Abraham Lincoln was fond of saying “killing the dog does not cure the bite” when referring to problems and their persnickety pervasiveness. When thinking about the problems facing the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology profession, there is no greater source of frustration than the gap between a scientist's findings and the application of those findings to practice. In recent years, organizations such as the White House Behavioral Sciences unit, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation in partnership with The Economist Intelligence Unit, and many others have explored the gap between research and practice and have highlighted every major derailer, from delays associated with peer-reviewed publication cycles to a lacking infrastructure for bringing science to practitioners. In 2014, the SHRM Foundation even went so far as to implement a strategy based on driving research directly to practitioners through executive round table forums. Despite the best efforts to identify strategies for closing the gap, many organizations have failed to find the optimal means for bringing I-O psychology research to the masses of human resource (HR) practitioners and, in many cases, even I-O psychology practitioners dealing with significant organizational issues.
What are we as an I-O psychology profession left to do? How can we address this problem? Are we even clear on what the problem really is and where it originates? Without answers to these questions, we are pinning the tail on a horse when all we needed to know was that we had a donkey. We take a deeper look at these questions in the following sections.
What Is the Root Cause of the Science–Practice Translation Gap?
Much has been written and said about this science–practice divide, which effectively splits the I-O psychology world into scientists and practitioners. In other words, such discussions make a distinction between those who primarily produce I-O psychology science versus those who primarily use I-O psychology science (or that we hope will use I-O psychology science). Although we agree with some of the promising implications of Aguinis et al.’s (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017) research, we also believe that dividing the I-O psychology world into such neatly opposing poles greatly oversimplifies the substantial diversity of both producers and consumers of I-O psychology research. Figure 1 provides a robust view of the universe of producers and consumers of I-O psychology research.
Figure 1.
Examining the larger universe of I-O psychology consumption.
It is our belief that in order to bridge the science–practice divide, we must first pay greater attention to defining and understanding the contexts and needs of individuals who identify themselves as “scientists” and/or “practitioners” at various stages in their careers. Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017) suggest that the research–practice divide may be formed after “graduates obtain employment as either practitioners or researchers” (p. 545, emphasis added). In fact, this bifurcation of the science–practice continuum seems to have grown over time. For example, Rupp and Beal (Reference Rupp and Beal2007) identified four groups of I-O psychology practitioners: “scientists, practitioners, scientist–practitioners, and practitioner–scientists.” In 1994, that concept of science and practice happily coexisting in a single professional made for pithy song lyrics in Paul Sackett's presidential address, “I am the very model of a scientist–practitioner.” But in the most recent TIP Practitioner Series survey, respondents were asked to identify as researchers or practitioners. At what point did the other categories leave our vernacular?
Some research–practitioners still strive to distinguish sectors of our profession by making distinctions between scientists, practitioners (i.e., largely internal consultants in this case), and hybrids from the nonprofit or public sector (Silzer & Church, Reference Silzer and Church2016). These additional levels of distinction can add both complexity by highlighting the diversity of the I-O psychology profession as well as related professions in the human capital space and potential models for how science and practice can achieve the symbiotic relationship between science and practice espoused since 1949 (Rupp & Beal, Reference Rupp and Beal2007). Like many professions ranging from HR to economists, I-O psychology practitioners, or those individuals who occupy the “practice” side of the science–practice gap, are not a single, homogenous group. We believe that the distinction between “scientist” and “practitioner” is a continuum rather than a dichotomy and that this continuum varies across the I-O psychology career mosaic. For example, the role of an I-O psychology practitioner engaged in applied research is markedly different from an I-O psychology practitioner who is primarily engaged in management consulting. In some contexts, an I-O psychology practitioner might even engage in both in a single week, depending on the project. The roles of practitioners working in the public and private sectors, in domestic versus multinational organizations, or in an external or internal consulting role might vary quite substantially.
What About Our Kissing Cousins? Solutions for the Wrong Audience?
Moving further along the continuum (i.e., beyond I-O psychology practitioners), a critical but frequently overlooked group in our ongoing discussion of the science–practice gap are HR practitioners, many of whom have no or marginally current education in industrial-organization psychology, are not members of SIOP, rarely if ever attend one of the many SIOP conferences, and quite possibly have never heard of I-O psychology. The neglect of the HR practitioner population represents a missed opportunity for I-O psychologists to increase the impact of their science on human capital practice in organizations. The addressable audience of HR practitioners is far larger than the audience of I-O psychology practitioners. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, 2017), HR practitioners in the United States outnumber I-O psychologists more than 100 to 1. Rarely, if ever, are these practitioners and presumably intended consumers of I-O psychology research the explicit focus of our discussion around reconciling the science–practice divide.
A number of barriers to the consumption of I-O psychology research by HR practitioners exist, many of which have been noted by Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017), including the nature of outlets, formats, topics, reward systems, and so on. In some cases, HR practitioners are overlooked as a target audience and are often unable to translate science from traditional outlets (e.g., JAP, PPsych) to a format that readily translates to their day-to-day problem sets. Too often we see cases of HR practitioners who are unaware of or misuse science when looking for ways to improve practices (Alonso, Kurtessis, & Waters, Reference Alonso, Kurtessis and Waters2017). Prime examples of this misuse are the application and interpretation of HR analytics and the overinterpretation of results from selection instruments (Kurtessis, Alonso, & Mulvey, under review). When pushed for a reason for these issues, HR practitioners often cite a misalignment between the science and their ability to translate the science into implementable practice (Huint & Saks, Reference Huint and Saks2003). HR practitioners may be overlooked by I-O psychologists due to a dismissive attitude about those with a lack of classical training in I-O psychology, a lack of understanding of HR issues, limited exposure to the HR profession (as defined here), or a lack of understanding of how to communicate with a less technical audience.
Among HR practitioners, the diversity of roles and employers is possibly far greater than that of I-O psychology practitioners. For example, although large multinational organizations employ thousands of HR practitioners around the world, SHRM also produces resources aimed at meeting the needs of an “HR department of one”—that is, organizations that employ only a single HR professional. By not recognizing the nuances among practitioners, we lose significant insight into how and why they do and do not adopt I-O psychology science, and we hamper our ability to truly understand the needs of an extremely diverse group of practitioners.
So . . . How Do We Bridge the Gap?
Although we applaud Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017)’s broad examination of citations and authors in I-O psychology textbooks, we agree with the authors that the generalizability of their findings is limited by their focus on I-O psychology textbooks alone. HR, business schools, and other programs that both I-O psychology and HR practitioners enroll in may include a variety of textbooks and other more specialized books that broaden the scope of both science and practice to which students are exposed. As the authors rightfully state, an analysis of other textbooks could result in findings quite different than those presented in their article. The next step might be to conduct a similar analysis with introductory HR textbooks to assess the degree to which I-O psychology findings are making their way further down the practitioner continuum.
Although a thorough review of efforts to bridge the science–practice divide across all related fields is beyond the scope of this article, our central thesis is that we might be well served by considering the science and practice of I-O psychology in more refined ways. In other words, our understanding of the needs and profiles of practitioners and the ways they apply science requires more nuance. In addition, we need to focus on methods for breaking the traditional model for dissemination of I-O psychology into practice—something we like to call “the long and winding road to evidence-based practice” (see Figure 2).
Figure 2.
The road to evidence-based practice.
The sooner we divert from this path and leap from one stop to another, the better we will be at driving evidence-based practice beyond the field of I-O psychology.
Below, we provide several recommendations for understanding and reducing the science–practice gap:
-
• More research should be conducted to examine how I-O psychology and other fields work together toward a common goal and to better understand the universe of ways in which work is studied and research is applied. Rather than looking at I-O psychology, HR, science, and practice as discrete categories, explore their interconnections by borrowing research methods from other fields, such as ethnographic studies.
-
• When researching or writing about the science–practice divide, the diverse characteristics of I-O psychology practitioners and HR practitioners should be taken into account. The science–practice divide, and ways to rectify it, are likely to vary quite substantially across such features as job role and organizational characteristics. Case studies describing how and when science is applied in organizations, as well as when and why it is not, could help to elucidate the specific needs of both current and potential consumers of I-O psychology research.
-
• One way to reach varied audiences is to create multiple products from a single research study. For example, every IOP article could be summarized in a high level “point–counterpoint” table to make the discussion accessible to multiple audiences, including HR practitioners.
-
• Research–practice incubators linking together diverse groups of I-O psychology practitioners and practitioners from related fields, particularly with representation from small organizations, nongovernmental agencies, and groups outside I-O psychology, might offer a useful place to start.
-
• Although we fully support discussions of the science–practice divide in the I-O psychology community, these discussions (and articles) appear in decidedly I-O psychology forums (such as TIP and IOP). We (I-O psychologists) might gain important perspectives by holding similar discussions in forums where greater numbers of HR practitioners are likely to actively participate.
-
• Future research and efforts to translate I-O psychology science into practitioner-friendly formats should include a focus on small business practices. Much of our research understandably occurs in large organizations, but to effectively bridge the science–practice divide, the I-O psychology profession needs to also support organizations with fewer internal resources (e.g., money, sample sizes). To do so, we might leverage alternative data collection methods and analyses, such as non-parametric statistics and anthropological data collection methods.
-
• Although I-O psychology faculty are increasingly housed in business schools, and HR practitioners continue to redefine their profession in a way that is more closely aligned to business management, I-O publications continue to pay little to no attention to the business implications of our research findings. Greater attention to, and communication of, how I-O psychology findings directly relate to meeting business goals and strategy might help facilitate the adoption of the I-O psychology science among practitioners and especially HR practitioners.
-
• As noted by the authors, the I-O psychology community should focus efforts to align the performance criteria for scientists and practitioners. Scientists should be rewarded directly for adoption of their research into practice, whereas practitioners should be rewarded directly for contributions to a global knowledge base. I-O psychologists are uniquely positioned to solve these kinds of measurement challenges, and new and emerging technology can augment our ability to assess the impact of ideas (from any professional, regardless of their position on the continuum).
Through a more nuanced approach to examining science and practice, and by identifying and implementing specific practices to reduce the gap, we can move forward as a profession dedicated more to helping businesses, their employees, and their customers and less to focusing on our identity.
Conclusion
We argue that the mutually beneficial relationship between science and practice is real and goes beyond artificial “scientist” and “practitioner” boundaries. A close partnership and mutual understanding among these groups is critical for maximum impact of well-defined evidence-based systems. In addition, practitioners can help highlight the boundaries of scientific evidence by monitoring and reporting out on the impacts and challenges faced (e.g., would I-O psychology have uprooted traditional performance management practices without the uproar from practitioners?). We believe that a more nuanced look at the universe of practitioners serving and studying people at work is required to achieve the objective of increasing the impact of science on work.
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Abraham Lincoln was fond of saying “killing the dog does not cure the bite” when referring to problems and their persnickety pervasiveness. When thinking about the problems facing the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology profession, there is no greater source of frustration than the gap between a scientist's findings and the application of those findings to practice. In recent years, organizations such as the White House Behavioral Sciences unit, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation in partnership with The Economist Intelligence Unit, and many others have explored the gap between research and practice and have highlighted every major derailer, from delays associated with peer-reviewed publication cycles to a lacking infrastructure for bringing science to practitioners. In 2014, the SHRM Foundation even went so far as to implement a strategy based on driving research directly to practitioners through executive round table forums. Despite the best efforts to identify strategies for closing the gap, many organizations have failed to find the optimal means for bringing I-O psychology research to the masses of human resource (HR) practitioners and, in many cases, even I-O psychology practitioners dealing with significant organizational issues.
What are we as an I-O psychology profession left to do? How can we address this problem? Are we even clear on what the problem really is and where it originates? Without answers to these questions, we are pinning the tail on a horse when all we needed to know was that we had a donkey. We take a deeper look at these questions in the following sections.
What Is the Root Cause of the Science–Practice Translation Gap?
Much has been written and said about this science–practice divide, which effectively splits the I-O psychology world into scientists and practitioners. In other words, such discussions make a distinction between those who primarily produce I-O psychology science versus those who primarily use I-O psychology science (or that we hope will use I-O psychology science). Although we agree with some of the promising implications of Aguinis et al.’s (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017) research, we also believe that dividing the I-O psychology world into such neatly opposing poles greatly oversimplifies the substantial diversity of both producers and consumers of I-O psychology research. Figure 1 provides a robust view of the universe of producers and consumers of I-O psychology research.
Examining the larger universe of I-O psychology consumption.
It is our belief that in order to bridge the science–practice divide, we must first pay greater attention to defining and understanding the contexts and needs of individuals who identify themselves as “scientists” and/or “practitioners” at various stages in their careers. Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017) suggest that the research–practice divide may be formed after “graduates obtain employment as either practitioners or researchers” (p. 545, emphasis added). In fact, this bifurcation of the science–practice continuum seems to have grown over time. For example, Rupp and Beal (Reference Rupp and Beal2007) identified four groups of I-O psychology practitioners: “scientists, practitioners, scientist–practitioners, and practitioner–scientists.” In 1994, that concept of science and practice happily coexisting in a single professional made for pithy song lyrics in Paul Sackett's presidential address, “I am the very model of a scientist–practitioner.” But in the most recent TIP Practitioner Series survey, respondents were asked to identify as researchers or practitioners. At what point did the other categories leave our vernacular?
Some research–practitioners still strive to distinguish sectors of our profession by making distinctions between scientists, practitioners (i.e., largely internal consultants in this case), and hybrids from the nonprofit or public sector (Silzer & Church, Reference Silzer and Church2016). These additional levels of distinction can add both complexity by highlighting the diversity of the I-O psychology profession as well as related professions in the human capital space and potential models for how science and practice can achieve the symbiotic relationship between science and practice espoused since 1949 (Rupp & Beal, Reference Rupp and Beal2007). Like many professions ranging from HR to economists, I-O psychology practitioners, or those individuals who occupy the “practice” side of the science–practice gap, are not a single, homogenous group. We believe that the distinction between “scientist” and “practitioner” is a continuum rather than a dichotomy and that this continuum varies across the I-O psychology career mosaic. For example, the role of an I-O psychology practitioner engaged in applied research is markedly different from an I-O psychology practitioner who is primarily engaged in management consulting. In some contexts, an I-O psychology practitioner might even engage in both in a single week, depending on the project. The roles of practitioners working in the public and private sectors, in domestic versus multinational organizations, or in an external or internal consulting role might vary quite substantially.
What About Our Kissing Cousins? Solutions for the Wrong Audience?
Moving further along the continuum (i.e., beyond I-O psychology practitioners), a critical but frequently overlooked group in our ongoing discussion of the science–practice gap are HR practitioners, many of whom have no or marginally current education in industrial-organization psychology, are not members of SIOP, rarely if ever attend one of the many SIOP conferences, and quite possibly have never heard of I-O psychology. The neglect of the HR practitioner population represents a missed opportunity for I-O psychologists to increase the impact of their science on human capital practice in organizations. The addressable audience of HR practitioners is far larger than the audience of I-O psychology practitioners. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, 2017), HR practitioners in the United States outnumber I-O psychologists more than 100 to 1. Rarely, if ever, are these practitioners and presumably intended consumers of I-O psychology research the explicit focus of our discussion around reconciling the science–practice divide.
A number of barriers to the consumption of I-O psychology research by HR practitioners exist, many of which have been noted by Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017), including the nature of outlets, formats, topics, reward systems, and so on. In some cases, HR practitioners are overlooked as a target audience and are often unable to translate science from traditional outlets (e.g., JAP, PPsych) to a format that readily translates to their day-to-day problem sets. Too often we see cases of HR practitioners who are unaware of or misuse science when looking for ways to improve practices (Alonso, Kurtessis, & Waters, Reference Alonso, Kurtessis and Waters2017). Prime examples of this misuse are the application and interpretation of HR analytics and the overinterpretation of results from selection instruments (Kurtessis, Alonso, & Mulvey, under review). When pushed for a reason for these issues, HR practitioners often cite a misalignment between the science and their ability to translate the science into implementable practice (Huint & Saks, Reference Huint and Saks2003). HR practitioners may be overlooked by I-O psychologists due to a dismissive attitude about those with a lack of classical training in I-O psychology, a lack of understanding of HR issues, limited exposure to the HR profession (as defined here), or a lack of understanding of how to communicate with a less technical audience.
Among HR practitioners, the diversity of roles and employers is possibly far greater than that of I-O psychology practitioners. For example, although large multinational organizations employ thousands of HR practitioners around the world, SHRM also produces resources aimed at meeting the needs of an “HR department of one”—that is, organizations that employ only a single HR professional. By not recognizing the nuances among practitioners, we lose significant insight into how and why they do and do not adopt I-O psychology science, and we hamper our ability to truly understand the needs of an extremely diverse group of practitioners.
So . . . How Do We Bridge the Gap?
Although we applaud Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017)’s broad examination of citations and authors in I-O psychology textbooks, we agree with the authors that the generalizability of their findings is limited by their focus on I-O psychology textbooks alone. HR, business schools, and other programs that both I-O psychology and HR practitioners enroll in may include a variety of textbooks and other more specialized books that broaden the scope of both science and practice to which students are exposed. As the authors rightfully state, an analysis of other textbooks could result in findings quite different than those presented in their article. The next step might be to conduct a similar analysis with introductory HR textbooks to assess the degree to which I-O psychology findings are making their way further down the practitioner continuum.
Although a thorough review of efforts to bridge the science–practice divide across all related fields is beyond the scope of this article, our central thesis is that we might be well served by considering the science and practice of I-O psychology in more refined ways. In other words, our understanding of the needs and profiles of practitioners and the ways they apply science requires more nuance. In addition, we need to focus on methods for breaking the traditional model for dissemination of I-O psychology into practice—something we like to call “the long and winding road to evidence-based practice” (see Figure 2).
The road to evidence-based practice.
The sooner we divert from this path and leap from one stop to another, the better we will be at driving evidence-based practice beyond the field of I-O psychology.
Below, we provide several recommendations for understanding and reducing the science–practice gap:
• More research should be conducted to examine how I-O psychology and other fields work together toward a common goal and to better understand the universe of ways in which work is studied and research is applied. Rather than looking at I-O psychology, HR, science, and practice as discrete categories, explore their interconnections by borrowing research methods from other fields, such as ethnographic studies.
• When researching or writing about the science–practice divide, the diverse characteristics of I-O psychology practitioners and HR practitioners should be taken into account. The science–practice divide, and ways to rectify it, are likely to vary quite substantially across such features as job role and organizational characteristics. Case studies describing how and when science is applied in organizations, as well as when and why it is not, could help to elucidate the specific needs of both current and potential consumers of I-O psychology research.
• One way to reach varied audiences is to create multiple products from a single research study. For example, every IOP article could be summarized in a high level “point–counterpoint” table to make the discussion accessible to multiple audiences, including HR practitioners.
• Research–practice incubators linking together diverse groups of I-O psychology practitioners and practitioners from related fields, particularly with representation from small organizations, nongovernmental agencies, and groups outside I-O psychology, might offer a useful place to start.
• Although we fully support discussions of the science–practice divide in the I-O psychology community, these discussions (and articles) appear in decidedly I-O psychology forums (such as TIP and IOP). We (I-O psychologists) might gain important perspectives by holding similar discussions in forums where greater numbers of HR practitioners are likely to actively participate.
• Future research and efforts to translate I-O psychology science into practitioner-friendly formats should include a focus on small business practices. Much of our research understandably occurs in large organizations, but to effectively bridge the science–practice divide, the I-O psychology profession needs to also support organizations with fewer internal resources (e.g., money, sample sizes). To do so, we might leverage alternative data collection methods and analyses, such as non-parametric statistics and anthropological data collection methods.
• Although I-O psychology faculty are increasingly housed in business schools, and HR practitioners continue to redefine their profession in a way that is more closely aligned to business management, I-O publications continue to pay little to no attention to the business implications of our research findings. Greater attention to, and communication of, how I-O psychology findings directly relate to meeting business goals and strategy might help facilitate the adoption of the I-O psychology science among practitioners and especially HR practitioners.
• As noted by the authors, the I-O psychology community should focus efforts to align the performance criteria for scientists and practitioners. Scientists should be rewarded directly for adoption of their research into practice, whereas practitioners should be rewarded directly for contributions to a global knowledge base. I-O psychologists are uniquely positioned to solve these kinds of measurement challenges, and new and emerging technology can augment our ability to assess the impact of ideas (from any professional, regardless of their position on the continuum).
Through a more nuanced approach to examining science and practice, and by identifying and implementing specific practices to reduce the gap, we can move forward as a profession dedicated more to helping businesses, their employees, and their customers and less to focusing on our identity.
Conclusion
We argue that the mutually beneficial relationship between science and practice is real and goes beyond artificial “scientist” and “practitioner” boundaries. A close partnership and mutual understanding among these groups is critical for maximum impact of well-defined evidence-based systems. In addition, practitioners can help highlight the boundaries of scientific evidence by monitoring and reporting out on the impacts and challenges faced (e.g., would I-O psychology have uprooted traditional performance management practices without the uproar from practitioners?). We believe that a more nuanced look at the universe of practitioners serving and studying people at work is required to achieve the objective of increasing the impact of science on work.