Research methodology in the congnitive style field: a review study in the area of business and management, 1988-2007

This study provides insights into the methodological practices of the field of cognitive styles research over the past two decades and aims to shed light on possible gaps and avenues for future research. Based on a carefully designed selection process, 102 style-related articles within the field of business and management were included in our methodological review study, representing 175 different empirical studies. These studies were content-analysed using a coding scheme that contained the following dimensions: theoretical framework, research design, measurement, and data analytic approach. Our results indicated that research on cognitive styles predominantly takes place in North America (mainly US) and Europe (mainly UK), looking at the affiliations of the first authors and the nationality of the samples. International collaborative studies are scarce. Unsurprisingly, a wide diversity of cognitive style models and measures is used in these studies, although three theories (i.e., Cognitive Style Index, Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) represent about 60 per cent of the applied frameworks. In terms of research methods, the field of cognitive styles research mainly uses quantitative, cross-sectional, and single-source designs and heavily relies on self-reports, sample surveys, and student samples. While these findings might indicate a potential vulnerability in terms of internal and external validity, we also found a rather strong emphasis on construct validity, exemplified in the fairly high attention for reliability, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Consequently, we encourage cognitive style researchers to work on three particular issues to further enhance the rigour and relevance of the field: (1) triangulation by striving towards more diverse research designs and implementing more diverse ways of data collection; (2) collaboration by increasing both scholar-practitioner cooperation and the number of international collaborative studies; and (3) contextualisation by embodying the context as well as a time dimension in style research, by conducting more multi-sample and longitudinal studies, and by striving towards more purposeful sampling. Although we are convinced of the value of this first systematic methodological review study of the cognitive style field, future similar studies are necessary, extending the scope of the current study to other research domains, a broader time period, and unpublished research, to strengthen and cross-validate our findings.