Editorial

Abstract

I am excited and honored to serve as the next editor at Organizational Research Methods (ORM).

Jose Cortina has been an excellent steward of ORM, having continued the strong traditions set forth by each of the previous editors: Larry Williams, Herman Aguinis, and Bob Vandenberg. My goal is to continue this tradition. I would like to thank Jose, his team of associate editors, and each member of his editorial board for their hard work and dedication to publishing high-quality manuscripts.

In addition, Jose has been extremely gracious and helpful as I get settled into my new role as editor (as have Cynthia Nalevanko and her entire team at SAGE)—so I extend a sincere thank-you to Jose, Cynthia, and the entire team at SAGE.

In what follows, I spell out my editorial vision for ORM and include several important updates concerning forthcoming feature topics. I welcome suggestions for additional feature topics, invited papers, point–counterpoint exchanges, and/or other types of papers that might advance our understanding of research methods, especially as they may be applied in organizational contexts.

Statement of Editorial Vision

ORM Has Emerged as an Elite Journal in the Organizational Sciences

The goal for any editor is to identify and publish those papers that will ultimately have substantial impact on the field. Clearly, the previous editors have been quite successful in achieving this demanding goal.

For example, Thomson-Reuters’s most recent impact factors, which were made available in July 2013, revealed that ORM’s impact factor (3.93) is extremely high. Moreover, ORM is ranked 11th out of 172 journals in the management category and now has an impact factor that is consistent with (or exceeds) those of many other influential management journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Strategic Management Journal, and Organizational Science (just to name a few). In addition, ORM is also included in the applied psychology category, and its impact factor places it 3rd out of 73 journals. Again, this impact factor is consistent with (or exceeds) those of a number of other influential applied psychology journals including Personnel Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

ORM’s impact factor is also higher than those of a number of leading journals in other business fields including marketing (e.g., Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing), entrepreneurship (e.g., Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice), information systems (e.g., Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems), finance (e.g., Journal of Financial Economics), operations management (e.g., Management Science, Operations Research), and accounting (e.g., Journal of Accounting Research, Accounting Review). Indeed, the impact factor of ORM is higher than those of all but 8 of the journals on the Financial Times top 45.

We are all aware of the limitations of impact factors, but they do help us to make relative (as opposed to absolute) judgments about interest in articles published in journals. Given that ORM now publishes individual papers and feature topics on issues relevant to scholars across all areas of management (e.g., organizational behavior/human resource management, entrepreneurship, organization theory/strategy), my hope is that it will continue to garner wide support across departments as a premier journal when considered for purposes of faculty evaluation.

Maintaining and Further Enhancing Scholarly Excellence at ORM: Vision of Papers to Publish at ORM

When I told Herman Aguinis that I was trying to decide if now was the right time in my career to edit a journal, he suggested I read a book he coedited titled Opening the Black Box of Editorship (Baruch, Konrad, Aguinis, & Starbuck, 2008). In the second chapter of this book, John Hollenbeck noted that

[an editor] is judged by history in terms of how well his or her decisions contributed to the knowledge base.… No one wants to see the impact of the journal he or she is stewarding in his or her discipline sink during his or her reign. (pp. 17-18)

Clearly, the key goal of an editor is to publish articles that make profound contributions to the knowledge base. Over the past 10 years, I have spent considerable time pondering what makes an impactful methods article. I have concluded that such articles share the following characteristics:

They address real problems, and do so in a compelling manner. In Hollenbeck’s chapter he presented a series of prototypes describing how papers are often framed by authors. Although I had never thought in terms of these particular prototypes, his thinking mirrors what I have come to conclude about impact. He noted two particular frames that seemed, on balance, to produce more impactful papers. Consensus shifting papers seek to change how people think about issues. Such papers often begin by stating how we have typically approached problems and then describe why such approaches are misguided. They conclude by providing a new approach/solution to the problem. For example, Jeff Edwards’s classic work on difference scores represents a consensus shifting research program (see, e.g., Edwards, 2001). In his work, Jeff explains the potential problems/limitations/challenges associated with using of difference scores and then provides a solution in the form of polynomial regression.

Hollenbeck’s second category of high impact papers consists of consensus creating papers. Such papers seek to bring clarity to a disparate and fragmented literature. A prime example is Vandenberg and Lance’s work on measurement equivalence/invariance. In their work, these authors observed that different researchers approached issues of measurement invariance from different perspectives. Each perspective carried with it different assumptions and tests (and often different sequences of these tests). In their classic ORM paper, Vandenberg and Lance (2000) created a unified framework for tackling issues of measurement invariance.

The work of Edwards and that of Vandenberg and Lance are emblematic of the types of papers I will strive to publish at ORM—they addressed pressing problems facing management scholars. In the first situation, Edwards was able to illustrate when traditional approaches may be problematic and should be replaced with a new approach. In the latter situation, Vandenberg and Lance were able to illustrate that the literature was confused and in desperate need of clarity. Both papers have become highly cited and represent “must read” material for many doctoral programs in management and applied psychology.

A brief perusal of the 20 most highly cited ORM papers reveals that the overwhelming majority of such papers fall into one of the two aforementioned categories.

A recent analysis by SAGE Publications revealed that among the journals most likely to cite papers published in ORM, we find such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Management (just to name a few). This indicates that ORM is having a direct and immediate impact on the work being published in top-level management and applied psychology journals.

Reciprocally, papers published in ORM are most likely to include references to journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Strategic Management Journal (again, to name just a few). This suggests that the methodological contributions being presented at ORM are driven by the problems facing researchers who commonly publish in leading journals.

I hope to continue these trends as editor by publishing papers (most likely review papers) that conform to the “consensus creating” or “consensus shifting” structures mentioned earlier in this editorial. In addition, I will seek to publish papers that (a) introduce a completely novel method to the research community, (b) introduce an extension of an existing method, (c) provide a tutorial describing how existing methods used in other disciplines can be used to address important research questions in the organizational sciences, or finally (d) compare existing methods to one another (with the goal of ascertaining the strengths, limitations, and boundary conditions for these methods).

They are readily understood by the average reader. In addition to addressing a pressing problem in a compelling manner, papers published in ORM must be understood. This means that the methods discussed must be readily implemented into organizational research. The typical person reading ORM is not a quant jock or stats wiz. Instead, the typical reader is a second-year graduate student reading the article as part of a graduate seminar and pondering how to analyze his or her thesis data, or a new assistant professor looking for a solution to a concern noted by a reviewer, or a distinguished professor who has elected to start a new line of research and is in need of new tools to test new hypotheses.

The typical ORM reader is bright, motivated, and looking for solutions to problems. He or she may or may not be familiar with matrix algebra, multivariate calculus, and so on. Thus, the papers we publish in ORM must be written at a level that doesn’t necessitate such a high-level mathematical background. That is not to say that the papers should be “dumbed down” or lack rigor. On the contrary, publishing in ORM necessitates rigor because the authors must convince a highly sophisticated editorial board that the paper is methodologically sound. However, publishing in ORM represents a balancing act—too much math and the paper will lack impact because the audience will not understand it; too little math and the reviewers may not be convinced that the authors have provided a rigorous proof of their ideas. Here is where the appendix becomes a wonderful tool!

They do not simply apply a well-known method in the test of a substantive hypothesis. After 6 months into my editorship, I am currently desk rejecting approximately 35% to 40% of the submissions. Most of these decisions have been driven by a poor fit at the journal, which is most often manifested in the lack of methodological contribution. The prototypic “desk rejection paper” typically applies a well-known existing research method or statistical tool to a substantive research problem. Substantive examples are welcome (indeed encouraged) at ORM, but only when they serve to advance our understanding of research methods. For example, applying confirmatory factor analysis during a scale development study does not (by itself) represent a major methodological contribution. However, deriving a new fit index for use with confirmatory factor analysis and demonstrating its advantages using an illustrative data set could represent a methodological contribution.

The Editorial Team as a Tool for Maintaining and Enhancing Scholarly Excellence at ORM

As the title indicates, ORM is an organizational journal. It is not an applied psychology journal, nor is it purely a management journal. It is not solely a quantitative or qualitative journal. It is a broad, interdisciplinary organizational journal. The strength of ORM has always been its broad appeal and its broad and expert editorial team. This has enabled the journal to see increased impact and to gain substantial international notoriety.

The journal will continue to maintain an outstanding editorial board that includes fellows of the Academy of Management; past chairs of the Research Methods Division and current and past elected officers of the BPS, HR, OB, Entrepreneurship, and many other divisions; Distinguished Career Award and Early Career Award winners from the RM division; presidents of SIOP; board members of SMS; and members of the Board of Governors of the AOM.

When I was assembling my editorial team, I wanted to make sure it reflected the diversity that has made ORM one of the most impactful journals in the organizational sciences. With respect to my associate editors, I invited several who were working with Jose to continue in their role—Brian Boyd, Bob Gephart, Adam Meade, graciously agreed for another tour of duty. In addition, I invited several new editors—John Antonakis, Scott Tonidandel, and Anne Smith. With respect to the latter, as the popularity of ORM continues to increase among qualitative researchers, I felt it was critical to expand the expertise of the editorial team along those lines.

Feature Topics as a Tool for Maintaining and Enhancing Scholarly Excellence at ORM

Past editors have had great success with feature topic issues of ORM. I have already approved two such feature topics and will likely be announcing additional topics in the coming months.

Current Feature Topics

Mixed Methods in the Organizational Sciences (http://orm.sagepub.com/site/includefiles/mmft.pdf)

Video-Based Research Methods in the Organizational Sciences (http://orm.sagepub.com/site/includefiles/ORM_Call_for_Papers.pdf)

If you have an idea for a feature topic, I encourage you to submit a brief white paper summarizing your ideas and highlighting the methodological contribution that you believe your feature topic would address.

References

Baruch

Konrad

A. M.

Aguinis

Starbuck

W. H.

(2008). Opening the black box of editorship. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Edwards

J. R.

(2001). Ten difference score myths. Organizational Research Methods, 4, 264–286.

Hollenbeck

J. R.

(2008). The role of editing in knowledge development: Consensus shifting and consensus creation. In Baruch

Konrad

A. M.

Aguinis

Starbuck

W. H.

(Eds.), Opening the black box of editorship (pp. 16–26). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vandenberg

R. J.

Lance

C. E.

(2000). A review and synthesis of the measurement invariance literature: Suggestions, practices and recommendations for organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 3, 4–70.