Why Should MBA Applicants (and Students) Care About Research In Business Schools

It is often said that business school researchers and professors only produce esoteric articles that only a handful of peers read. And they invest considerable time and resources in producing those articles, which hardly benefit the students or the schools’ ecosystem. Many rankings, including the Financial Times, have a criterium for research based on the number of publications in a selected set of journals (10% of the final score in the said ranking). So it must be relevant, somehow?

Business schools do face a crisis of legitimacy, and it is crucial to rethink how we communicate the role of our research and how we work as academics. As a business school professor, and like most of my colleagues, I aspire to publish rigorous yet relevant research that can inform my teaching (and thus my students), businesses and policy making. As we have claimed with my colleague Joel Bothello, there are broad benefits to management research, but why should it matter for students and potential applicants for MBAs or other business degrees?

Management academics and research both filter out bad management ideas

Have you been taught the Pyramid of Maslow as the pinnacle of motivation theories? Suppose you have had a research active academic teaching your organizational behavior of leadership. In that case, they have warned you of how the well-known framework lacks scientific and empirical support.

As my colleague Matthew Cronin put it: the market for management ideas is a market for lemons. For most audiences, whether students or managers, it is challenging to differentiate empirically supported, robust ideas from arguments for which there is limited evidence.

That’s why when management academics work on getting their research through, they also develop an understanding of how to assess those ideas, and filter them into or out of their teaching. Management academics spend a good chunk of their time reviewing the studies others have produced. Importantly they also get to read and understand the current frontier of research: what other researchers have established through their work, and what is the state of the art answer on specific and often narrow research questions.

Thus, research-trained academics can deliver cutting-edge insights, based on robust evidence that can give students a competitive advantage in their organizations and careers. Moreover, they can give them the frameworks, structure and critical thinking they will need to make decisions in an uncertain era.

Research-oriented business schools signal their quality

The Academy of Management Journal, the leading scientific journal in the management science field, publishes roughly 70 papers yearly, with 2 to 3 or 4 co-authors. 200 to 250 academics might publish in such an outlet yearly. Yet, there are 18,000 members of the Academy of Management. The acceptance rates for those academic journals are brutally low. Publishing in those scientific outlets takes years of data collection, rigorous analysis and theorization, which is then intensely scrutinized to ensure the validity of the claims.

Selecting faculty who publish in highly selective journals can be a signal for schools to show the quality, training, and empirical skills of their professors. It does not necessarily make them great teachers, which should be another crucial criterion for schools recruiting faculty. Most top business schools use research as a hygiene factor for faculty recruitment and then take those who can deliver the best lectures during their job talks. Excellent research skills and teaching abilities are more often aligned than one thinks!

Management research can directly be useful to students and beyond

Academics are publishing more than just esoteric papers that nobody reads. They are more commonly pushed to engage audiences around their research, either by translating this research into more digestible and practitioner-oriented summaries. They also have outlets that are directly read by practitioners, such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and those outlets often cover robust and sound research. The work I have produced on well-being and remote work would not necessarily have made it to a top scientific journal. Still, the findings were so important that we published them directly into the MIT Sloan Management Review. I used the conclusions of this article to support the design of hybrid work policies in half a dozen organizations so far.

Similarly, business school students often have a primer of the big ideas and research conducted in their school.

Not all is rosy in the world of business school research: schools and their faculty need to invest more effort in public engagement around their research and expertise to show their relevance in a fast-changing business world. In the UK, a central aspect of how universities are evaluated for their research is by proving the impact it has had on their communities, organizations and policy making. It is a first step in the right direction.