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Writer's pictureIsabel Putri

Evidence-Based Management: What is the evidence?


We were privileged to host Dr Christian Dormann for a seminar on evidence-based management at the Future of Work Institute.

We thank Christian for his time and for kindly sharing the slides of presentation.


Empirical evidence of positive effects of evidence-based management (EBM) in general and of evidence-based school management (EBSM) in particular is scarce. We propose teachers’ perceptions of EBSM to have a variety of positive motivational outcomes for them, and we investigate the impact of EBSM on teacher’s job satisfaction, role-breath self-efficacy, work engagement, and collective personal initiative. We further propose that the aggregated ‘school-level EBSM,’ positively impacts on individual teachers’ outcomes above and beyond the perceptions of the individual teacher. We measured two facets of EBSM: internal evidence orientation (IE), and external evidence orientation (EE; Stumm, Mohr, & Dormann, 2010) in a sample of N = 2,573 teachers employed at N = 168 schools. All major hypotheses were at least partly confirmed: perceptions of EBSM and school-level EBSM impacted independently on teachers’ job satisfaction, role-breath self-efficacy, and work engagement. Furthermore, school-level EBSM improved school-level teachers’ job satisfaction and work engagement after 2.5 years, but there was no evidence for reversed effects. Our findings suggest that an open attitude towards establishing and using research evidence in schools is motivating and could directly and indirectly improve school development.

About the speaker

Dr Christian Dormann: Chair of the Business Education & Management at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany, and adjunct research professor at the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at UNISA. His research focus is on stress in organisations, evidence-based management, and methods for the analysis of longitudinal data. Among others, he has published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Psychological Methods. He was editor of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology and associate and consulting editor of several other journals, including the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior.


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