Making a difference: Doing leadership research that matters

Most of the research that is currently in ‘leading’ journals ignores the really important issues that confront our world. As an example, consider what is probably the most important problem now facing our species. Unless, dear reader, your name is Donald J. Trump it should be clear by now that climate change poses an existential threat to the environment, biodiversity and our own species. Yet when I searched The Leadership Quarterly using the term ‘climate change’ I found no hits in the title, abstract or keywords of any papers. Full disclosure: I edit the journal Leadership, and we have published nothing on climate change either. Very little research has been done by management scholars on other important issues as well, including the now rapid growth of new technologies that are already transforming the world of work, and the possibility that an insufficiently reformed banking system will inflict a worse crisis on us than it did in 2008. For far too many of us, scoring publication ‘hits’ in top journals to advance our careers has overwhelmed whatever initial motivations brought us into academic life in the first place.

These include a curiosity about ideas, a love of writing and the desire to make a positive difference to the world in which we live. If we let the regulatory environment in which we work wholly supplant our sense of intrinsic motivation, and the joy of discovery, then academic life is worse than pointless. It becomes harmful, since it means that we are polluting the publication biosphere with pretentious theories and trivial insights. We need a greater willingness to address problems that really matter.

We also need to back pedal on our fascination with theory development. For some reason, most leading journals now insist that every paper must not just use theory, but seek to develop it. Of course, good theory is important. But so is gathering useful data on significant problems, addressing the practical implications of our work, and incidentally writing in accessible language. The insistence by journals that every paper must develop theory, and be shoehorned into the same lifeless template, encourages a great deal of pretentious gibberish. If an existing theory can explain new and fascinating data perfectly well, why should that be a problem? I argue that we need a greater commitment to doing work that really matters, and relinquish our present obsession with where we publish rather than the quality of our ideas.

Read the full article ‘Making a difference: Doing leadership research that matters‘ published in Journal of Management & Organization

 

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