Evidence-based management

Evidence-based management (EBMgt or EBM) is an emerging movement to explicitly use the current, best evidence in management and decision-making. Its roots are in empiricism and well developed in evidence-based medicine and evidence based policy. These are quality movements aimed at applying the scientific method to evaluating practice.

Evidence-based management entails managerial decisions and organizational practices informed by the best available scientific evidence, where best evidence is understood in terms of norms from the natural sciences. Like its counterparts in medicine and to a lesser extent education, the judgments EBMgt entails also consider the circumstances and ethical concerns managerial decisions involve. In contrast to medicine in particular, however, contemporary managers and management educators make limited use of the vast behavioral science evidence base relevant to effective management practice.

An important part of EBMgt is educating current and future managers in evidence-based practices. The EBMgt website maintained at Stanford University provides a repository of syllabi, cases, and tools that can inform the teaching of evidence-based management.

Efforts to promote EBMgt face greater challenges than have other evidence-based initiatives. In medicine there is more consensus as to what constitutes best evidence than in the social sciences more generally, and management in particular. Unlike medicine, nursing, education, and law enforcement, "Management" is not a profession. There are no established legal or cultural requirements regarding education or knowledge for an individual to become a manager. Managers have diverse disciplinary backgrounds. A college degree may be required for an MBA – but not to be a manager. No formal body of shared knowledge characterizes managers, making it unlikely that peer pressure will be exerted to promote use of evidence by any manager who refuses to do so. Little shared language or terminology exists, making it difficult for managers to hold discussions of evidence or evidence-based practices. For this reason, the adoption of evidence-based practices is likely to be organization-specific, where leaders take the initiative to build an evidence-based culture. Practices an evidence-based organizational culture employs include systematic accumulation and analysis of data gathered on the organization and its functioning, problem-based reading and discussion of research summaries by managers and staff, and the making of organizational decisions informed by both best available research and organizational information. Organizations successfully pursuing evidence-based management typically go through cycles of experimentation and redesign of their practices to create an evidence-based culture consistent with their values and mission.

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