Your textbook reading (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015) notes learning objectives at the start of each section of each chapter, I recommend you review them before you read/review a section and then again after you complete each section to ensure you have gained the understanding expected of you from your reading assignments.)
Journal articles can be very difficult to read and understand - but once you know how it can also be the difference in being able to find evidence-based solutions to problems versus just going with whatever fad 'sounds good' at the time. Reminder: It can help to review comments on the article (I've left you some). If they don't automatically show up when you open the PDF, click the little comment bubble in the top right corner to review them. You should also be able to add comments on this document, if you need me to clarify something for you please do that and @ my University email in it so I'll get a notification and can reply! If you're confused, someone else is too, so please ask.
The most important thing to understand about them is you do not need to doubt the validity of their results (though you do have to interpret how you can use them properly). Scientific journals have PhD level editors who are experts in their fields and employ peer reviewers that are the same. Nothing makes it to publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly source that has not been deemed valid by a team of experts in that field.
In this case we're reading a meta-analysis, which means the authors are pulling from and comparing large amounts of data from other already verified and peer-reviewed sources to see what we can conclude across ALL of those previous studies - is there anything we can generalize to all workplaces from these previous studies? This will give us what is known as a generalizable result (something we can apply to the entire population with confidence). However, that means this article is densely layered from multiple citation lineages (multiple lines of research from many different people). You are not expected to understand everything.
(Based on the video: We're using this article to combine results and get a quantitative overview of this concept.)
The ADIR approach to reading journal articles will help you! (see the handy step by step guide below), which just means reading the Abstract, Discussion, Introduction, and Results in that order.
Follows these steps...this is referred to as the ADIR method of reading.
Read First: Abstract.
Start here and ask “What is the BIG QUESTION? (what is the problem in the field that this article attempts to address?)”
Read Second: Discussion.
Ask “What are the researchers’ findings?” and “What does it mean? What doesn’t it mean? (e.g., what are the limitations of this work)”
SKIM Third: Introduction.
Put together a 5 Sentence Background (What is the prior work that had led up to this question; what are limitations of prior work?) and define what the specific questions of the study/article are or the definitions of the main concepts (like what is P-O Fit??).
SKIM/SKIP Last: Results
Honestly, this section you should check out only to see if it helps you understand anything better or more. If it starts to feel too complex or confuses you at all, focus on the Discussion instead! This section is intended to give other experts the information they need to attempt to replicate the results or to understand how they should run their own studies on the same things. It's not necessarily useful for laypeople in any way. Just trust the editors and use the parts that help you only.
SKIP: Methods - Seriously, DON'T feel the need to even skim it.
Skip these is my general advice for most people. Only graduate students or other experts in the field need to grapple with this stuff. This section, like the Discussion, is intended to give other experts the information they need to attempt to replicate the results or to understand how they should run their own studies on the same things. It's not necessarily useful for laypeople in any way.
After you've done all of the above: Think it over
Do you understand? Can you identify the BIG QUESTION this article attempts to address?
What is something you can DO with these results?? In practice?
Quick reminder: I NEVER require you to work alone on things.... So feel free to work together if you can get some people together to do so (you can even draft posts/documents together, just note that you did so and give credit where it's due)!
I bet after doing this assignment you can see why the world needs more good science communicators in every field, because trying to interpret articles is hard work, and it would be great to have more people to bridge the gap. I'm trying to teach you one way to implement this kind of science in the workplace by having you do assignments like this one which train you to be an interpreter of the articles and therefore make you capable of implementing their results in the workplace for the good of all. The idea is that you'll be a much more effective behaviorist in the workplace than anyone else who doesn't have this skill.
Here's a great website that does this for I-O articles... https://www.ioatwork.com/ It even has an article showing one idea for how you can USE this kind of P-O fit information to good effect in an organization https://www.ioatwork.com/recruitment-tips-highlight-person-organization-fit/
Another favorite author of note for I-O, the science behind Org. Behavior, is Adam Grant https://www.adamgrant.net/
And of course websites like Harvard Business Review specialize in this too... but for a fee. https://hbr.org/
🎧 Try Harvard Business Review's IdeaCasts (you can click RSS then use Ctrl+F to search all episodes easier). This lesson #96 Why Zappos Pays Employees to Quit and #10 Opening Up Innovation and Dealing with Underperformers are particularly relevant for our OB topics, while #456 Your Brain's Ideal Schedule and #416 The Dangers of Confidence are relevant for self-management.
🎬 Watch a relevant TED Talk. For this lesson I recommend:
Dweck, C. (2014, November). The power of believing that you can improve. [Video File]. Retrieved from http://go.ted.com/Cq9k