How relevant are Business Sciences to managerial Practice?

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:05:00 +0000

There are only very few studies, which investigate the impact of research in business has on the actual research field.

In other fields the impact is easily seen. Without research there would be no modern medicine, without research there would be no buildings rising 800m and more.

But where would business be without research in the business and economics sciences?

For the part of operations management (OM) research the authors de-Margerie and Jiang (2011; “How relevant is OM research to managerial practice?”) analyze the key factors of literature to be relevant for practitioners.

Method

Impact on business oriented problems is a major criterion for many leading OM journals. To analyze the factors the authors employed an expert panel, made up from senior practitioners with cross-functional experience in international operations. Each of them was assigned with the task of reading and assess the ten most downloaded papers of the Journal of Operations Management.

The selected papers are listed in figure 1.

Figure 1: Top ten downloaded Papers (Journal of Operations Management; from 2004 to 2007; de-Margerie and Jiang, 2011; click to enlarge)

The assessment was based on seven criteria and graded on a five point Likert scale.

Descriptive relevance (e.g. “this article’s findings represent the ‘real world’”)

Goal relevance (e.g. “the article produces definitive results for decision making”)

Non-obviousness (e.g. “this article’s findings are just common sense”)

Timeliness

Readability (e.g. “this article is too abstract or complicated to be understood”)

Topic (e.g. “this article has a guideline that connects the reader to the problem and solutions”)

Usefulness

Results

Based on the direct survey data from practice [in this study], this research empirically derived a much smaller number of dimensions as replacements for the original variables of relevance while still retaining their original character.

The first finding is represented by the three criteria which are used by the practitioners to evaluate OM research.

“whether academic research is applicable or implementable to the practice;”

“whether academic research provides novel insights or new perspectives to management; and”

“whether academic research helps practitioners recognize their situation (i.e. communicates in recognizable ways).”

Furthermore the authors show that the evaluated ten papers did achieve high score in the second and third criterion.

Since these papers were primarily downloaded by other OM researchers, these papers should be important or relevant to other OM scholars’ research. Therefore, we may conclude that the academia of OM shares the second and third criteria of relevance with the practice.

The authors explain the lower scoring of the first criterion with the “the conflict between academic research’s goal and executive’s expectations. Practitioners expect to obtain immediate resolutions of current problems in specific operational contexts. In contrast, scholarly researchers ‘are required to reflect on the implications of innovations in an effort to distill knowledge that will stand the test of time and be applicable over a wide array of situations’”

Conclusion

This again was a very nice article.

Methodically, all steps are explained in detail and the assumptions seem reasonable.

Formally, the article guides the reader through its content without loosing the red thread from the research question to the presentation of the results.

Content-wise, the article touches interesting new grounds. Of course research should never follow practice blindly, so a gap between research and practice is only natural. For me, another interesting question on a broader scale would be, to what degree business research is transferred to practice.

Reference:

de-Margerie, V., & Jiang, Bin (2011). How relevant is OM research to managerial practice? International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 31 (2), 124-147

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Job dissatisfaction and supply chain risk

Daniel Dumke — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:05:00 +0000

Jiang et al. (2009) wrote about job dissatisfaction of workers at suppliers in developing countries.

Goal & Methodology

The goal of the study was to analyze risk in a global supply chain, especially originating from labor dissatisfaction and turnover. The results were obtained using a survey of workers in the Chinese Pearl River Delta region. The methodology is presented precisely and comprehensively.

Risks & Mitigation

Three major risks are resulting from high turnover and job dissatisfaction: 1) A cost risk emerges directly from turnover costs and indirectly due to rising wages. 2) Job dissatisfaction can lead to operational risks (eg. low quality, not meeting schedules) 3) There can also be reputational risk, if low production costs are achieved by low standards for health, safety and welfare issues.

Risk mitigation measures in this case must be different to those in other markets, since labor markets behave quite differently to other input markets.

Labor quitting or turnover is a more social or collective decision making process

Therefore it is influenced by many factors at once.

h5. Study design & Results

Six factors which influence the quitting decision have been identified.

Correlation between influencing factors and the decision to quit the job
Factor	Correlation	Description
HR management at the supplier	positive	Up to now there is only little effort by chinese manufacturers to improve the HRM, since labor turnover is seen as costless or at least less expensive than investing in HRM.
Production- & operations management	positive	Job satisfaction declines rapidly with POM practices-related problems.
Attitude towards the relationship with the buyers	positive	The relationship with the buyers has influence on many aspects of the work environment within a supplier and therefore influences the job satisfaction of the workers.
Working conditions	no correlation
Compensation issues	weak correlation	Interestingly the correlation for compensation issues is only weak, probably since the expectations of the workers in this respect are usually quite low.
Opinion of industry	no correlation

h5. Implications

To lower the induced risks the results imply that suppliers should improve POM and HRM issues, thereby improving job satisfaction. The study also shows that buyers might be able to lower these risks directly by adjusting their behavior within the relationship to the supplier and indirectly by influencing the supplier to improve POM and HRM issues (see also the article about Supplier Responsibility at Apple Inc.).

h5. Summary

The article presents the methods used very completely, even the limitations are nearly complete so I only can list them: Survey was only conducted in a single country, there was no separation of successful and unsuccessful factories and neither the management of the supplier nor the buyers were included.

The magnitude of the resulting risk was never made clear. Especially in manufacturing jobs with only low requirements on the skills of the workers the risk of loosing an employee might prove to be only minimal since he/she can be replaced without major training cost. Particularly in a study on the manufacturing industry in developing countries this topic should have been addressed.
Do not hesitate to leave your comments below.