Methods for Management Research in the 1970's: An Ecological Systems Approach.

This article deals with the increasing number of warnings that the field of management is declining. Starting with the premise that this decline is due to the failure of management scholars to meet the needs of the client population, practicing managers, and students, an attempt is made to correct this trend by forecasting the needs of this client group for the 197O's. The characteristics, expected to be increasingly required by this client group in the 197O's, are operationality and testability. Therefore, scholars in the field of management must move toward a research base that emphasizes these aspects, or risk the loss of these client groups to others who are willing to satisfy their needs. Attempts in the past to connect specific managerial action with firm performance have been frustrated by problems of suboptimization, the lack of experimental control, and by confounding due to the impact of environmental, or uncontrollable, factors on firm performance. A research model that has been proven to be operational in recent field tests is proposed as a way of beginning to accumulate the research base that will probably be required if we are to halt the decline in the field of management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]