30 October 2019 – The essay below was posted to the Keiser University DBA 710 Week 8 Discussion Forum. It is reproduced here in the hope that readers of this blog will find this peek into state-of-the-art management research interesting.
This posting is a bit off topic for Week 8, but it reviews a paper that didn’t cross my desk in time to be included in last week’s discussions, where it would have been more appropriate. In fact, the copy of the paper I received was a manuscript version of a paper accepted by the journal Organizational Psychology Review that is at the printer now.
The paper, written by an Australian-German team, covers recent developments in measuring variables apropos management of decision teams in various situations (Klonek, Gerpott, Lehmann-Willenbrock & Parker, in press). As we saw last week, there is a lot of work to be done on metrology of leadership and management variables. The two main metrology-tool classifications are case studies (Pettigrew, 1990) and surveys (Osei-Kyei & Chan, 2018). Both involve time lags that make capturing data in real time and assuring its freedom from bias impossible (Klonek, Gerpott, Lehmann-Willenbrock & Parker, in press). Decision teams, however, present a dynamic environment where decision-making processes evolve over time (Lu, Gao & Szymanski, 2019). To adequately study such processes requires making time resolved measurements quickly enough to follow these dynamic changes.
Recent technological advances change that situation. Wireless sensor systems backed by advanced data-acquisition software make in possible to unobtrusively monitor team members’ activities in real time (Klonek, Gerpott, Lehmann-Willenbrock & Parker, in press). The paper describes how management scholars can use these tools to capture useful information for making and testing management theories. It provides a step-by-step breakdown of the methodology, including determining the appropriate time-resolution target, choosing among available metrology tools, capturing data, organizing data, and interpreting data. It covers working on time scales from milliseconds to months, and mixed time scales. Altogether, the paper provides invaluable information for anyone intending to link management theory and management practice in an empirical way (Bartunek, 2011).
References
Bartunek, J. M. (2011). What has happened to Mode 2? British Journal of Management, 22(3), 555–558.
Klonek, F.E., Gerpott, F., Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., & Parker, S. (in press). Time to go wild: How to conceptualize and measure process dynamics in real teams with high resolution? Organizational Psychology Review.
Lu, X., Gao, J. & Szymanski, B. (2019) The evolution of polarization in the legislative branch of government. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 16: 20190010.
Osei-Kyei, R., & Chan, A. (2018). Evaluating the project success index of public-private partnership projects in Hong Kong. Construction Innovation, 18(3), 371-391.
Pettigrew, A. M. (1990). Longitudinal Field Research on Change: Theory and Practice. Organization Science, 1(3), 267–292.