James Larsen, Ph.D.

In the early 1980s, I completed a Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska in an interdisciplinary program titled Community and Human Resources (CHR). For my dissertation, I designed and tested a training program at Lincoln General Hospital for hospital supervisors in leading groups. For my internship, I developed an in-basket test for new managers and supervisors at the Omaha National Bank in Omaha, Nebraska.

With a freshly minted doctorate, I started a business and named it The Management Training Company. I taught classes in supervision as a consultant, and I used exercises I had developed including an in-basket test and an employee survey I named Leadership Behavior Rating Scale.

As a small business owner, the toughest part for me was generating new business, and I found the goal of a steady adequate income to support my family to be impossible to achieve. I packed it all up and found myself grateful for my day job which I had never left.

I turned to writing, but what to write about?

The second chapter of a doctoral dissertation is a literature review. The doctoral candidate reads articles about similar research and describes how the research project of this dissertation fits into the larger context of other studies. When I completed my review, I found the research literature to be a vast and rich resource. I was very impressed. Later, when I asked myself what to write about, I remembered the experience, and I began a process that carried me through the rest of my career. I would search through my favorite journals and look for new findings that would help supervisors and small business owners if they knew about them, and I would write about the new findings. I followed a formula to 1) describe the problem the researchers addressed, 2) explain what they found, and 3) explore how the findings could be implemented in real settings.

For ten years I self-published a management newsletter titled The Digest of Management Research, and I sold subscriptions to a variety of organizations. By the mid 1990s, I also began peddling individual articles to trade publications. Eventually, I chose to continue writing for other publications and I ended the newsletter.

I have written about 389 findings, but my pace has slowed in recent years, and all of my paying clients have found others to fill their pages. My attention has now shifted to this large archive of findings I have amassed and to the useful knowledge contained in the articles. It need not disappear. For new supervisors and business owners, the findings remain fresh, interesting, and instructive. This website keeps the mission alive that I have pursued to help them.

I have created three search mechanisms to access relevant findings for the reader. The first is a subject index. The second is a researcher index that connects the first-listed author of the research with the article I have written describing the findings he/she discovered. The third gathers findings together according to the groups which would be most interested in them, i.e. supervisors, customer service representatives, business owners, salespeople, and so on. I expect these reading lists to be used to supplement classroom instruction and to guide continuing education efforts for people currently in business and management settings. Instructors may also find the archive useful to help them craft broad and interesting classroom learning experiences informed by the research findings.

You will notice that I have removed copyright notices from the contents of this website. Copying and distributing these articles is encouraged. Doing so will advance my purpose to widely distribute the knowledge of these findings to those who can use them and to help the practice of business and management be informed by the findings of careful research. If anyone asks, tell them you have my permission and direct them to this website.

Finally, you will also notice an absence of advertising. Arranging ads is a chore I don’t need to or want to pursue. I will pay for the website.