The Development of Management and Leadership Capability and its ...

6: What is the Strength of the Evidence?
Overview
The priority of this review has been to draw conclusions from a survey of evidence based
research. In general a very large proportion of the literature and debate is only weakly, or not
at all, evidence based suggesting that more attention needs to be paid to this in general.
Secondly, much more if the evidence base is descriptive – showing how things are, rather
than providing evidence of effects of policies and actions in relation to management and
leadership development. That is largely because the former is easier (though not without its
difficulties) and quicker and more economical to carry out. Investigating effect and impact is
also technically and methodologically more difficult, and in general needs more longitudinal
research. The overall conclusion is that the future will be best served buy a greater emphasis
on more research supporting evidence based policy and practice in general, and, within that,
more of the kind of research that increases our understanding of effects and consequences of
policies and actions.
For the purpose of this review a pragmatic approach has been adopted – of necessity.
Evidence-based investigation will be taken to mean anything that gives some basis for
confidence in a response to a question because it is based on observation and analysis.
In this review, as in others of a similar nature, an inspection of literature, reports, articles,
books and increasingly web based material suggests that only about 20% of these can be
regarded as evidence-based, even using a broad and pragmatic definition of this. We will use
the term ‘speculative’, in contrast to ‘evidence based’ to describe the literature and reports
that constitute the remaining 80%. We define speculative literature as that which explores
and articulates ideas about how things might or could work, or could be interpreted and
judged, or justified as courses of action.
While this review is primarily concerned with evidence-based material, and what can be
reasonably concluded from an overview of it, speculative material is taken to be of some use.
Speculative material can be assessed at least for the inner consistency and logic of their
arguments and analyses, and also as a source of ideas about how things do or could work
which could be suggestive of questions, propositions and prescriptions that could be usefully
addressed by more evidence based investigation in future inquiries.
Policy- and practice-oriented inquiry is about getting a better answer to a big question rather
than a precise answer to a narrower one. The aim is often to achieve an incremental
improvement to the evidence base for a choice that is going to have to be made by one means
or another.
Purer more ‘academic’ research tends to narrow the question to make it more answerable and
to come up with a cautious and often tentative answer.
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