Improving the Quality of Business Research by Asking Significant Questions: A Review and Suggested Technique for Increasing Relevance

Abstract

We suggest that organizational and managerial research tends to suffer from incremental approaches that marginalize the result. We review the history and nature of organizational research as a means of pointing out the limitations of various approached to the issue of developing high quality research that can significantly impact research and practice. We note that research that tends to affect practice comes from qualitative studies that lack rigor, but frequently provide meaningful insights. We then examine one technique, called Spectrum analsysis, as a means of improving the assessment of organizational information and as a basis for improving the quality of future qualitative research efforts. This is demonstrated by applying the Spectrum analysis to the information from the book Built to Last as a way of providing an example of the utility of such approaches to furthering knowledge of organizational and managerial experience.