Evidence-based management

Evidence-based management (EBM) is an emerging movement to explicitly use the current, best evidence in management decision-making. Its roots are in evidence-based medicine, a quality movement to apply the scientific method to medical practice.

Evidence-based management entails managerial decisions and organizational practices informed by the best available scientific evidence. Like its counterparts in medicine (e.g., Sackett, et al., 2000) and education (e.g., Thomas & Pring, 2004), the judgments EBM entails also consider the circumstances and ethical concerns managerial decisions involve. In contrast to medicine and education, however, EBM today is only hypothetical. Contemporary managers and management educators make limited use of the vast behavioral science evidence base relevant to effective management practice (Walshe & Rundall, 1999; Rousseau, 2005, 2006; Pfeffer & Sutton, 2001).

Efforts to promote EBM face a difficulty unprecedented in other evidence-based initiatives. Simply put, 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. There is no shared understanding regarding how managers acquire expertises, an omission which compounds the lack of a true profession (Rousseau, 2005, 2006). Furthermore, the movement is not uncontroversial within management studies (Learmonth & Harding, 2006; Learmonth, 2006). In particular, it has been criticised for treating "evidence" and "scientific method" as if they were neutral tools. But "management" is not necessarily an automatic good thing - it often involves the exercise of power and the exploitation of others, but the evidence of evidence-based management typically leaves out such considerations.

At present, there are initiatives in several parts of the world, in the US through the Academy of Management, in Canada through CHERF, the Canadian Health Education and Research Foundation, to begin building communities promoting EBM. Another example is the Center for Health Management Research affliated with the Health Research & Educational Trust of the American Hospital Association.

Research in management science
Some of the publications in this area are Evidence-Based Management, Harvard Business Review, Jan 2006; and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management;. Some of the people conducting research on the effects of evidence-based management are Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert I. Sutton, and Tracy Allison Altman. Pfeffer and Sutton have recently opened a web site dedicated to the movement.

Research in specific industries and professions
Evidence-based management is also being applied in specific industries and professions, including software development (see Evidence-Based Software Engineering for Practitioners ). Other areas are crime prevention (see Evidence-Based Crime Prevention ), public management (see What Works? Evidence-Based Policy and Practice in Public Services ), and manufacturing (see Profit Signals: How Evidence-Based Decisions Power Six Sigma Breakthroughs ).

Also see the Journal of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice and the [http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/education/ijebcm/home.html! International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring].