STRONG HYPOTHESIS TESTING IN ORGANIZATIONS: ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO THE EVALUATION OF PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE

Organizational decision‐makers require information presented in ways that allow them to make informed decisions on the effectiveness of change interventions. Current statistical methods do not provide enough information about the practical value of organizational interventions to decision‐makers. It is proposed that a strong hypothesis testing strategy provides a partial answer to this problem. The hypothesis testing method presented here uses Bayesian statistics to test null hypotheses other than the traditional Ho = 0. A description of the evaluation of a change project in six manufacturing plants of a large United States corporation is provided. The data from this project is used to show how both statistical and practical significance may be tested using this hypothesis testing method. The applicability of the strong hypothesis testing approach to the assessment of organizational change is then discussed, and recommendations are made for evaluations conducted in field settings.