantitative field, and there has been resistance to incorporating non-quantitative methods. I ran into him at a conference at the end of this 6-year term and asked how many qualitative papers they published. “None” was his reply. “No one submitted a qualitative paper than met our standards”.
I also saw reviewer resistance when I guest edited a special issue of Journal of Business and Psychology that solicited papers using exploratory or inductive methods. These are papers that address interesting research questions that are not based on theory and do not have hypotheses. We got some great submissions, but changing established practices for some people was hard. There were some papers, thankfully few, that were not exploratory at all. They looked to be standard theory-based papers with the hypotheses deleted. A few reviewers complained that the paper they were reviewing lacked sufficient theory even thought it was clearly stated in their instructions that the papers would not address theory.
Start with Special Issues
It has taken decades for our organizational journals like Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Applied Psychology to move away from problem-focused papers, so change won’t happen overnight. Perhaps the best approach is with special issues that solicit problem-focused papers that would inform practice. The editors and reviewers would agree to a new set of rules for evaluating papers for the special issue, just as we did for the inductive special issue. Just such an approach is being implemented by a special issue in Personnel Psychology, one of the top academic journals in the field of industrial-organizational psychology and organizational behavior. They have put out a call for papers that address practical problems of organizations using research. This is a great start, and assuming they get good submissions, I hope they will make it a recurring feature of the journal. I also hope that the other top journals will follow their lead. We need our major societies like Academy of Management and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology to encourage journal editors to take up the cause because journals must bridge the academic-practice gap. The goal should be to produce more balance between the theoretical and practical, which will benefit both academic researchers whose work will have greater societal impact and practitioners who will have the evidence to make their organizations better.
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