REAP REWARDS : MAXIMIZING BENEFITS FROM

You’ve submitted the manuscript to the journal. The waiting begins. Tick, tock, tick, tock. When the decision letter finally arrives, you almost wish you could postpone the moment that is finally upon you. Perhaps with trembling hands, you click on (or tear open) the mail. For a first submission, you know that the chances of an outright acceptance are slim to none, although you can always hope! What you really fear is an outright rejection, which is the ultimate fate, you are told, of 90 percent of all manuscripts submitted to a top-tier journal. You skim through the letter. You know that the usual platitudes precede the twist and almost wish that the letter started off with the decision in large, stamped letters. The suspense gathers momentum as you read how the reviewers were complimentary but raised many questions, how many of their concerns mirror the editor’s . OK, yeah, yeah, but what is the decision? Your eyes finally fall on the little, all-powerful sentence that lies innocuous and hidden. As soon as you spot it, the smattering of words surrounding the editor’s decision takes on a life of its own. Jumping right off of the page, searing through your consciousness, and relegating the rest of the document to mere verbiage. An R&R—revise and resubmit! COOL! But wait a minute, it says “high risk,” and the editor is not sure whether the concerns can be adequately addressed. Is it a usual disclaimer, or disguised advice to not even bother with resubmitting? Your mind is going a mile a minute in many directions as you try to assimilate what you have received. Undergoing the review process is both an emotional and intellectual endeavor. The emotional roller coaster begins when you open the decision letter. The intellectual process requires revisiting each thought articulated in your submitted manuscript, reexamining every argument made, tightening all the logical connections, checking the methodology, developing more robust tests for the proposed hypotheses, and making your key contributions to existing research stand out emphatically. So, how do you maintain your sanity while navigating this challenging and demanding process? Sara Rynes has asked us to write about our experiences while undergoing the review process for our paper on spin-outs (Agarwal, Echambadi, Franco, & Sarkar, 2004). This particular paper was a particularly challenging one to write and revise, not only because of the complexity of the issues being investigated, but also because the author team consisted of four people geographically dispersed over three cities. In retrospect, the latter turned to be a benefit in disguise, since we had to develop routines and templates for communication and organization of the revision task. When asked to prepare this editorial, we found ourselves labeling our templates for the stages and subprocesses of our R&R and drawing a mnemonic from the first letters of these labels. “REAP REWARDS” aptly describes the process that enabled us to benefit from the reviewer comments received in each of three successive requests to revise and resubmit this paper. Each letter of this mnemonic stands for a stage of the process, and each stage is identified and described below. All four authors contributed equally. The names are arranged in alphabetical order. The manuscript has benefited significantly from “reviewer” comments received from Sara Rynes, Janet Bercovitz, Amy Hillman, Glenn Hoetker, Duane Ireland, Marshall Schminke, Sonali Shah, and Rosemarie Ziedonis. Thanks to Persephone Doliner for copy-editing. All remaining errors are ours. Academy of Management Journal 2006, Vol. 49, No. 2, 191–196.