Research for management

For a long time concerned researchers have developed expertise on different features of organisations in order to analyse and to identify trends and improvements. The challenge for these researchers has been to ensure that knowledge and insight can be aligned to the specific (and sometimes hypothetical) concerns of managers in a wide range of different organisations. For example, sometimes management research focuses on wider theories or more specific issues (for example, how can we prove that HR practices lead to better organisational performance?) whereas managers want an answer to more immediate questions (such as, how can we make our performance management processes work more effectively?). When the concerns of researchers and managers come together, there is lots of evidence that this can have positive impacts. Sometimes a manager is in an interesting position which bridges the two roles of manager and researcher. This dual status means the manager has an opportunity to design a great research project – the management role means the research should be relevant to a current issue in the organisation, and the researcher status means having to show how this issue links to a wider framework. Management research does not have to simply focus on what managers do. Instead, it can be research that addresses an organisational issue or problem in which managers have an interest because it has the potential to negatively impact on their practice. The great researcher F.W.Taylor was obsessed with improving industrial productivity and solving the problem of systematic soldiering whereby workers would deliberately reduce their effort in order to maximise their payment rates and maintain levels of employment. By breaking down each job into specific stages and describing these, Taylor was able to show how work could be done more efficiently and more quickly – something that evolved into ‘time and motion’ or ‘stopwatch and clipboard’ studies. As a piece of management research, Taylor did not achieve immediate success (he was asked to leave the Bethlehem Steel Company where he developed his work and his ideas were famously satirised by Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times) but his work was voted the most influential of the 20th century and can still be seen today in many industrial production lines or call centres. Another example of management research which has resonated over many decades is the Hawthorne Studies conducted at the Western Electric Plant in the 1920s and 1930s. This research started out as a study looking at the effect of illumination on worker productivity. The findings proved to be inconclusive but then the research expanded into one of the first pieces of work which addressed the issue of employee wellbeing/happiness and its impact on productivity – something that continues to influence management research which focuses on solving the question of whether happy employees mean commitment and higher profits. These studies have given us the Hawthorne Effect, a key issue in all research which warns the researcher that the act of studying something can also influence change of its behaviour. Management research has impacted practice over many years. #Leadership #Change #OrganizationsResearch #ManagementResearch