"Why Should I Care?"

Abstract

A scholar in the area of organizational behavior has just learned that her paper on gender diversity has been accepted by a top management journal. She is looking forward to today's class because her new paper, which she had assigned as reading for class, could serve as a test run to discovering what kind of response her research would elicit from practical-minded business students. But instead she must make a case for the relevance of research in the real world of business.

Excerpt

UVA-S-0301

May 23, 2018

“Why Should I Care?”

Greta Birch, a widely respected rising scholar in the area of organizational behavior, had just learned that her paper on gender diversity had been accepted by a top management journal, Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), after five years of research, writing, and multiple revisions. Other premier outlets such as Academy of Management Journal and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes had rejected the paper, and even at ASQ, it had gone through four runs of revisions. The research had become almost an obsession for Birch, and she had spent nearly all her free time digging deeper, repositioning, and rewriting. She was elated that her sweat and tears finally had paid off.

This was a timely acceptance because Birch was preparing her tenure package for full professorship. The business school at the major public university where she taught was consistently ranked among the top graduate programs in the nation. Its reputation was based on its teaching excellence, but it also placed a high premium on faculty publishing. Now with this paper's acceptance, Birch's application for tenure had become much stronger. And from a teaching standpoint, the timing was perfect as well because the topic for today's class in her elective course “Leadership in the 21st Century” highlighted diversity. The course was a favorite of MBAs and was open to some select senior undergraduate students. Every year it was in high demand, and this year was no different.

Today's class was scheduled at the halfway point of the term, and students had just submitted midterm papers. The session was always relaxed and particularly interactive, reflecting students' mood following completion of the arduous benchmark midterms. Also by this point in the semester, the students and the instructor had developed a strong rapport; even those participants who had not been comfortable with case discussions at the beginning of the term had mostly warmed to the format. Birch was a well-liked teacher, and this group, with its wide-ranging geographical representation, brought a level of excitement and variety of insights to the topic.

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Keywords: bridging research, teaching, and practice, research relevance