How to build strong research connections?

My personal reflections on building senior, peer, and junior research connections; includes my nearly 30-year-old PhD survey materials

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 16 Oct 2024 15:24 (updated Fri 8 Nov 2024 10:55)

In May 2024 I was asked to participate in a webinar series organised by the Research Leadership Development Consortium (RLDC), a network that designs and organises development events that strengthen and support research leadership in the social sciences. The topic of the session was two-fold: building strong research connections and developing your research leadership brand.

This post shares my personal experiences in building strong research connections, with a second post discussing How to build your research leadership "brand"? As part of the current post, I have included a reflection on my own PhD survey materials. The state of technology embedded in these materials might amuse younger academics and evoke some wistful memories from older academics. You can read more about my PhD journey in Musings of a recent graduate, the epilogue I wrote for my PhD thesis.

Thinking back about my academic career since the late 1980s, I can see that – without doing this consciously – I have always prioritised relationships and understood the power of meaningful connections. This is a bit odd as I am a very strong introvert and have always been quite shy. Even so, throughout my entire academic career I have always reached out to other academics, whether they were seniors, peers or juniors.

Building senior connections: increasing survey response rates

During my PhD I attempted to forge relationships with senior academics in my field. This was quite essential for me as I was doing my PhD pretty much independently, without much supervisory input. So, I sent my research proposal to academics like Gunnar Hedlund, Denice Welch, and Paul Evans (INSEAD), all academics I cited extensively. They all kindly responded with useful feedback. This was before email was common, so I still treasure their response on thermal fax paper. Unfortunately, the text has almost faded now!

For my PhD on control mechanisms in multinational companies I decided to run an international mail survey. My prospective respondents - senior managers in multinationals - were extremely busy people with many demands on their time. Hence, I had to build a strong research connections with them too if I wanted to have any chance of a decent number of survey responses. So, I thought up a lot of ways to do this.

First of all, rather than immediately bombarding my respondents with a questionnaire, I tried to build up our relationship slowly by mailing an announcement postcard a week before the questionnaire. This postcard included some key practical questions that could be answered by participating in the research project (see below). It also featured my picture and full address details (blurred in the picture) to create a personal connection, with an international committee of recommendation on the reverse side. More on this later...

I had done a lot of reading on incentives to improve response rates and had implemented most of these, but I felt something "quirky" was needed to get my prospective respondents over the hurdle. So in the cover letter that accompanied the questionnaire, I tried to appeal to them on a human level and make them smile. If you can get someone to laugh with you, it is much easier to build up a connection with them.

So I stapled a teabag to the letter, encouraging my respondents to take a short 5-minute break and complete the questionnaire there and then. In the reminder, I sent them a sachet of instant coffee, joking that the reason they hadn’t responded yet might be that they preferred coffee over tea. You can read the letter below; the coffee sachet has gone, but you can still see the staples. I vividly remember spending many days folding letters and stapling on the tea bags/coffee sachets. I had to be extremely careful not to puncture the bag/sachet.

[And in case you are wondering, thirty years ago there were no ethics committees in the Netherlands requiring plain language statements or signed statements of consent].

To reinforce the connection, I repeated the earlier picture of myself on the questionnaire. However, I also reasoned that my prospective respondents also needed me to connect in some way with their own country. So, I came up with the idea of a committee of recommendation, featuring an academic from every country that was included in the survey.

Although I had no illusion that the managers would know these academics, the universities they were affiliated with might ring a bell. The managers or their children might even have studied at them. Even if they didn’t, it would still create a "local" connection. 

I was savvy enough to ask famous academics such Geert Hofstede and John Dunning first before I asked the other academics. They all said yes 😊. Perusing the committee of recommendation list now evokes mixed feelings as many of these academics are sadly no longer with us. 

The key to building strong relationships is trust. So, I did keep my promise to inform my respondents of the results of my study and sent a company report to all participants. I am quite proud of what I managed to put together (see below). Remember, this was nearly 30 years ago! Software packages were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are these days.

It seems my respondents appreciated it as I did receive some thank-yous. Some companies even took up my offer of paid-for tailored industry or country reports, which allowed me to defray some of the cost of the mail survey.

And if you are wondering what the results of all these efforts was, I am happy to tell you that I got a very decent response rate (20%). This was significantly higher than the 6-16% that was common for company surveys in the late 1980s / early 1990s. But even back then companies were already over-surveyed. Here are some of the responses I received from those who didn't respond. 

I even applied my later adage to never do someting for one reason only. After completing my PhD I wrote up three articles about my experience with international mail surveys, as well as country differences in response rates - my response rates varied from 7.1% in Hong Kong to 42.1% in Denmark. These articles became quite popular, with nearly 1,000 combined citations.

My interest in the practicalities of international surveys also led me to a range of further studies and articles on response styles and the role of language in international mail surveys. If you are interested, you can read all about them in these three blogposts.

• Challenges in International survey research: illustrations and solutions
• Language effects in international mail surveys
• What if fully agree doesn't mean the same thing across cultures?

Building peer connections:
initiating networks throughout my career

Networking with your peers (rather than only  with seniors) can be a very rewarding - and less stressful and intimidating - way to build relationships. When you are young you might not immediately realise this, but it also builds a network that is much more future proof. Remember that in 20 years’ time most of your senior connections may have retired or even passed away, whereas many academics in your peer network may now be in positions of influence.

Somehow, I have ended up running lots of networks during my career. During my PhD, I started the Young Academics Network. It included a group of PhD students I had met at European conferences. We shared our experiences in academia by email and gave each other advice. Several of these PhD students later participated in the two large-scale multi-country data collection projects I ran in the mid-2000s.

Membership involvement committee

From early on in my PhD studies I went to lots of conferences, initially only smaller European ones, but from 1999 onwards also the big Academy of Management conferences. I felt completely overwhelmed at these large conferences and out of place at its receptions. They seemed to be full of extroverted, smooth-talking Americans looking over my shoulders for a more interesting/important person to talk to.

I noticed many non-Americans felt the same. So I mentioned this to Srilata Zaheer, then president of the International Management Division, who promptly asked me to set up a Membership Involvement Committee. We organised lots of conferences activities for new and international members. We also created buttons with “MIC Country Rep: How can I help you?” (see above) which we proudly wore at the receptions.

This led me to a crucial discovery about networking as an introverted, shy person. Once you are leading something, you have a role to play. So, it is much easier to be brave and to "play extrovert". Moreover, once you are in charge people will come to you. This mean you don’t have to take that difficult step to walk up to someone you don’t know.

Networks for female academics

Throughout my career I have also played a role in setting up networks for specific groups. At the University of Melbourne, for instance, I ran an interdisciplinary cross-cultural research group. I have also engaged in several initiatives to support female academics in particular, creating a safe space for women to learn, collaborate, and empower each other.

In the late 1990s, I co-founded LAWN (Local Academic Women Network), offering workshops for undergraduates and research / skill-development / networking events. More recently, I was a co-founder of CYGNA (see below), which by now has organised 60 meetings and has nearly 400 members in nearly 40 countries.

Building junior connections:
rewarding, revitalising, and reinvigorating  

The further you get in your academic career (and life), the more you will notice that "suddenly" everyone seems to be younger than you. Whilst this may be a bit confronting at first, it is important to extend your network to the younger generation (both in age and in rank). I have found mentoring junior academics to be one of the most rewarding things I have done in my career.

However, it has also been revitalising and reinvigorating. As as senior academic, you can become jaded and cynical (see: Proactive academia (3): My advice for senior academics), as well as set in your ways. Collaboration with the younger academic generation can revitalise those research sparks and can reinvigorate both your methodological and disciplinary skills and knowledge. 

I have learned so much about research supervision in my role as PhD director, about disciplinary differences in my role of Research Dean, and about developing research competencies and inclusive research cultures in my role as Staff Development Lead at Middlesex University. Through this I even built up my own Research Leadership brand, as you can read in my write-up of the second section of the RLDC event: How to build your research leadership "brand"?

Key take-aways

For me the key lessons to build strong research connections have been:

1. Don’t be shy to contact senior academics in your field. Many are very happy to help polite and eager junior academics.
2. Connections are important in all areas of your research; this includes your research respondents. Spending time to carefully build connections with them will benefit your research tremendously.
3. Building up peer networks early on in your career is a great way to grow together. Remember that in 20 years time many junior academics will be senior and in positions of influence.
4. As a senior academic, building research connections with junior academics can not be rewarding in terms of transferring your knowledge and experience, but also revitalising and reinvigorating. A perfect antidote to declining energy and increasing cynicism.
5. If you are introverted and shy, taking on leadership positions might actually help you as you can play a defined role. It will also lead academics to come to you and you don’t need to be the one initiating contact.