In Search of Evidence

Summary and General Discussion
the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.’ Most popular management
books, however, seem to focus on offering a quick solution instead of a thorough
diagnosis of the problem. In addition, the number of scholarly articles on
organizational problem diagnosis is limited. Research is needed to examine how
reliable and accurate managers’ diagnoses are in general and whether an evidencebased
approach will make a difference here, too.
Evidence-Based Practice Tools
Evidence-based practice tools can help practitioners to overcome limitations of
human judgment and thus help them to make better decisions. In fields where
evidence-based practice is well established such tools are widely available in the form
of checklists, decision aids, and even apps. Within the field of management only a few
tools are available, and their validity and reliability are still unknown. For instance, the
Center for Evidence-Based Management has developed an app that aims to help
managers to critically evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific studies in order to
answer practical questions about the effect of an intervention or success/risk factor on
an outcome. For practical reasons the number of appraisal questions in this app is
limited to three questions that cover the most important aspects of methodological
quality. This limitation, however, may seriously affect the app’s reliability. The same is
true of tools that are adapted from the field of medicine; future research has yet to
evaluate their applicability to the field of management. The most important research
question, however, concerns the effectiveness and impact of evidence-based practice
tools in general: do they help managers make better decisions?
Teaching Evidence-Based Practice
A study by Charlier et al found that, using a very liberal operationalization of
evidence-based practice, only 25% of core MBA management courses utilize evidencebased
practice in some form . Based on these findings we can safely assume that the
number of management programs that have fully integrated the principles of
evidence-based practice into their curriculum is limited. Reason for this slow uptake
may be partly due to the fact that there is no empirical evidence yet demonstrating the
added value of teaching evidence-based practice as compared with traditional ways of
teaching management. This evidence, however, could be furnished by a randomized
controlled study or a sufficiently powered stepped wedge design. In a stepped wedge
design an evidence-based training program is rolled-out sequentially to groups of
students over a number of periods of time. The order in which the different groups
receive the training is determined at random and a before-and-after measurement is