From the Guest Editors: Change the World: Teach Evidence-Based Practice!

This AMLE special issue is dedicated to furthering the practice of evidence-based management, and does so by focusing on the how’s, what’s, and wherefores of teaching it. Evidence-based management (EBMgt) is a professional form of managerial practice. It is about making decisions through the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of the best available evidence from multiple sources to help managers choose effective ways to manage people and structure organizations (Briner, Denyer, & Rousseau, 2009). EBMgt has grown out of the movement across many professions toward the uptake of evidence-based practice and away from reliance on tradition and unchallenged authority. Fittingly, the evidence-based movement first began in the field of medicine as a teaching method led by Gordon Guyatt and colleagues (Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group, 1992). In Guyatt’s words, “[T]here was no question that what we were doing was challenging authority, challenging paradigms, challenging educational approaches, challenging what you had to know, challenging how you do practice ultimately” (this issue). Since its origins in medicine over 2 decades ago, the systematic use of scientific evidence—along with evidence from other sources—is on its way to becoming an interdisciplinary professional standard. At the 2003 EBHC International Joint Conference, the term EB medicine was dropped in favor of evidence-based practice (EBP), emphasizing the fact that from medicine to policing, nursing, management and other professions, the basic principles of EB practice are shared (Dawes et al., 2005). At the same time, so are many of the challenges. Foremost among the challenges of systematically using evidence in one’s professional practice is that people need to acquire the content, knowledge, and skills in research and critical thinking to do so. EBP in management, as in medicine, begins with education and training. In fostering this training, management educators will be challenged to structure instructional experiences and develop new materials. This special issue provides insights into how to organize and structure learning experiences consistent with both research-based principles of human learning (Goodman & O’Brien, 2012) and practical teaching experience (e.g., Erez & Grant, 2014; Walshe & Briner, this issue). Teaching EBP has been described as having two sides—push and pull. “Push” refers to courses, textbooks, and other educational media and experiences that help learners acquire research-based content knowledge in substantive areas such as organizational behavior (OB) or strategic management. In this special issue, Steve Charlier’s interview of Gary Latham, Robert Dipboye’s review of Pearce’s (2013) textbook, and Tamara Giluk’s of Latham’s (2009) all provide insights into the push side of teaching EBP. The “pull” side of teaching EBP, in contrast, helps students and managers access and interpret research findings on their own. In a sense, the distinction between push and pull is one of content versus process. While the push side is used primarily to bring research evidence into the teaching of a particular content area, the pull side helps learners acquire skills they can use, whatever the topic, to access practice-related research and principles over the course of their careers. Most articles in this special issue focus on the pull side of teaching EBP (e.g., Gamble & Jelley; Goodman, Gary, & Wood; Trank; and Walshe & Briner). Another article (see Dietz, Antonakis, Hoffrage, Krings, Marewski, & Zender), also exemplifies the pull side, but focuses on helping students and practitioners produce their own research evidence (what Rousseau, 2006, termed “local” or “little e” evidence) rather than the more common approach of teaching how Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2014, Vol. 13, No. 3, 305–321. http://dx.doi. org/10.5465/amle.2014. 0203