Revisiting some “established facts” in the field of management

Abstract

Although management is now becoming a mature scientific field and much theoretical and methodological progress has been made in the past few decades, management scholars are not immune to received doctrines and things we “just know to be true.” This article revisits an admittedly selected set of these “established facts” including how to deal with outliers, conducting field experiments with real entrepreneurs in real settings, the file-drawer problem in meta-analysis, and the distribution of individual performance. For each “established fact,” I describe its nature, the negative consequences associated with it, and best-practice recommendations in terms of how to address each. I hope this article will serve as a catalyst for future research challenging “established facts” in other substantive and methodological domains in the field of management.