key: cord-0812442-9c8g2p0p
authors: Kouchaki, Maryam
title: OBHDP Editorial: Where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going
date: 2020-06-02
journal: Organ Behav Hum Decis Process
DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.05.001
sha: 5cc0eef0365848eae4f3dbc64eb3ab799e52f930
doc_id: 812442
cord_uid: 9c8g2p0p

nan

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp Editorial OBHDP Editorial: Where we are, how we got here, and where we're going I am deeply honored to serve as editor of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Here, I'd like to address several related areas of interest for the journal, in the context of the "new normal" we find ourselves in as scholars and global citizens. As I write this, I am honoring my state's stay-at-home orders, like many people worldwide, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. While protecting the world's collective health remains the top priority, the "pause" the pandemic has required for business as usual offers a rare opportunity to not only reflect on our individual lives and aspirations but also to reinforce and clarify OBHDP's purpose, identity, mission, and future.

In line with this, I will use this editorial both to underscore the journal's ongoing purpose and mission-rooted in its history-and to emphasize the need for open science as the best means for upholding the rigor for which OBHDP has become known. Near the editorial's end, I will articulate the systematic open-science practices and guidelines the journal will aim to follow, as we stay true to our mission of publishing original, interdisciplinary works reflecting state-of-the-art psychological and organizational science as well as meaningful applicability.

In many ways, my professional situation mirrors OBHDP's original "reason for being" and ongoing purpose and identity, along with the attendant tensions and challenges. As a researcher, I sit at the intersection of psychology and organizational behavior: I focus primarily on psychological work, but perform much of my research in an organizational context, as a professor within a business school. Thus, I must navigate tensions related to scholarly identity, publishing, etc., as embodied by the ongoing questions I face: Am I a social psychologist, an organizational psychologist, a behavioral scientist, a management scholar, or some combination? Do I err on the side of more basic, social and cognitive psychological theories, or work with clear application to organizational functioning and challenges? These dilemmas align with those inherent to the traditional university structure. Most schools are organized by discipline, which creates natural tension at the intersections, inevitable territoriality, and consequent resistance to valuing truly interdisciplinary work.

In this context it is perhaps not surprising that I came to the editorship of OBHDP, as the journal's genesis represents an effort to resolve those academic dilemmas and tensions with a truly integrative approach. Specifically, OBHDP was launched to promote diversity in academic scholarship reflecting a genuinely interdisciplinary approach on the dimensions of topic, perspective, methodology. Thus, from its inception the journal has aimed to publish "fundamental research that delves into basic psychological, cognitive, and decision processes underlying behavior in organizations," with the publication's name itself reflecting emphasis on both organizational and psychological phenomena (Edwards, 2002) .

OBHDP also emerged to reflect the growing need for a journal featuring both fundamental, theoretically derived research and work focused more squarely on practical application. As Daniel Ilgen noted in his 1998 OBHDP editorial, the journal celebrated "work that was theoretically driven and yet advanced understanding of behavior critical for organizational effectiveness and individual well-being." This broad, integrative focus was especially important because traditional applied psychology journals were much more application-oriented rather than theoretical at the time of OBHDP's birth, and they have begun to evolve in the decades that followed.

Our mission, then, has been to publish papers that exemplify rigor-as reflected in OBHDP's history of accepting papers with the soundest theory, methods, samples, and other features-but that also have an eye toward practice, while representing the broadest range of topics possible relevant to organizational and psychological research. After all, even highly theoretical judgement/decision-making papers have implications for application, and should be treated as such. While other journals are moving toward this integrative space, it is territory OBHDP has occupied for over half a century, and will continue to in the future.

As editor, my goal is to remain committed to OBHDP's original mission: maintaining the highest levels of both rigor and relevance, by publishing interdisciplinary work bridging key academic theories and domains. Here, it's worth emphasizing that we will continue to especially value papers offering clear routes to applicability-ideally, those with simple but powerful implications for organizations and the individuals within them. The papers OBHDP publishes are generally characterized by substantial contributions to understanding psychological processes relevant to human attitudes, cognitions, and behavior, while still representing meaningful opportunities for application. I will strive to uphold this tradition, as part of my broader mission of maintaining close alignment to the journal's established, mission, identity, and track record.

I firmly believe researchers will and should diverge in their views on research topics and methods, as part of the questioning and debate that fundamentally underlie science and scholarship. Yet I also believe we can all agree on the need for utmost rigor, especially as a means of establishing trust among divergent stakeholders in the domains of academia and practice.

This has only become more urgent as competition for publishing, jobs, and other areas in academia and science intensifies. Indeed, it has never been more important to perform and publish rigorous research that adds meaningfully to the global body of knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.05.001

Here, the ongoing debate about open science and best approaches to it reflects and expands this general theme of what constitutes rigor. I am strongly in favor of the open-science practices now promoted across science and research domains, as a means of improving transparency, reproducibility, expansion, and collaboration associated with scientific work. Of course, I acknowledge that manuscripts published at OBHDP and the top-tier journals in our field are different from papers published in experimental psychology journals. Yet, there are practices we can adopt to increase the transparency, reproducibility, and ultimately our impact. Thus, as part of my effort to take an even more systematic approach to the maintenance of scientific rigor for OBHDP going forward, I want to articulate more specific guidelines for those submitting to the journal and for our readership.

First, to facilitate reproducibility and transparency, authors are encouraged to make their data and materials available in publicly accessible online repositories upon publication. As part of our effort, authors are now asked to state the availability of their materials and data during the submission process. We do not require public posting, so it is at researchers' discretion. If the authors' data are unavailable or unsuitable for sharing, they can provide an explanatory statement during submission. OBHDP enables authors to interlink data and any useful materials, such as code, protocols, pre-registrations, and methods, with their published articles, in various ways. Also in line with APA ethical standards, OBHDP has an explicit data transparency policy that mandates every author to make their data available on request for scientific purposes within a five-year window after the paper's publication. The data include all materials used in the research (e.g., experimental procedures, instructions, manipulations; survey questionnaires; interview recordings and transcripts), and the analyses conducted (e.g., data files, syntax files, result output files, coding schemes). We believe that full reporting of all variables and materials allows readers and reviewers to make informed assessments. In general, by sharing their materials and data, researchers can maximize the impact and visibility of their research in addition to making their work more reproducible and available for others to build upon more fully.

In addition, OBHDP encourages authors to preregister their hypotheses, design, procedures, and analysis plan and make their preregistration publicly available. In a preregistration, authors state their research questions and expectations, explain how they used existing observations to formulate their research questions and inform their research project, and specify their design, sampling, and analysis plans. Preregistration not only boosts the credibility of research in a scientific field, but also provides a "pre-check" of subjectivity for the scientists by encouraging deliberate, thorough planning prior to data collection. OBHDP recognizes that preregistration may not be appropriate for all studies; nevertheless, authors should still purposefully develop and follow a strict protocol in addition to fully disclosing any researchprocess decisions that could affect the integrity and quality of the data in their manuscript.

It is the goal of this editorial team to promote practices and initiatives that can help enhance the credibility and transparency of research published in OBHDP and the broader scientific community. In addition to the initial submission disclosure, during the revision process we now strongly encourage all researchers to improve the rigor and transparency of their studies by making study materials and/or anonymized data available for blinded peer review and preregistering their hypotheses, design, procedures, and analysis plan. Importantly, our editorial team is committed to reasonableness: we value well-triangulated and generally supported conclusions over perfect (a-priori predicted) single studies; we acknowledge the messiness of data in the social sciences and are open to accepting imperfect results. Our editorial team recognizes the deep value of openness and reproducibility and hopes to endorse and further those values by improving journal policies and continuing to publish the most rigorous research.

In closing, I am honored to uphold and further OBHDP's commitment to rigorous, interdisciplinary work reflecting both fundamental science and broad applicability at the intersection of organizational and human behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic has only reinforced the critical function of science in the world, and I will strive to ensure OBHDP continues to do its part, by publishing high-quality scientific works with transparency.

The past, present, and future of organizational behavior and human processes

Maryam Kouchaki a Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, United States E-mail address: m-kouchaki@kellogg.northwestern.edu.