Maintaining relevance and rigor: How we bridge the practitioner–scholar divide within human resource development

• Author: Gary P. Latham,Travor C. Brown
• Published date: 01 June 2018
• Date: 01 June 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21308

EDITORIAL

Maintaining relevance and rigor: How we bridge

the practitioner–scholar divide within human

resource development

Prior to joining academia, we both worked in industry. Brown worked in various human resource roles in the pulp

and paper and telecommunications sectors in the 1990s, while Latham worked as a manager of human resource

research in the pulp and paper industry in the 1970s. In these roles, we frequently worked with our respective man-

agement teams to examine issues related to developing and evaluating various training and development programs

at the employee, leader, and organizational level; developing interventions designed to bolster employee motivation

and engagement; and designing and measuring the effectiveness of performance management programs (Brown &

Latham, 2000; Latham, Wexley, & Pursell, 1975). This workplace experience in many ways grounded our research

programs as subsequent academics. In fact, some of our earliest publications examined issues related to goal-setting

training in field settings involving employees in the logging (Latham & Kinne, 1974) and telecommunications

(Brown & Latham, 2000) sectors. Decades later, this industrial experience continues to influence our current

research programs.

The field of HRD is well aligned with the workplace issues we faced in our industry-based roles. For example,

Hamlin and Stewart (2011, p. 210), following a comprehensive review of the literature, concluded that the four core

purposes of HRD include:

•Improving individual or group effectiveness and performance;

•Improving organizational effectiveness and performance;

•Developing knowledge, skills, and competencies; and

•Enhancing human potential and personal growth.

Given the alignment between the core purposes of the HRD field and the practical challenges and issues faced

by HRD professionals, it is not surprising that Human Resource Development Quarterly (HRDQ) editorials have exam-

ined the need for engaged research (Tsui, 2013), curiosity-driven and pragmatic research (Reio, 2012), as well as

evidence-based HRD practices (Gubbins & Rousseau, 2015). Similarly, over a decade ago, Short (2006) wrote a

forum article for HRDQ entitled “Closing the Gap Between Research and Practice in HRD.”In each of these articles,

there is a discussion of the important, and often challenging, relationship between scholars and practitioners, the

need for relevance in scholarship, and the need for rigor in practice.

Yet even with repeated calls for relevance in HRD scholarship and rigor in HRD practice, there continues to be

a scholar–practitioner gap in our field. In our editorial and reviewer roles, we find that empirical articles submitted

to journals for review include implications for practitioners that are often superficial. In some cases, as noted by

Leung and Bartunek (2012), these implications read as if they were treated as a necessary “afterthought”merely

added by the authors to adhere to a journal submission requirement. For example, a manuscript recently submitted

to HRDQ was over 35 pages in length, with three detailed paragraphs concerning implications for scholarship and a

very brief paragraph presenting vague implications for practice. This is surprising given the clear discussion of both

DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21308

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