Guiding the next generation of doctoral students in operations management

This paper presents ways for senior researchers to help future doctoral students in Operations Management (OM) to overcome multiple challenges in the following: (a) conducting relevant research while demonstrating greater rigor, and (b) exploring multi-disciplinary research projects while mastering a single research method. Recognizing that knowledge is generally created in four broad stages ((I) awareness, (II) framing, (III) modeling and (IV) validation), we first argue that different research approaches (analytical, behavioral, case study, or empirical) serve different roles in each of these stages: (1) case study approach for awareness, (2) empirical methods for framing, (3) analytical modeling for modeling and analysis, and (4) behavioral for validation in the real world. Then we discuss ways to enable doctoral students to overcome the aforementioned challenges.