“More than Meets the Eye”: A Guide to Interpreting the Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Matrices Reported in Management Research

The author of this essay wonders whether in teaching our students the latest analytic techniques we have neglected to emphasize the importance of understanding the most basic aspects of a study’s primary data. In response, he provides a 12-part answer to a fundamental question: “What information can be derived from reviewing the descriptive statistics and correlation matrix that appear in virtually every empirically based, nonexperimental paper published in the management discipline?” The seeming ubiquity of strained responses, to what many at first consider to be a vexed question about a mundane topic, leads the author to suggest that students at all levels, seasoned scholars, manuscript referees, and general consumers of management research may be unaware that the standard Table 1 in a traditional Results section reveals “more than meets the eye!”

“More than Meets the Eye”: A Guide to Interpreting the Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Matrices Reported in Management Research

The author of this essay wonders whether in teaching our students the latest analytic techniques we have neglected to emphasize the importance of understanding the most basic aspects of a study’s primary data. In response, he provides a 12-part answer to a fundamental question: “What information can be derived from reviewing the descriptive statistics and correlation matrix that appear in virtually every empirically based, nonexperimental paper published in the management discipline?” The seeming ubiquity of strained responses, to what many at first consider to be a vexed question about a mundane topic, leads the author to suggest that students at all levels, seasoned scholars, manuscript referees, and general consumers of management research may be unaware that the standard Table 1 in a traditional Results section reveals “more than meets the eye!”

Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival: key challenges for future research

How do social organizations evolve? How do they adapt to environmental pressures? What resources and capabilities determine their survival within dynamic competition? Charles Darwin’s seminal work The Origin of Species (1859) has provided a significant impact on the development of the management and organization theory literatures on organizational evolution. This article introduces the JMG Special Issue focused on Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival. We discuss key themes in the organizational evolution research that have emerged in recent years. These include the increasing adoption of the co-evolutionary approach, with a particular focus on the definition of appropriate units of analysis, such as routines, and related challenges associated with exploring the relationship between co-evolution, re-use of knowledge, adaptation, and exaptation processes. We then introduce the three articles that we have finally accepted in this Special Issue after an extensive, multi-round, triple blind-review process. We briefly outline how each of these articles contributes to understanding among scholars, practitioners and policy makers of the continuous evolutionary processes within and among social organizations and systems