Extend well-established models by probing boundary conditions and causal pathways.
Example: Under what external legitimacy threats does transformational rhetoric erode, rather than enhance, follower trust?
Start with puzzling phenomena and allow theory to emerge iteratively from field evidence.
Example: How do leaderless teams negotiate decision authority when formal hierarchy is removed?
Locate puzzling real-world events and work backward to conceptual puzzles.
Example: What role do social-media legitimacy shocks play in accelerating executive turnover in higher education leadership?
Treat empirical findings that contradict dominant expectations as seeds for questions.
Example: Why does demographic diversity dampen idea generation in highly time-pressured healthcare teams?
Import theories, constructs, or methods from adjacent fields to recast leadership puzzles.
Example: How do superintendents make real-time decisions when faced with overlapping political demands, regulatory deadlines, and community crises?
Deliberately interrogate and overturn the field’s taken‑for‑granted assumptions to uncover alternative perspectives and formulate novel, more generative research questions.
Example: How do distributed teams negotiate and enact shared leadership practices when the conventional assumption of a single, heroic leader is replaced by a relational view of leadership as an emergent, collective process?
Iteratively co-design interventions with stakeholders to discover new questions from prototype outcomes.
Example: What psychological contracts are violated when algorithmic decision aids expose previously opaque judgments?
Leverage granular administrative and sensor data for quasi-experimental questions.
Example: Do real-time stress biomarkers predict subsequent discretionary-decision errors more accurately than self-report fatigue scales among leaders?
Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247–271.
Foundational work on moving beyond gap-spotting to assumption-challenging research questions.
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532–550.
Essential guide for inductive, case-driven research question development.
Whetten, D. A. (1989). What constitutes a theoretical contribution? Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 490–495.
Framework for evaluating theoretical contributions using what, how, why, and when criteria.
Davis, M. S. (1971). That's interesting! Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 309–344.
Classic work on what makes research findings "interesting" versus obvious or absurd.
Schwarz, G. M., & Stensaker, I. G. (2024). A roadmap for navigating phenomenon-based research in management. Journal of Management, 50(2), 443–463.
Contemporary framework for phenomenon-driven inquiry approaches.
Banks, G. C., McCauley, K. D., Gardner, W. L., & Guler, C. E. (2016). A meta‑analytic review of authentic and transformational leadership: A test for redundancy. Leadership Quarterly, 27(4), 634–652.
Meta-analysis demonstrating established relationships in transformational leadership research.
Edmondson, A. C., & McManus, S. E. (2007). Methodological fit in management field research. Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1155–1179.
Framework for aligning research questions with appropriate methodological approaches.
Yin, R. K. (2017). Case study research and applications (6th ed.). Sage.
Comprehensive guide to case study methodology and research design considerations.
💡 These references provide both theoretical foundations and practical guidance for implementing the research question generation strategies outlined above. Consider reading them in order to build a comprehensive understanding of advanced research methodology.
⚠️ Critical Warning: Formulating an incisive research question is deceptively difficult. The following nine pitfalls can significantly weaken a dissertation's contribution and merit careful attention during question development.
Poor Example: "Does transformational leadership enhance follower job satisfaction?"
This question can be answered by any recent 🔗meta-analysis. A frequent miscalculation is proposing a question whose answer can be inferred from a competent synthesis of existing studies, essentially turning empirical work into an unnecessary replication of well‑documented effects. When your research merely reconfirms a consensus, you may want to rethink whether it your research questions worth pursuing.
Better Approach: Interrogate boundary conditions, when or for whom transformational behaviors cease to produce job satisfaction, thereby advancing nuance rather than redundancy.
Poor Example: "How does stress influence performance?" (with "leader" appended later)
Without a leadership-centric mechanism (hierarchical power, role modeling, follower attributions), the inquiry risks drifting into generic psychology.
Better Approach: "How do school principals transmit their acute stress to teachers during crisis briefings, and with what consequences for collective efficacy?"
Asking whether followers perceive a leader as humble or inclusive, then stopping there. Perception measures provide useful snapshots, but alone reveal little of the how, why, when, or for whom that theory demands (Edmondson & McManus, 2007).
Better Approach: "How do moments of leader humility during post-error learning sessions alter subsequent psychological safety over the next three project sprints, and how is this contingent on team power-distance orientation?"
Poor Example: "How does the district’s new Data‑Driven Coaching initiative [replace it with any initiative] influence math scores [or replace it with any performance metrics, e.g., student achievement, graduate rate, etc.]?"
Because the phenomenon, intervention, and outcome are tightly coupled to a unique context, answers become obsolete the moment you move elsewhere. Such situational idiosyncrasy undermines external validity, limits theoretical leverage, and thwarts cumulative science.
Ready access to archival databases or survey panels tempts students to retrofit theory to whatever variables are already measured. This data-driven opportunism can yield questions of scant theoretical or practical weight.
Better Approach: Begin with a puzzle grounded in practice or theory, then identify the appropriate data, even if collection is more challenging, to answer it.
Students who favor a methodological comfort zone sometimes shrink their question so that a cross-sectional survey or case study suffices. Yet many leadership dynamics (identity construction, micro-political influence) unfold longitudinally and require mixed or qualitative designs.
Better Approach: Let the research question drive methodological choices, not the reverse. An overly narrow question may strip the phenomenon of temporal richness and undermines claims about causality.
Poor Example: "What personality traits predict ethical leadership?" (presupposes stable dispositions)
Many dissertations inherit dominant assumptions, such as individualism, rationality, leader centrality, without considering alternative ontologies.
Better Approach: "How do organizational scripts enable or constrain ethical enactment?" This shifts attention from traits to context.
Poor Example: "Why are our new principals failing to use the learning-management system?" (diagnostic, not theoretical)
Students often conflate managerial pain points with scholarly puzzles. The managerial issue should catalyze, but not substitute for, a theoretical puzzle.
Better Approach: "How does digital self-efficacy mediate the relationship between role transition stress and technology adoption among novice principals?"
Poor Example: "Does remote leadership improve employee autonomy?" (binary formulation)
Binary formulations invite simplistic hypothesis testing and rarely yield nuanced explanations.
Better Approach: "Through which social-identity mechanisms does remote leadership reshape talent identification, and under what conditions does this increase employee autonomy?"
Avoiding these pitfalls requires deliberate attention to theoretical grounding, methodological fit, and the balance between practical relevance and scholarly contribution. The strongest dissertation questions emerge from deep engagement with both theory and practice, and challenge assumptions while maintaining rigorous theoretical coherence.
After reviewing these strategies and pitfalls, select 2-3 approaches that align with your research interests and current project stage. Begin by documenting assumptions in your area of interest, then systematically apply your chosen strategies to generate multiple potential research questions before narrowing to your final inquiry.