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21 BizEd September/October 2014 PETE R G R I FFITH / MASTE R FI LE A sk business school deans what keeps them awake at night, and they'll respond with a litany of similar concerns: raising money, retaining faculty, recruiting students, and doing well in the rankings. Ask faculty what keeps them awake at night, and their answers will range from achieving tenure to securing grant funding. But one topic that is gaining momentum as a faculty concern is how to mea- sure impact. It's a complex issue with implications for individual careers as well as institutional reputations. It's affected by fund- ing models, the rankings race, and public perception. And it's not even close to being solved. Debra Shapiro, Herman Agui- nis, and Elena Antonacopoulou are three professors who have written extensively about the importance of assessing faculty members' impact with metrics that go beyond count- ing publications in top-ranked journals. Shapiro, the Clarice Smith Professor of Management at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business in College Park, is also the president-elect of the Academy of Management, whose nearly 20,000 members represent over 100 nations. Aguinis, the John F. Mee Chair of Management at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, is also president of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management. And Antonacopoulou is a professor of organizational behavior at the Uni- versity of Liverpool's Management School in the U.K., where she leads GNOSIS, a center for excellence in management research. She also is a member of both the Academy of Management and some of its affiliates: the British Academy of Management, the European Group for Organizational Stud- ies, and the European Academy of Management. Last fall, at the Academy of Management's annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, they were part of a symposium titled "Scholarly Impact: A Pluralist Perspective," where panelists discussed the stra- tegic importance of broadening the ways faculty impact is assessed. Individually and separately, Shapiro, Aguinis, and Antonacopoulou have written on related topics that try to answer key questions: How should schools assess the intellectual contri- butions of faculty? And how should those metrics change in light of the current educational environment? Counting Contributions Shapiro presents the argument in a straightforward fashion: The scope of faculty responsibilities is expanding due to a variety of pres- sures (see "The Pressures and the Problems" on page 24). As profes- sors divert energy to these new responsibilities, they have less time for research and writing activities. Yet, when it comes to tenure and promotion decisions, faculty still are being evaluated based primarily on the number of their publications in top-ranked journals. Says Shapiro, "Ideally, the evalu- ation system used in schools to assess faculty performance would change to reflect the fact that research productivity is impeded by increased demands associated with teaching and other school- related needs. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the metrics used to assess faculty performance remain unchanged. That is, most schools only consider articles pub- lished in A journals as intellectual contributions. This is true in large part because these are the only intellectual contributions measured by the Financial Times rankings." The tight focus on publication in top-tier journals is problematic for more than one reason. It ignores all the other demands on professors' time, as Shapiro points out—but it also ignores all the other gifts that faculty bring to the table. Specifi- cally, the current approach does a poor job of measuring what kind of impact faculty have on their students, their institutions, and the broader community through their research, teaching, and service. "We're trying to be exceptional scholars, and to cultivate conscience in our students and in our com- munities. That means that we are teaching, conducting research, and serving the profession and the wider community in direct and relevant ways," says Antonacopoulou. "We must not only support learning, but also act responsibly and critically. We must be accountable for the impact we make. Fundamentally, we add value through all the practices that constitute our scholarship." She adds, "What matters to fac- ulty is a recognition that what we do makes a difference, and therefore needs to be accounted for in a way that reflects the difference we make. If citations are the only way we choose to measure ourselves, we are stabbing ourselves in the foot." Aguinis agrees. While he stresses that "research is the pil- lar, the foundation" of academic purpose, it's not enough on its own. "We need to show that our research adds value to society and to organizations and doesn't just