Mediation Testing in Management Research

By Robert E. Wood, Jodi S. Goodman, Nadin Beckmann, Alison Cook. 2008

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors review and critique the conduct and reporting of mediation analyses in 409 studies published in five leading organization studies journals over the past 25 years. The aim of the study is to learn from past practice and to use that knowledge to signal to researchers the importance of correctly applying mediation tests as well as to facilitate the valid testing of mediation models and the reporting of mediation results in future studies. The authors content code their sample for a wide range of characteristics and find that the majority of inferences of full and partial mediation are based on testing procedures that deviate significantly from procedures recommended by statisticians. In addition, the reporting of results is often incomplete and inefficient. The authors discuss and evaluate the findings of the study and make recommendations for future testing and reporting of results for mediation models.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd80849c7dd9d50846bae7852b4d6a60f122ff70

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In Management Information Systems

In Management Science and Operations Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Integration of Financial and Management Accounting Systems: The Mediating Influence of a Consistent Financial Language on Controllership Effectiveness (2011, background): “00) is statistically insignificant (Wood et al., 2008).”
Contingency Hypotheses in Strategic Management Research (2012, methodology): “Most management studies that involve mediation also use regression analysis (Wood et al., 2008), driven by the widespread adoption of Baron and Kenny’s (1986) “four-step” approach.”
Management of innovation: role of psychological empowerment, work engagement and turnover intention in the Indian context (2012, methodology): “To test the mediation of employee engagement, the study followed the suggestion of Wood, Goodman, Beckmann and Cook ( 2008 ) and applied SEM procedures using the maximum likelihood estimation algorithm.”
Service Quality and the Mediating Effect of Corporate Image on the Relationship between Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty in the Malaysian Hotel Industry (2014, methodology): “…the third hypothesis postulated, three different tests, namely Baron and Kenny’s 4 causal steps test, Sobel’s Z test and bootstrapping as suggested by Wood et al. (2008) were adopted in this study to examine the mediating effect of corporate image on the relationship of customer satisfaction and…”
The mediating effect of job satisfaction and organizational commitment on self-reported performance: more robust evidence of the PSM—performance relationship (2009, background): “Although this latter step is not explicitly mentioned as a necessary step in the original Baron and Kenny (1986) article, as it focused on complete mediation (Kenny, 2008), it should be incorporated in any model testing partial mediation (Wood et al., 2008).”