This Best Paper Award 2023 (awarded in 2024) recognised Prof. Cornelissen and Dr Kaandorp’s innovative approach to enhancing the rigour of causal claims in management research. Their article addresses widespread concerns about the reliability and strength of many causal claims made in management research. The researchers first critically reviewed the three prevalent forms of theorising used to identify causal relationships in this field: the propositional, configurational, and process approaches to causation.
Practical benefits
Highlighting the strengths and limitations of these approaches, Cornelissen and Kaandorp showed that while no single approach is sufficient by itself as the basis for robust causal claims, researchers can nonetheless enhance and strengthen claims significantly by combining approaches and thus subjecting them to multiple criteria for drawing robust inferences. The authors emphasise the risks of continuing with narrow monolithic approaches, using examples of weak claims to show how these could have been strengthened (or abandoned) if the researchers had followed their proposed model of causal triangulation.
Finally, Cornelissen and Kaandorp elucidate the practical benefits for management researchers and stakeholders in society of adopting this theoretically pluralistic approach to causation.
Honouring Kaandorp
“Although Mariëtte is no longer with us, her achievements were remarkable and her work will continue to inform and inspire scholarship for years to come,” noted the Journal of Management Studies on LinkedIn.
Professor Joep Cornelissen agrees: “Mariëtte was a beautiful person with an inquisitive mind who by blending her training as an econometrician with a qualitative, phenomenological outlook on life planted the seeds for this project. I have tried the best I could to complete the revisions in that spirit, and it is wonderful to hear that colleagues value the paper and what it tries to do.”
The researchers
Joep Cornelissen is professor of corporate communication and management in RSM’s Department of Business-Society Management. His research focuses on the role of corporate and managerial communication in the context of innovation, entrepreneurship and change. He also has an interest in questions of scientific reasoning and theory development in management and organisation theory. His work has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science and Organization Studies. He is the editor-in-chief of Organization Theory, a former associate editor for the Academy of Management Review, a council member of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, and serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies.
Dr Mariëtte Kaandorp was an assistant professor in RSM’s Department of Organisation and Personnel Management. After finishing her PhD at the VU in Amsterdam in 2017, she started as a tenure track assistant professor at RSM, where she worked for three years. She researched cognition and the processes of social interaction in the workplace, as well as giftedness, sensory processing sensitivity, intuition and social networking practices. Kaandorp was an excellent researcher, with publications in the Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. She also taught in several of RSM’s master programmes, where she made difficult concepts understandable and she had a special feel for people who were out of the ordinary like hypersensitive and highly gifted students. Dr Kaandorp passed away in 2020 at the age of 35.
Journal of Management Studies
The Journal of Management Studies is a globally respected, multidisciplinary business and management journal with a long-established history of excellence in management research. It publishes innovative empirical and conceptual articles which advance the fields of management and organisation, with contributions relevant to organisation theory, organisational behaviour, human resource management, strategy, international business, entrepreneurship, innovation and critical management studies.
