Not that I needed any further reminding that we still have a long way to go in bridging the gap between the work of academic researchers and informing (and perhaps even influencing) practice but the last couple of years have certainly reinforced my views on this topic. Hello and welcome to our blog dedicated to firing up your imagination and starting the conversation before we meet in Montreal in just under four weeks time. My name is Kerry Grigg and I am an academic about to re-enter the corporate world at one of the leaders in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector on the global stage.
I have spent the last ten years in Australia working in academia, consulting to a range of organisations from the public and private sector while also working on my Masters and PhD qualifications. I am currently writing up my PhD thesis and as I reflect on the last three years it has been an interesting journey in working with the organisations that generously gave me access to the inner workings of their businesses and to their employees. The PhD process really illuminated the gap between academic research and the day to day reality for many practitioners at the coal face. While I don’t claim that my observations and opinions will be shared by my fellow presenters at the Engaging Encounters PDW I hope they provide the basis for some robust discussions around some of the challenges involved in ‘closing the gap’.
So to kick things off, here are just some of my thoughts and ideas based on my relatively short experience:
1. Negotiating access into organisations to actually conduct organisational research is exhausting (and character building) work! I now understand why many researchers seek out an alternative path to reaching participants via professional associations and other methods. Does this matter? Well of course the answer to that question will depend very much on the research question itself but I think to conduct quality research in the areas of talent management and employee engagement we want to as researchers submerge ourselves into those “brave” organisations that are willing, ready and able to participate.
2. Following on from my first point, I often wonder about the rich insights I missed out on gathering for my PhD research due to the unwillingness of some organisations to participate. I was researching the impact an organisation’s promotion of their work-life balance (flexibility) credentials had on the individual employee’s psychological contract. The great frustration for me was that I was unable to negotiate access into any of the organisations that were actively and explicitly promoting their support for work-life balance (e.g. in their recruitment advertising, internal communications). I do sometimes wonder if the difficulty in securing access to organisations that may provide some of the most revealing data and findings means researchers are left to take the easier path of researching within the most convenient , but perhaps less revealing, organisations. I believe ‘closing the gap’ could potentially make it easier for academics at all levels to access a wider and more diverse range of organisations.
3. I believe some (perhaps many) business practitioners do not see the value in robust academic research. In some of the organisations I approached about participating in my PhD study they couldn’t understand why my questionnaire included so many questions. A response I received from one practitioner probably reflects the view of many practitioners went something like this... “why do you need to ask about employee trust alone in seven different ways when Gallup can get to the bottom of employee engagement in this organisation in twelve easy questions?” Footnote: this HR Director did eventually agree to give me access to the organisation but it was a battle.
4. In my view at some Universities (despite their public claims), building links with the practitioner community just isn’t genuinely valued. Consulting work can become almost the “dirty secret” of some academics in some Universities where publication in top ranking journals alone is the only way to build a career and carve out an academic reputation. This is perhaps one of my great frustrations – I do not know a single business practitioner that reads a Management or HR Journal beyond the Harvard Business Review and I can understand why. In my humble view there just has to be a better way of encouraging academics to take that next step beyond publishing in top ranking (but rarely read) journals. I think a great academic conducts high quality and robust research, publishes it in the top journals, ‘translates’ it into a meaningful form for business practitioners and then gets amongst those practitioners to shape business practice while at the same time learning from practitioners (and the organisations and people they work for) to feed back into the research and teaching loop.
The motivation in setting up this PDW for me personally is driven by my ambition to be an academic and practitioner that somehow bridges that disconnect between quality research and influencing practice back out in the business community. It’s for that reason I approached Professor Graeme Martin, Professor John Boudreau, Professor Paul Sparrow and Professor Elaine Farndale to join this PDW to share their experiences on how they have bridged this gap in their own professional lives. Graeme, John, Paul and Elaine have used a variety of approaches to actively engage with the practitioner community and I’m really looking forward to hearing and learning more from them at the PDW. But just as importantly I’m really excited about the prospect of a group of academics and hopefully some practitioners coming together in Montreal to discuss these issues, share ideas and perhaps even develop some collaborative links along the way!
I really do encourage you to keep this discussion rolling along by commenting or if you would like to include a more substantial post please feel free to email me the contribution so I can upload it to our blog on your behalf. I have to confess I am a relatively newcomer to the blogosphere but I will be relying on the help of my good friend and blogger from way back ...Graeme Martin! My email address is Kerry.Grigg@buseco.monash.edu.au I look forward to meeting you in Montreal if not somewhere in the blogosphere in the meantime.
Kind regards
Kerry
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Many thanks Kerry, for getting this going and for your comments,which reflect the experience of lots of academics, I'm sure (including me). I'm afraid I have rather let my blog lapse over the last few months, in part because I've been doing so much writing.
ReplyDeleteA few quick comments to get things going. On access and on what you have to go through to get access for questions which interest you but are not driven by business interests, this is always going to be difficult. Naturally organizations are going to sponsor research which addresses questions of interest to them, and thus puts you in a position of have to negotiate and perhaps compromise over your focal questions. Many of the projects I've been involved in recently have been action research, which have involved negotiation over the questions and addressing issues that the sponsoring organization wanted to address. In one sense this places us in a position of being 'servants of power', which, for some academics, particularly 'critical theorists', is a difficult place to be. I think Andy Van de Ven's book on 'Engaged Research' addresses this problem quite well in posing the problems and solutions to enagaging with practitioners/ organizations to do research without compromising academic integrity. However, no matter how you dress it up, engagement will always provide researchers (not consultants) with problems, consciously or unconsciously, over what gets asked, what gets answered, who gets asked and what gets reported and where. On this last point, I've recently experienced problems on doing the kind of research you discuss in your posting on employee engagement. I think we are often morally obliged to do 'no harm', but sometimes what we find out can harm the sponsors of our research (e.g. through being misreported by newspapers who get hold of results in the case of public sector organizations), and thus make them very wary of ever engaging again with practitioners.
On your comment about HR directors not understanding why we have to ask so many questions to get to the same point as they think Gallup gets to with their Q12, etc., my experience is that you have to have a very good explanation (theorerical argument!) for wanting to do so that will provide them with valuable extra data. This won't always work because they may not need the extra data, but if you can link it to one of your other issues - evaluation and measurement of programmes- you are more likely to win. The consultancy engagement surveys are useful, largely because they can benchmark against companies in the same industry. Typically, however, they lack a strong theoretical base (or route map), which explains why and how variables are linked. This is important because both practitioners and researchers are ultimately most interested in predicting with some certainty the impact of HR interventions. These kinds of explanations which necessarily complexify rather than simplify don't always wash, but if you can make your points well enough you can get them to cooperate.
Follow up to last comment (PS you are restricted in the length of your reponses )I couldn't agree more with your points about the lack of genuine interest in working with practitioners among some universities. Paul Sparrow's excellent initiative at Lancaster University in the UK is the exception rather than the rule at many of the prestigious universities in my country. The explanations for this are complicated and have been well documented by people like Rakesh Khurana in the US, and the debate over Mode 1 and Mode 2 research in the UK. However, in this country the research assessment exercise has tended to privilege certain types of research and researchers - often at the expense of impact on the practitioner community. There are strong arguments for this traditional form of social science approach to business school research. However, it has not helped the cause of most UK business schools in reputation terms, because they are seen, with only a few exceptions, as being irrelevant to business and only good for producing basic forms of education such as undergraduate and middle management MBAs. Impact, and what this means, is a subject of intense debate in the UK right now and will inform the new REF assessment exercise of UK universities. My best guess is that engagement with practitioners in research terms will become more important as a way of demonstrating impact. However, will this create other problems down the line?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kerry and Graeme for your very thoughtful kick-off of this blog, and the preparation for the Professional Development Workshop (PDW) at the Academy of Management meeting in Montreal.
ReplyDeleteKerry's blog certainly captured common hopes and frustrations of Ph.D. candidates and academics in working with organizations. At the Center for Effective Organizations, a research institute within the business school at University of Southern California in the U.S. (http://ceo.usc.edu/) Ed Lawler, Sue Mohrman and colleagues have been successfully doing action research with organizations for over 30 years (I joined 7 years ago so take little credit for their remarkable accomplishments). The web site provides a lot of material for consideration by any researcher striving to work closely with organizations. As Graeme noted, the key to success in achieving both field relevance and academic rigor is that the research issue be both transparently valuable in practice and of interest to scholars. As Graeme noted, that means the researcher must craft a question and a relationship with the organization(s) that clearly shows why doing the research in a way that may be different from standard consulting firms or in-organization practice will yield insights that might not otherwise be available. It is not enough to say to an organization "but I can't get published unless we do it this way." It is not enough to say to a journal "they wouldn't let me do it the way we needed to advance understanding." The answer is usually somewhere in between. Graduate programs could do more to give their students opportunities to engage such conversations and practice finding the middle ground. At the Center, former graduate students such as Chris Worley and George Benson now contribute to our research agenda, but both did some of their Ph.D. work with the Center, and got valuable opportunities to work with seasoned scholars doing just this kind of work.
One of the problems that we (academics and practitioners) have with all of the bridge-mechanisms that we try to build is that they are incredibly resource intensive to both set up and maintain, and the energy invariably saps away from the initiative once there has been an initial exchange of knowledge. Moreover, the personalities also change with increasing frequency these days.
ReplyDeleteI think about it this way at the Centre for Performance-led HR. Collaborations are about the creation of new knowledge and also about the exploitation of both new and existing knowledge. But to enable this, any collaboration needs a degree of operational stability. So, as an academic, if you are to build a strong practitioner interface to research, you need to attend to five things. First, you have to manage the reputation of the network (which means publishing and presenting in practitioner outlets). Second, you have invest much time in network maintenance activities (creating things like special interest groups). Third, you have to develop deep knowledge of your sponsors or collaborators, which means understanding the context. Fourth, you need to draw upon the linkages to expert knowledge that the practitioners bring.
The reputation building and network maintenance activity means getting involved in case study writing, using practitioners for live teaching, producing policy guidance papers for practitioners, and being able to create research-into-practice digests. That is the starting point to engage interest. Only then can academics pursue their part of the agenda, which is better research dissemination. And that requires designing and managing web resources so they do not just dump knowledge on practitioners. but entice them into deeper and deeper levels of knowledge, developing forums that continue to co-create knowledge (such as special interest groups and joint investigation teams) and then co-opting the strategic planning processes and workshops that practitioners run so that they are enriched by some academic themes and analysis.
None of this is easy. None of it is measured or rewarded within academic or research evaluation frameworks. Most of it helps shape the relevance of research, but on;y some of the activity - but not all - can however help lead to more rigorous research. As academics, we have to work harder just to maintain a level playing field with more research-capable if not research-interested intermediaries (consulting houses, practitioner and professional networks etc). Lots of people are trying to move into the same space.
Paul
The comments here so far are incredibly insightful, and reflect much of my own experience to date.
ReplyDeleteI started my career working in the public sector in the UK as an HR professional, and after a few years was lured back to the world of academia where I completed my PhD and now have teaching and research responsibilities some ten years on.
As a practitioner, I was always also a student (both at heart and in practice) as I wanted to gain as much knowledge as possible so that I could perform better in my role in HR. I started from the most basic level so it was easy for me to tap into the wealth of HR knowledge, including that provided by professional associations and educational establishments.
I wonder now today though, whether HR professionals still have the time (and possibly the inclination) to do this, especially when holding more senior positions in organizations. There are always more urgent (if not important) matters to be dealt with, so is it really possible to step back and take the time to carry out some in-depth research into the issue at hand? I was teaching on an intensive summer school recently, and it is always wonderful when you get comments like this: “After attending a lecture during the summer and heightening my understanding of Barlett & Ghoshal’s internalization strategies, I wanted to understand the level of awareness of my colleagues had of our international operations. In talking to staff, applicants, local leaders, national leaders, and my fellow HR colleagues, I unfortunately was not shocked to find out most, if not all, honestly had no idea we, HCA were an international company.“ So by taking an hour out of a day to follow a class on internationalization, the whole direction of this organization became much clearer to this student, and this is something she could share with colleagues.
The question remains though – how do we as academics make our research sufficiently interesting and accessible for immediate practical use? It can be difficult after a two-year project studying a phenomenon in great depth to come up with the all-encompassing ‘2x2 matrix’ which might solve corporate mysteries!
I believe the answer lies largely in carrying out applied research – by involving companies in research projects, i.e. investigating a phenomenon in a real corporate setting rather than from secondary datasets or through laboratory-based experiments, this enables the company and the researcher to learn together. This is certainly the approach I am currently taking with a major international piece of research looking at employee engagement. We are interested in finding out about the linkage between how the performance of employees is managed and their resultant employee engagement, but in different country contexts from both the West and the East. The research involves producing academic papers, but also running feedback workshops and writing company reports for the participant companies. Together, the project is able to tap into both the academic and practitioner fields and hopefully one day will make a difference!
I look forward to reading your thoughts and insights on this, especially from the practitioner point of view now!
Elaine