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Reference

Salmen, A., Urbig, D., & Aguinis, H. (2026). Identifying and Using Nonlinear and Interactive Control Variables. Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063261431571

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🎙️✨ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit... the podcast where ideas are not just summarized, but felt, turned over, questioned, and brought a little closer to life.

Today, we step into a paper that does something rare in academic research. It does not merely point out a mistake. It reveals a habit of seeing. A habit so ordinary, so widely accepted, that most scholars barely notice it at all... until someone shows us what has been missing in plain sight. 👀📚

The article is titled Identifying and Using Nonlinear and Interactive Control Variables, written by Andreas Salmen, Diemo Urbig, and Herman Aguinis, and published online on 24 April 2026 in the Journal of Management 🏛️, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the world and proudly part of the FT50 journal list. Published by SAGE Publications, this is the kind of article that does not simply add to a conversation. It changes the terms of the conversation itself. 💡

Here is the trouble at the heart of the paper. In management research, we often test relationships that are not neat or straight. Life is rarely linear. Organizations are not linear. Human behavior is not linear. So scholars increasingly examine nonlinear and interactive effects. And yet, even while doing that, many continue to rely on only linear control variables, as if complexity in the main argument can somehow coexist with simplicity in the background. 🔍📈

Salmen, Urbig, and Aguinis show us why that is risky. After reviewing 548 quantitative articles published between 2021 and 2023 in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Strategic Management Journal, they found something startling ⚠️: about 73% tested for nonlinear and interactive effects, but only 3% included nonlinear and interactive control variables. Just 3%.

That number lands with force because the omission is not innocent. It can bend the evidence. It can distort statistical tests. It can bias effect sizes. It can even reverse the very conclusions researchers thought they had discovered. 🧠⚡

And so this paper offers more than critique. It offers a path. A five-step, theory-driven guide for identifying, evaluating, and incorporating the control variables that complexity requires. It is methodological, yes. But it is also moral in the scholarly sense. It asks researchers to be more honest about causality, more transparent about omission, and more careful about what we call knowledge. 📝✨

If you care about robust research, causal inference, theory development, or simply the hidden architecture of good scholarship, this episode is for you.

🎧 Subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and follow the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher for more conversations like this. You can also find us on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcasts. 🚀📺🍎

Our thanks to the authors, Andreas Salmen, Diemo Urbig, and Herman Aguinis, and to SAGE Publications for this important contribution in the Journal of Management.

So here is the question we carry into today’s episode 🤔: if so much of what we believe depends on what we choose to control for, then how many celebrated findings have been shaped not by what researchers saw, but by what they never thought to look for?