Evidence-Based Management

Executive overview

Management is a significant component of an organization. The success of an organization, and the profits that it is able to make will be determined, to a great extent by the degree of quality management that has been used (Baba, & HakemZadeh, 2012). There is a wide research that has been done to improve the management and decision making processes for organizations. There is an emerging management strategy, that of evidence-based management. An emerging trend for management and decision-making is the use of evidence-based management (EBMgt). This is a new management strategy, even though the idea of making use of research in making decisions is not something new. This study will focus on the many approaches and the misconceptions that regard EBMgt and how it can be useful in making decisions.

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Introduction

For the past 50 years, the use of research evidence to make managerial decisions have been common, and is proving to be an effective way in which effective and reliable decisions can be used. The definition of EBMgt is that it is a process of making decisions through the conscientious, judicious, and explicit use of four sources. The four sources include judgment and expertise from the practitioner, evidence that is got from the local context, evaluation of the best available evidence that is from research, and the point of view of the people who might be affected by the decision. Like many ideas which are multi-faceted, EBMgt is still new and under-developed, misunderstood, applied wrongly, and inconsistently applied. It is for this reason that there is a need to have new learning and development of EBMgt (Booker, Bontis, & Serenko, 2012). It is because of this aspect that this article will come up with new ideas and areas that will have to be considered for further research. One of the aspects that will have to be clarified in this paper is that evidence-based management is something that is practitioners and not scholars. This will serve to show the source of evidence about how this has been effective and how the idea of evidence-based management has been useful in the end. Another issue that will need to be clarified is that EBMgt is a collection of practices and not a single method of making decisions at the managerial level. There are many aspects that will need to be included in the management of this information (De Marchi, Lucertini, & Tsoukias, 2016). This perspective will be useful in understanding what should be implemented and the procedure of understanding how to implement it. Another point to note is that scholars, researchers, educators, and consultants are all important agents that can make changes and bring this new practice into use in organizational management. There is the need of input from the communities because they will help to expand and widen the knowledge. There is also an important aspect of systematic reviews which will be useful in understanding this new perspective and paradigm.

Evidence-based management (EBMgt) is a unique style of organizational leadership. Unlike conventional management, it does not rely on personal thoughts, habits, irrational confidences, and trends to make judgments. Instead, it focuses on using reliable research information to necessitate the coining of correct decisions at all times (Dietz, Antonakis, Hoffrage, Krings, Marewski, & Zehnder, 2014). Concerning the notion that it is part of the emergent aspects, this paper intends to review existing literature regarding EBMgt as a way of availing a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter.

According to Dietz et al. (2014), EBMgt encompasses the devising of decisions and the establishing of practices that are fitting to both the short-term and long-term needs and expectations of an organization. These are the administrative measures that favour organization-based rather than individual-based judgements in accordance with the findings of Baba and HakemZadeh (2012). It is necessary to note that EBMgt evolved from the health care context and gradually expanded into the spheres of business practice. It puts great emphasis on the use of objective, rational and empirical strategies in order to address issues. As such, Glaub, FreseFischer and Hoppe (2014) relate EBMgt to the scientific techniques that use the experimental frameworks of data collection in their bid to advance knowledge. It means that, by adopting an implementing EBMgt, it is possible for managers to examine the outcomes of every decision, especially in the case of strategic and routine decisions. This is in agreement with the predispositions of Booker, Bontis and Serenko (2012). Booker, Bontis and Serenko (2012) reiterate the assertions of Rauch, Doorn and Hulsink (2014) by stating that EBMgt provides a cautious contemplation regarding the relationship between reason and outcome. This enables managers to acquire high confidence when making programme-based judgements since they can locate data which augment the probabilities of a choice. The result, with regards to Kepes, Bennett and McDaniel (2014), is the attainment of the desired goals and objectives. Alternatively, Dietz et al. (2014) affirm that the use of EBMgt frameworks tends to create an added advantage to businesses. Take a case example of the instances where there is streamlining of all decision-making endeavours. EBMgt encourages decision makers to have discipline and employ structured approaches when making judgements. All of these depend on the high structured level of collecting, disseminating and analyzing data, thereby creating a workplace that thrives on facts as opposed to guesswork or intuition.

Management and use of evidence-based management

Like in medicine, management can use EBMgt to make decisions in their daily running of the organizations. Unlike in medicine, the challenges are wider in management because managers are not sure about the strategy that will be useful for a certain management problem. Also, the managers are less eager to find out the strategy that will heal a certain illness within an organization (Glaub, Frese, Fischer, & Hoppe, 2014). The eagerness and the effort that is put in medicine is not the same effort that is put in management. If doctors would put the effort of managers, then there would be a medicine filed in confusion, and there would be many deaths and unnecessary illness occurring. There would be more doctors in jail because of the lack of effort to make them responsible in what they are doing in the end. This is reason it is time to start sensitizing managers to take on management using evidence base management.

Some of the obstacles that we see in management in their quest to take on EBMgt is that there is weakness in the strategy as everyone claim that they are experts in management. There is also a bewildering array of sources that have been seen in management, and getting the genuine sources will be something that will be hard to understand and get it right (Harland, 2013). These many sources are the ones that are used to generate the management advice for the users. It is important to understand how to assess the many sources so that there is a clear way in which the sources will be achieved in the entire process. There is also varying sizes of companies and the structures that have been put in place for management in these companies. The age of the companies, the form, and the industry will affect many of the management strategies of making decisions (Kepes, Bennett, & McDaniel, 2014). These factors will affect the way companies will ensure that they have the right decisions in place. it is important to understand these factors and come up with the issues that will be addressed in these management issues and aspects. It is important to understand the degree of risk is higher in management such that it will be hard to presume that a certain management strategy will work. There will be devastating effects if the strategy is found not to working the end.

The users of EBMgt

The times that practitioners try to make a decision, have a solution to a problem, or come up with a set of practices, are unique and distinct. However, there is a general approach in which to approach decision-making. There is a general way in which decisions can be made. This is the concept that is referred to as EBMgt (Morrell, Learmonth, & Heracleous, 2015). Among other things, EBMgt incorporates the scientific approach and issues when making managerial decisions in a given case. Like the approach that is used in medicine, and medicine, EBMgt is informed by the experience, expertise and contextual experiences, and the concerns that is associated with ethics. Most of the business issues, ranging from morale to strategic management, are generic. This means that they are a repetition of familiar problems that have been met before and have had a different way in which a solution was procured in that process. They are problems that come in the guise of new unique problems. If a problem is generic, this means that the business manager will benefit a great deal because of the knowledge they have about the underlying principles that can be used to solve them (Rauch, Doorn, & Hulsink, 2014). If the problem is novel, being in a position to understand effective decision-making techniques, and problem-solving procedures will be effective and useful even if there is some degree of uncertainty in the entire process.

When talking about EBMgt, it is important to understand the four components that make the EBMgt. The aspect of EBMgt will take place at the intersection of all the four elements which will be the decision that will be made. It is important to understand the issues and the aspects that are required in this entire process (Tourish, 2013). The strength and the degree of using a component in making a decision will depend on the problem that is being solved in a given case. There are some situations where the ethical considerations and the opinion of the stakeholders will be more important than the external research evidence that is required in the entire case. in such cases, these will be given much great emphasis so that the external research evidence will not be considered more than stakeholder say or ethical concerns. In other situations, there could be little internal evidence available, so that they will have little effect and impact on the decision that is being made. In all cases, the option to place more emphasis on the various elements will be more important than the choice that will be made on the decision that will be made in the entire case.

Another impact of the newness of the management approach would be the various researches that put different emphasis on the different elements of the EBMgt. In some cases, although not main emphasis on the case, there is the concern to facilitate practitioners to make use of research evidence when they are making their decisions (Madhavan, & Niranjan, 2015). This is something that is useful in the entire case. most of the motivation to have this approach would from the organizations which disseminate systematic research reviews in medical, social policy, and educational research.

The education research can also be useful in the training of managers in this aspect and field in order to have management issues out in place. The training of managers has been seen to be of great concern in some organizations like Carnegie Melon University, Canfield, and Case Western Reserve universities. These institutions have had emphasis on the skills that involve research findings.

Other organizations have had a different approach on EBMgt so that they place more evidence on collecting more internal data and analyzing this data and that...