In the Heart of a Storm: Leveraging Personal Relevance Through “Inside-Out” Research
- 1 August 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Academy of Management in Academy of Management Perspectives
- Vol. 35 (3), 435-460
- https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2018.0089
Abstract
By considering our experiences of a crisis at our own organization – the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State – we argue for the value of leveraging diverse, personally relevant insider views to better understand difficult-to-study organizational phenomena, including those that are ambiguous, contested, and/or emotional. Researchers tend to study organizational dynamics from the outside-in, seeking a dominant dispassionate interpretation. In contrast, we advocate for inside-out perspectives that give voice to introspective and reflexive views – including of researchers themselves – to account for cognitive and emotional experiences of those directly affected by events. We encourage researchers to overtly reflect on their cognitive and emotional responses to research. Such personally engaged research comes with potential biases, which researchers must mitigate. Yet such research also has distinct advantages. Researchers working from the inside-out are motivated and positioned to employ deep, long-term, real-time engagement, with access to many types of sensitive data often unavailable to outsiders. Researchers for whom events have direct personal relevance as insiders to a phenomenon and/or organization, thus, have the means to bring different and deeper insight and richer understandings to organizational research by including their experiences.Keywords
This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit:
- Values Work: A Process Study of the Emergence and Performance of Organizational Values PracticesThe Academy of Management Journal, 2013
- Identification in Organizations: An Examination of Four Fundamental QuestionsJournal of Management, 2008
- Give it Up!Journal of Management Inquiry, 2003
- The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and its Influence on Group BehaviorAdministrative Science Quarterly, 2002
- The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.Psychological Review, 2001
- Work/Family Border Theory: A New Theory of Work/Family BalanceHuman Relations, 2000
- Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiationStrategic Management Journal, 1991
- The hindsight bias: A meta-analysisOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1991
- Publication prejudices: An experimental study of confirmatory bias in the peer review systemCognitive Therapy and Research, 1977
- Self-serving biases in the attribution of causality: Fact or fiction?Psychological Bulletin, 1975