Dear Careers Division Members,
I would welcome self nominations from interested parties for the task force announced below. This is an important, recurring, problem and I would like to suggest names of those who are interested in this particular issue.
Please let me know soon if you are willing to join in this effort so that I can nominate you to the AOM president.
Cherry Granrose
AOM Careers Division Chair 2006-2007
This is a call requesting participation of members from your division in an initiative to explore possibilities for closing the gap between management research and practice. I am writing to ask whether you or some members of your division's leadership would be interested to join a Collaborative effort to explore how best available scientific management and organizational research evidence might be organized and made useable for both teaching and practice.
This collaborative is being formed by a group of scholars, headed by Denise Rousseau with some organizing assistance by the Academy of Management. The Academy's interest is in the exploration of solutions by this collaborative to the age-old problem of the limited use by management educators and practitioners of research conducted by management scholars. The Academy is assisting with some financial support for initial meetings of the collaborative and supporting its direct engagement of content experts from the divisions.
The primary initial task of the Collaborative is to develop and design the architecture and support practices for an on-line service that practitioners and educators can readily use to access summaries of best evidence. The Academy is interested in seeing whether such a service based on management and organization research is feasible. On-line publicly-available research summaries exist today in other evidence-informed fields, such as medicine's on-line Cochrane Collaboration, and education's Campbell Collaboration.
The participants in the Collaborative will be researchers, design scientists, professional educators, practitioners, and textbook writers who are all critical to investigate the feasibility of this effort. Many wear multiple hats as management researchers and design scientists who teach and/or write textbooks and as practitioners applying evidence in the many aspects of our work. We are fortunate to have several evidence-based managers (i.e., real prototypes) who have agreed to participate. Among others, participants currently include Jean Bartunek, Rob Briner, Robert Ford, Michael Frese, Carrie Leana, Jone Pearce, Craig Pinder, Sara Rynes, and John Zanardelli (an evidence-based manager).
The commitment we are looking for at this time is to see if there are members of your leadership or division who would volunteer to attend meetings of the Collaborative scheduled, over a 1 1/2 to 2-year period. Ideally, we hope to have at least one participant per division. Joining this group would entail attending potentially 3 face-to-face meetings and working on a task of their choosing between meetings. Participation would be at their own expense or the expense of their institution. The Academy is providing some financial support for the infrastructure of these meetings.
Schedule
June 28-30, 2007 (in Pittsburgh)--Meeting 1: conversation and idea sharing, needs analysis, and first-round planning. Categories and classifications are tools for cultural change; and evidence-informed ways of organizing and managing won't fly without cultural supports for thinking differently about theory, evidence, and organizational problem solving.
December 2007 (Pittsburgh)--Meeting 2: developing solutions and action plans to build support and implement these solutions.
June 2008-Meeting 3: investigating alternative methods for launch of an empirical based on-line management platform.
Critical issues to worked on together (not all-inclusive, just a start):
o Designing Solutions: What are alternative ways of closing the research/practice gap, supporting practices that increase likelihood that available evidence will actually be put to use, etc.?
o Consensus: What might be the bases for agreement around the meaning of evidence in research and practice, forms evidence-based management principles would take, etc.?
o Framing Evidence in Practitioner-Oriented Ways: What are various ways of categorizing and framing applied problems (or solutions, outcomes, etc.) so users can more readily access and apply evidence; partnerships with users and user groups, use of design processes to better identify user needs from research, differences among end users, etc.?
o Developing Support Tools: What services and supports do practitioners need to take evidence-informed actions in their daily activities, e.g. decision supports and aids for evidence-informed practice, such as checklists developed from actionable evidence or action guidelines downloadable to their PDAs?
o Identify Funding Sources: What sustainable financial support is there for the on-going activities we seek to establish? What value-added can we create that is economically sustainable?
o Creating Additional Benefits: What other approaches might our Collaborative pursue that would be valuable to our constituents, yourself, and other Collaborative members?
P.S. See the Collaborative's website for additional information http://wpweb2.tepper.cmu.edu/rlang/ebm_conf/index.html