Evidence‐based Management in Practice: Opening up the Decision Process, Decision‐maker and Context
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| Author | April L. Wright,John Burke,Stuart Middleton,Victoria Brazil,Peter W. Liesch,Paul Hibbert,Raymond F. Zammuto |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12123 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 161–178 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12123
Evidence-based Management in Practice:
Opening up the Decision Process,
Decision-maker and Context
April L. Wright, Raymond F. Zammuto,1Peter W. Liesch,
Stuart Middleton,2Paul Hibbert,3John Burke4and Victoria Brazil5
UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Blair Drive, St Lucia, Queensland, 4072, Australia, 1University
of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, USA, 2UnitingCare Queensland, Australia, 3University of St Andrews, St
Andrews, Scotland, UK, 4Queensland Health, Australia, and 5Bond University, Australia
Corresponding author email: a.wright@business.uq.edu.au
Evidence-based management (EBM) has been subject to a number of persuasive critiques
in recent years. Concerns have been raised that: EBM over-privileges rationality as a ba-
sis for decision-making; ‘scientific’ evidence is insucient and incomplete as a basis for
management practice; understanding of how EBM actually plays out in practice is lim-
ited; and, although ideas were originally taken fromevidence-based medicine, individual-
situated expertise has been forgotten in the transfer. To address these concerns, the au-
thors adopted an approach of ‘opening up’ the decision process, the decision-maker and
the context (Langley et al. (1995). ‘Opening up decision making: the viewfrom the black
stool’, Organization Science, 6, pp. 260–279). The empirical investigationfocuses on an
EBM decision process involving an operations management problem in a hospital emer-
gency department in Australia. Based on interviewand archival research, it describes how
an EBM decision process was enacted by a physician manager.It identifies the role of ‘fit’
between the decision-maker and the organizational contextin enabling an evidence-based
process and develops insights for EBM theory and practice.
Introduction
Since 2005, there has been increasing interest in
developing an evidence-based approach to man-
agement decision-making (Pfeer and Sutton,
2006; Rousseau, 2006, 2012; Tranfield, Denyer
and Smart, 2003). Observing how evidence-
based practice has enhanced patient care in
medicine (Sackett et al., 1996), leading man-
agement scholars argue that decision processes
within organisations can be similarly improved
by systematic analysis of ‘best available evidence’
(Pfeer and Sutton, 2006; Rousseau, 2006). The
Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Management
describes evidence-based management (EBM) as
The authors acknowledge the support of the Australian
Research Council in providing funding for this project
under Linkage Project grant LP0989662
the ‘science-informed practice of management’,
which fundamentally involves ‘using scientific
knowledge to inform the judgment of managers
and the process of decision-making in organi-
zations’ (Rousseau, 2012, p. xxiii). Advocates
of EBM see its potential to help bridge the
research-practice gap in organizations through
management educators incorporating EBM in
their teaching (Casio, 2007; Erez and Grant,
2014; Pfeer and Sutton, 2007; Rousseau and
McCarthy, 2007; Rynes, Bartenuk and Daft, 2001;
Rynes, Giluk and Brown, 2007), contributing to
the relevance of business schools (Bennis and
O’Toole, 2005; Thomas and Wilson, 2011).
Other scholars, however, are more cautious
of EBM’s applicability to management decision-
making in practice and oer four particular
critiques. First, EBM privileges science and ra-
tionality as the basis for decision-making, even
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
162 A. L. Wright et al.
though what ‘counts’ as legitimate evidence in
management studies is contested (Arndt and
Bigelow, 2009; Learmonth, 2006; Tourish, 2013).
Second, given the divergent nature of the man-
agement discipline in terms of research questions
and methods, Tranfield, Denyer and Smart (2003,
p. 219) propose that ‘there is a need to recog-
nize that evidence alone is often insucient and
incomplete, only informing decision-making by
bounding available options’. Third, authors have
also argued that empirical research on the eec-
tiveness of EBM is not well developed (Arndt and
Bigelow,2009; Swan et al., 2012) and oers limited
insight into the nuances of how EBM plays out
as a decision process in practice in dierent orga-
nizational contexts (Reay, Berta and Kohn, 2009;
Walshe and Rundall, 2001). Fourth, concerns have
been raised that, in EBM’s borrowing of ideas
from evidence-based medicine, the importance
of the situated expertise of the decision-maker in
making judgements has been lost (Morrell, 2008).
With these four critiques of EBM in mind,
we propose that the approach of Langley et al.
(1995) of ‘opening up’ the decision processes
oers a means of advancing understanding of
EBM (Langley et al., 1995). Specifically, Langley
et al. (1995) proposed that deeper insights are
uncovered when decisions are investigated in ways
that ‘open up’ the role of the decision-maker and
of the context in the processes leading to the com-
mitment to action. In the remainder of the paper,
we apply this approach with the aim of exploring
how the decision-maker and the decision context
shape EBM decision processes in practice. We
first provide a brief review of the literature on
decision processes and EBM before describing
the case study method adopted for our empirical
investigation. We then present the findings of
the case study, which focused on the decision to
solve an operations management problem in a
hospital emergency department in Australia. The
paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical
contributions to the four critiques of EBM and
implications for management practice.
Evidence-based management and
decision-making
Evidence-based management is an emerging
stream in the literature on decision-making in
management and organization studies. For several
decades, scholars have been interested in under-
standing how decisions happen in organizations
(Butler, 1990; March, 1988, 1991; Mintzberg and
Waters, 1990), as well as prescribing processes
for how decisions should be made (Nutt, 2008).
Decision processes are typically thought to involve
a stimulus for action and a commitment to action
(Mintzberg, Raisinghami and Theoret, 1976),
although the traces of decisions inside organiza-
tions are not always clear (Mintzberg and Waters,
1990).
Historically, the literature on decision processes
in organizations is broadly grouped into ratio-
nal, political and garbage can perspectives (Das
and Teng, 1999; Eisenhardt and Zbaracki, 1992).
Within the rational perspective, decision-makers
approach decisions as intendedly rational choices
(March, 1991) and try to follow a systematic pro-
cess of problem identification, search for and gen-
eration of alternative courses of action, and evalu-
ation of these alternatives (Daft, 1995). However,
because limits on information and human cogni-
tion place boundaries on rationality (Simon, 1955,
1976), decision-makers look for new alternatives
in the vicinity of current actions, select an alter-
native that is ‘good enough’ in satisfying evalua-
tion criteria rather than the optimal solution, and
proceed when there is sucient consensus (Cyert
and March, 1963; March and Simon, 1958; Simon,
1976; Thompson, 1967). Other scholars emphasize
that decision processes involve political bargain-
ing because organizations are coalitions of people
with competing interests and power (Allison, 1971;
Pettigrew, 1973; Pfeer and Salancik, 1974). Fi-
nally, decision-making in some organizations may
resemble an organized anarchy in which solutions
randomly meet up – as if in a ‘garbage can’ – with
participants, choice opportunities and problems
(Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972; Padgett, 1980).
Of these three perspectives, bounded rationality
is normatively prescribed as the approach that
decision-makers should adopt (Van de Ven and
Lifschitz, 2013). Empirical studies have found that
some organizations do engage in bounded ratio-
nal processes. Mintzberg’s early work reported
a process involving three phases (Mintzberg,
Raisinghami and Theoret, 1976): an identification
phase recognizing problems and opportunities
and diagnosing cause-and-eect relationships; a
development phase searching for and/or design-
ing solutions; and a selection phase screening
solutions for feasibility, investigating alternatives
© 2015 British Academy of Management.
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