A leading professor has accused business schools of “regularly producing research that has no relevance to business” after it emerged that academics were basing studies on students simulating management situations.
Andrew Kakabadse, professor of governance and leadership at the University of Reading, blamed the trend on the pressure for academics to publish and the difficulty of gaining access to industry executives.
In one recent example recounted by Professor Kakabadse, a paper by a researcher at a European business school was presented as offering insights into decision-making among “leaders” but was actually based on an experiment involving 300 students.
“No leaders were involved in the study, but rather 18- to 22-year-olds with very limited experience who had to imagine themselves as leaders making decisions in circumstances they were given,” he said.
“Leaders need to estimate and assess market nuances; these individuals possess wisdom and resilience based on years of experience.” Using students to role play business managers does not replicate real life, Professor Kakabadse said, making the study “totally meaningless”.
A snap survey of papers on leadership published in 2019 immediately throws up more examples. One paper on leadership competencies was based on a survey of 165 management students, while another on leadership behaviour and subordinate trust drew on a sample of “undergraduate students with work experience”.
A paper purporting to look how employees respond to being told by their manager that they were being dismissed acknowledged that among its limitations was “a primary reliance on students as participants and the measurement of behavioural intentions rather than behaviour”.
“At the moment, there are very few business schools – in the UK and around the world – that actually have access to business managers,” Professor Kakabadse said.
“It is also very difficult to get published [in journals] through data from going to CEOs, because it doesn’t fit within the tight methodological rules journal publishing requires.”
Professor Kakabadse, who is also emeritus professor of international management development at Cranfield University, argued that there were some exceptions to the trend – including, he said, Reading’s Henley Business School and the London Business School. But he claimed that the use of students in studies was an increasing problem in business schools worldwide.
Professor Kakabadse said a particular problem in the UK was the research excellence framework, which meant that “faculty careers are now driven by how many publications you can get in a five-year period in 4* and 5* journals”.
He argued that business schools were ill-suited to this type of assessment because their purpose should be about improving practice and interacting with business leaders.
“Business schools need to be taken out of the university [REF] system as it exists,” Professor Kakabadse said. “They do need a system for quality control, but at the level of post-experience, continual development.”
He called for investment “in practice-orientated business schools that judge faculty by how they relate to CEOs, only need to produce journal articles occasionally, perhaps have a book, but mostly are working on reports created by interacting with the industry that are actually useful to businesses”.
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Print headline: Students play boss in ‘meaningless’ studies
