Reflections of Teaching Evidence-Based Management - Center for ...

“Guiding students through a process of conceptual changetakes time, patience, and creativity.”Susan Ambrose et al. (2010)“Don’t confuse me with the facts.” That quote from an organizational decisionmakerseems to represent an all-too-common mindset that may help explain “theapparent lack of demand” for an evidence-based approach to managingorganizations (Briner & Rousseau, 2011, p. 19). Evidence-based management(EBMgt) is fundamentally “a way of thinking” (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2007, p. 12)about organizational decisions in a systematic manner; with due consideration forstakeholder concerns, practitioner expertise and judgment, local evidence, andevidence from formal research (Briner, Denyer, & Rousseau, 2009, p. 6). Insteadof balanced consideration of those four EBMgt elements, managers tend to basedecisions on personal experience, their strengths and preferences, hype and fads,uncritical benchmarking of others’ practices, or ideology (Pfeffer & Sutton,2006a). Scholars have argued that an EBMgt approach has the potential toenhance the productivity of organizations and the well being of their members(Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006a, 2007). Realizing EBMgt’s potential requires changes inhow managers think and act. To that end, fundamental shifts in managementeducation are called for to forge closer links among teaching, research, andpractice (e.g., Burke & Rau, 2010; Rousseau & McCarthy, 2007).Management educators are beginning to adopt an EBMgt perspective intheir teaching (Briner et al., 2009). Yet the fact remains that MBAs and othermanagement students are not typically taught to know or use research evidence intheir decision making (Graen, 2009; Rousseau, 2006; Rousseau & McCarthy,990