Academics and Practitioners Create Better Research Together

I was thrilled to be part of a team of practitioners and academics who wrote a paper about how academics and practitioners create better research together. Published in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) flagship journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology (IOP), our new paper talks about engaged scholarship whereby academics partner with practitioners in conducting their studies.

The Academic-Practice Divide

When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, the focus of my field of industrial-organizational psychology and business management was on practical problems of organizations. There was a good mix of articles that tested theoretical ideas and articles that showed how to solve practical problems. The latter were conducted in field settings to show how one might hire better people, motivate those you had, or assure that they would stay on the job. Over time the field evolved to focus more and more on theoretical issues, with few articles focused on practical problems of organizations in a way that a practitioner, IO psychologist or others, could use.

As I look at research articles today, I find that few of them have findings that are actionable, that is, that one can directly apply to the workplace. Most are focused on theoretical model tests using extremely complex statistics. Although the topic might be one that is relevant to organizations, the findings generally just show that theoretical concepts invented by academics, are correlated with one another. These constructs have gotten farther and farther removed from important organizational outcomes and practices.

Academics and Practitioners Create Better Research Together

The point of our paper is that it is easy for academics, who mainly talk to one another, to become siloed in their work. We propose that engaged scholarship, a method by which academics and practitioners collaborate on research, can improve research. There are advantages to engaging in collaboration.

• Additional expertise on the team. My first job was a visiting assistant professor in a business school. One of my mentors, a senior professor with industry background, noted that most management professors had little practical knowledge of how management worked in the field. Practitioners bring that knowledge as they understand how organizations function and whether theoretical ideas are unrealistic or impractical. They can challenge our assumptions, in a good way.
• Logistical knowledge. At the university, I teach how to measure things, how to design studies, and how to analyze data. I do not cover the logistics of conducting a research study inside an organization. I find that the research method portion (design, measurement, analysis) is the easy part because I can do it all myself. The hard part is managing the project. Getting all the pieces together to carry it out, is hard because you are dependent on others for much of it. Practitioners know how to do this, because logistics is what they do every day.
• Resources. When the practitioner is a partner in research that addresses an important problem, such as employee engagement, retention or burnout, the project is as much the practitioner’s as the academic’s. The organization will invest resources into that project that the academic would otherwise need grant funding for. In a project involving a training intervention, for example, likely the organization will cover the resources for developing and delivering the training.
• Piggy-backing research and practice. A collaborative project can merge research and practice by addressing a practical problem in a way that tests theoretical ideas. This might mean measuring important organizational outcomes of concern to the practitioner while also measuring other variables purely of theoretical interest. For example, a training intervention study might include a pretest post-test design with a survey conducted before and after the training occurs. The practitioner is happy to see that outcome means improved. The academic is happy to have a longitudinal dataset to test complex statistical models–a win/win.

Bridging the Divide

Academics who labor under publish or perish already have full plates, so it can be hard to think about adding one more thing. My advice to those who are thinking about collaborative research is to start small. Invest a little time to network with practitioners to explore areas of mutual interest. Rather than approach it as looking for research sites, consider this as recruiting a research team that has a bigger skill set than those you’ve put together in the past. Perhaps the hardest part is just getting started and making those connections. Some of this can be done on campus in the business school. It can be done of campus by giving talks to trade groups. The local Society for Human Resource Management chapter comes to mind. Talk to practitioners about their challenges, and make it known that you are interested in collaborating. If more of us engage in collaborative research, our science and practice will both benefit.

Image generated by ChatGPT 4.0. Prompts: “image of bridging the divide by showing a tug of war across a trench” “Less cartoonish and no writing” “make more colorful”

SUBSCRIBE TO PAUL’S BLOG: Enter your e-mail and click SUBSCRIBE