Response Rates in Business and Management Research: An Overview of Current Practice and Suggestions for Future Direction

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12154
Date01 April 2016
AuthorKamel Mellahi,Lloyd C. Harris
Published date01 April 2016
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 426–437 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12154
Response Rates in Business and
Management Research: An Overview
of Current Practice and Suggestions
for Future Direction
Kamel Mellahi and Lloyd C. Harris1
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, and 1Birmingham Business School
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Corresponding author email: kamel.mellahi@wbs.ac.uk
This paper examines response rates (RR) in published research in business and manage-
ment journals. Its aim is to evaluate the ecacy of RR-enhancing strategies, explore
dierences in RR between sub-disciplines and geographical regions, provide a critical
appraisal of RR in business and management research, and oer guidelines for assess-
ing and improving RR in business and management research. Data are analysed from
1093 survey-based papers published between 2009 and 2013 in a representative sample
of business and management journals. The results of the study are discussed, and their
implications for RR in business and management research are provided.
Introduction
Survey methods are widely used in business and
management research. The advantages of surveys
are well known; they can reach a large number
of the target population at relatively low cost in
money, time and eort. Their disadvantages are
also well known and welldocumented. One of their
key disadvantages, examined in this paper, is low
response rates (henceforth RR). This review of the
burgeoning literatureon the use of survey methods
in business and management research reveals that
the issue of RR is a contentious one (Baruch, 1999;
Baruch and Holtom, 2008; Malhotra and Grover
1998; Roth and BeVier, 1998; Rungtusanatham
et al., 2003).
On the one hand, RR is an important dimen-
sion in the assessment of the soundness of a study
using a survey method. A recent survey of edi-
tors of journals across the social sciences field re-
vealed that about 90% of editors reported that
RR is a somewhat or very important criterion in
publication decision (Carley-Baxter et al., 2013). It
is ‘often taken to be the primary measure of quality
when assessing the validity of survey data or com-
paring dierent surveys’ (Skalland, 2011, p. 89). A
low RR ‘can be a serious threat to the quality of
data’ (Schoeni et al., 2013, p. 77) and could seri-
ously impair the validity and generalizabilityof the
findings (Kellerman and Herold, 2001).
On the other hand, despite the voluminous lit-
erature on the subject, there are no fixed rules or
‘formulae’ to determine the acceptability of RR,
and there are no clear boundaries between what
is considered acceptable and unacceptable RR. As
noted by Cummings et al. (2001), ‘no gold stan-
dard’ for an acceptable RR exists in the literature.
As such, much depends upon one’s interpretation
of what is an acceptable or not an acceptable RR.
Without a ‘golden’ rule or benchmark, authors of-
ten ‘sandbag’ their obtained RR by citing pub-
lished research that obtains similar or lower RRs
© 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.

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