Is the focus on small business warranted? Yes!

I-Os wishing to conduct more research in small business contexts have an audience of entrepreneurship researchers sympathetic to the value of this work. Entrepreneurship researchers have long held that small businesses are a worthy population to study, in no small part due to research finding that most new job creation (in the United States, at least) is the result of new and small businesses growing into old and large ones (Haltiwanger et al., Reference Haltiwanger, Jarmin and Miranda2013). Beyond simply being interested in the subject, entrepreneurship researchers have laid a foundation of research at the intersection of HR and entrepreneurship that I-Os can build upon to tackle small business issues and close the research–practice gap.

Research on I-O/HR topics in small businesses is a long-running and ongoing endeavor in entrepreneurship research. Although entrepreneurship researchers have studied HR in small businesses for decades (see for example Cardon & Stevens, Reference Cardon and Stevens2004; De Kok & Uhlaner, Reference De Kok and Uhlaner2001), efforts have been galvanized by the introduction of the joiner, the (aspiring) employee of a new venture, as a major character in the entrepreneurship literature in the last decade (Roach & Sauermann, Reference Roach and Sauermann2015). Since 2015, contributions in top management, labor, and entrepreneurship journals have examined recruitment (e.g., Engel et al., Reference Engel, Lewis, Cardon and Hentschel2023), selection (Roach & Sauermann, Reference Roach and Sauermann2024), compensation (Burton et al., Reference Burton, Dahl and Sorenson2018), careers (Sorenson et al., Reference Sorenson, Dahl, Canales and Burton2021), work design (Van Lancker et al., Reference Van Lancker, Knockaert, Collewaert and Breugst2023), team formation (Lazar et al., Reference Lazar, Miron-Spektor, Chen, Goldfarb, Erez and Agarwal2022), and many other HR topics in the contexts of nascent small businesses specifically. The unique challenges facing new and small businesses (more on this in response to the next questions) represent key scope conditions for these studies, and the literature they collectively comprise represents a fertile jumping-off point for I-Os interested in studying small businesses.

Improving practical applicability: work around resource constraints

It is dismaying to see small business owners and managers propounding that our work makes “no sense to actual humans” (as if researchers are not people too), yet there are reasons for hope. Simply put, HR is not the average small business owner’s primary, or even secondary, focus, and there may be no one else focusing on it on staff. A study by ADP, Inc. found that less than 30% of small businesses have an owner, manager, or employee that is formally trained leading the HR function (ADP, 2019). I once interviewed a woman who, earlier in her career, had been the first HR professional hired at a Silicon Valley startup, and she was their 80 ^th employee. Thus, the HR function in a small business is usually run by a self-taught, reluctant HR manager who deals with problems ad hoc, is primarily concerned with compliance, and may not be fluent even in industry parlance for HR, let alone academese. In my view, I-Os should not be overly discouraged by Zhou and colleagues’ results but should instead see it as a sign of hope that papers are seen as having any utility by this audience.

To improve practical relevance, I would argue that we should focus on generating evidence-based insights that resource-constrained small business owners have the resources to act on. As Zhou and colleagues noted, many of the best practices I-Os have developed painstakingly over the years are simply too complex and/or costly for most small business to implement at a net benefit (Cappelli & Neumark, Reference Cappelli and Neumark2001). Fortunately, we already know many of the barriers to managers implementing evidence-based advice (constraints on knowledge and financial resources being leading culprits; Johns, Reference Johns1993; Terpstra & Rozell, Reference Terpstra and Rozell1997; Wyatt et al., Reference Wyatt, Pathak and Zibarras2010), and we can design practical takeaways around those barriers if we so choose.

For example, consider structured interviews, which meta-analytic evidence shows are among the best selection tools in our arsenal (Sackett et al., Reference Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens2022; Schmidt & Hunter, Reference Schmidt and Hunter1998). Almost every small business owner who does not simply hire a friend or relation will conduct interviews for an open position, but many, if not most, will be unstructured. Why? Because very few small business owners have the needed time or knowledge to conduct a job analysis, run a validation study, or any of the other steps prior to the interview itself that make an interview structured (Wyatt et al., Reference Wyatt, Pathak and Zibarras2010). As a result, studies finding that small businesses are more profitable when they implement structured interviews are unlikely to be persuasive to small business readers, given the prohibitive expense and knowledge gap.

However, a practical implications section that identifies ways to make interviews more (if not completely) structured using cheap techniques that any thoughtful person can employ may be more persuasive. For example, O*Net can serve as a tool for identifying key KSAOs when custom job analysis is implausible (Spector, Reference Spector2020), and AI tools may help small business owners develop more effective interview questions and score them more fairly than they might otherwise (Campion & Campion, Reference Campion and Campion2023). O*Net and many AI tools are cheap, user friendly (Williamson, Reference Williamson2024), and can help an untrained individual come to conclusions that are at least reasonable, if not ideal. It may feel counterintuitive for I-Os who are used to pushing for best practices to encourage practitioners to “cut corners,” but when local knowledge and monetary resources are insufficient to implement best practices, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

In the entrepreneurship literature, we are accustomed to the subjects of our research having limited resources; in fact, many theories originating from our discipline seek to explain how severely resource-constrained entrepreneurs accomplish as much as they do (e.g., bricolage theory; Baker & Nelson, Reference Baker and Nelson2005; effectuation theory; Sarasvathy, Reference Sarasvathy2001). Relevant to HR, entrepreneurship researchers have studied, for example, the benefits of costless acts like displaying passion and “hustle” during recruitment (Kindermann et al., Reference Kindermann, Hocker and Stresein press; Lewis & Cardon, Reference Lewis and Cardon2020). These displays probably cannot fully make up for the inability to follow best practices, but they are helpful when best practices are too costly or complex to implement. Similarly, low-cost facsimiles of best practices (e.g., using O*Net; Spector, Reference Spector2020) stand to be very useful to small businesses. I-Os seeking relevance to small businesses should identify these alternatives where possible, and entrepreneurship research on resource-constrained actors can help identify “pain points” where such alternatives are needed.

Bridge outlets: reaching small businesses

Entrepreneurship researchers have long been faced with the challenge of disseminating knowledge through the noise of a multibillion-dollar industry marketing (often dubious) assistance to entrepreneurs (Hunt & Kiefer, Reference Hunt and Kiefer2017). Bridge journals play a key role in answering this challenge. Although there are many bridge journals specific to our discipline, one exemplar is Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX for short), which primarily publishes articles (usually of 3,000 words or less) that translate entrepreneurship research and explain practices useful to entrepreneurs. Well-respected entrepreneurship researchers and successful practicing entrepreneurs contribute to EIX as both article writers and editorial board members, realizing the ideal of researcher–practitioner coproduction. With over 15 million annual page views as of this year (Buday, Reference Buday2024), EIX is fast becoming an important audience-specific complement to other bridge outlets like Harvard Business Review, and its sister publication FamilyBusiness.org has a wide reach among the subgroup of small businesses that are family run.

Practically, bridge journals are unlikely to be key to any researcher’s tenure case any time soon, which unfortunately limits incentives to publish translations there. However, for I-Os with intrinsic motivation to disseminate insights to small business owners, outlets like this provide a targeted medium to reach small business practitioners, and they become more well-respected as their reach grows each year. Although I am not a representative of EIX or any other bridge journal, it is safe to say that I-O psychologists would be welcome to submit to outlets like EIX when the implications of their research are relevant to small business owners.