Insufficient Effort Responding in Management Research: A Critical Review and Future Directions

Abstract

Insufficient effort responding (IER) presents a significant challenge in management research, potentially leading to flawed inferences. This review critically examines IER practices in 17 leading management journals from 2012 to 2023, highlighting inconsistencies in screening methods, cutoffs, and reporting. We find that IER screening is more prevalent in studies using online paid samples, experimental tasks, and computerized data collection. However, researchers’ IER-related practices, specifically the use of multiple detection methods, predicted IER removal rate above and beyond these study characteristics. Our review revealed that, despite increasing awareness, IER detection and reporting remain unstandardized, with varied practices across studies. While attention checks are frequently used, details about their implementation are often inadequately reported, and multiple detection methods, though recommended, are inconsistently applied. Variability in cutoffs and reliance on single-item checks raise concerns about the risk of retaining IER cases or mistakenly excluding attentive respondents. Our assessment of the impact of IER removal suggests that while it generally improves reliability and model fit, its effect can vary widely across measures and studies. We call on methodologists to resolve existing inconsistencies by developing clearer, empirically derived guidelines for IER detection and removal. We urge researchers to adopt more comprehensive and transparent reporting practices to enhance replicability and methodological rigor, with a flowchart to guide research design and method communication. This review underscores the need for a more systematic approach to IER mitigation in management research to enhance data quality and research validity.