Evidence-Based Decision-Making and Practice in Organizations

Abstract

Evidence-based practice originated in medicine in response to a science-practice gap and an overreliance on clinical expertise in clinical decision-making. The same gap persists in other fields including in management, work, and organizations. Incorporating evidence-based practice in these fields will enable more critical thinking and more trustworthy evidence usage from multiple sources, and provide a more structured approach to decision-making and practice. An evidence-based approach in organizations is needed to reduce uncertainty, de-bias managerial decision-making and judgment, reduce the uncritical emulation of “best practice,” and ameliorate the impacts of advice and prescriptions from management gurus and consultants. However, surprisingly few business schools’ leadership and management development programs are evidence-based or teach evidence-based practice in their curricula. While evidence-based practice is more prolific in industrial and organizational psychology as an allied field to management, it too has room for growth. Building on existing work, a more encompassing capabilities framework for evidence-based decision-making and practice (EDMP) in organizations, management, and allied fields including industrial and organizational psychology is proposed. This framework can be used to develop leadership and management curricula and help promote an understanding in academia and the broader business community of the limitations of the dominant “craft” model of logic and practice in organizations that results in uncritical emulation, decision neglect, and action bias.