Recommended Practices for Academics to Initiate and Manage Research Partnerships With Organizations

Although academics can receive considerable training in selecting appropriate research designs, types of data to collect, and methods for analyzing data, as well as guidance on preparing scholarly manuscripts, there is a dearth of information on how to initiate and manage partnerships with organizations in order to conduct high-quality applied research, particularly when the research is quantitative in nature. In this article, we provide our own experience-based insights and recommendations to help academics more easily (a) initiate a research relationship with senior organizational leadership, (b) decide early whether to pursue or end a research collaboration with an organization, (c) keep the organization engaged during the study, and (d) maintain the relationship with the organization after data collection is complete. This information is proposed as a complement to traditional organizational research methods and as instrumental in the pursuit of research salient to the interests of organizational practitioners.