ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL EDITORS' FORUM ON THE RESEARCH-PRACTICE GAP IN HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT EDITOR'S FOREWORD: TACKLING THE 'GREAT DIVIDE' BETWEEN RESEARCH PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION IN HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

摘要

Over the past several years, AMJ has devoted considerable attention to exploring the extent, nature, and implications of the considerable chasm between research and practice in management. In addition to a special research forum on this topic published several years ago (see Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001) and the in-process Special Research Forum on Research with Public Policy Implications, a number of AMJ editorial forums have explored various aspects of the research-practice gap (see, e.g., Ouchi, Riordan, Lingle, & Porter, 2005; Rynes, 2007; Shapiro, Kirkman & Courtney, 2007). Continuing in this tradition, the present editors' forum examines the academic-practice gap in human resource management. In the lead article, "The Very Separate Worlds of Academic and Practitioner Periodicals in Human Resource Management: Implications for Evidence-Based Management," Tamara Giluk, Ken Brown, and I examine the extent to which three well-established research findings in HR management were communicated to HR practitioners and general managers by major practitioner-focused periodicals over the six years 2000-05. The three research findings we examined were (1) the strong link between intelligence and job performance, (2) the relationship between certain basic personality traits and job performance, and (3) the effectiveness of goal setting for improving performance. We selected these three findings on the basis of prior evidence that they were widely unknown and/or disbelieved by HR managers (Rynes, Colbert, & Brown, 2002), as well as recently gathered data showing that HR researchers consider them to be very important findings for managers to know (see "The Very Separate Worlds" for details).