Podcast: A Practitioner’s Wishlist for I-O Research | Marc Effron and Department 12

One reason I pursued an academic degree in industrial and organizational psychology was to understand how to design and conduct organizational research. The end goal was not the research itself but to use the research findings to solve real business problems. For instance, when I was employed at AT&T in 2007, I designed and implemented a research initiative to identify which aspects of the employee value proposition were driving employee turnover and disengagement and show how these aspects affected business outcomes. The results helped business leaders make talent investments based on a rigorous research study versus simply gut instinct. And while I published an article on this work in the Organizational Development Journal, the format and requirements of the journal required that it be written in a more academic and scientific manner. That article’s format is different than one I wrote from a practitioner’s perspective on workforce planning. While both pieces provide value, the latter resulted in higher engagement across internal HR practitioners. Even when I share academic research-based articles on this website, they are usually ranked in the bottom ten percent of viewed articles. This picture begs the question: how do we preserve scientific rigor when researching organizational topics while making it radically easy for busy practitioners to understand and make use of the findings? In this 20-minute podcast, Marc Effron provides a few ideas on this topic and shares suggestions for framing research questions that result in practical value.