✔ The importance of the research.

✔ The meaning of the research work.

✔ How the research benefits or impacts others in part or whole.

✔ What people or groups of people might benefit from reading the research.

• Impactful research must address issues of practical concern.

• One simple way to find out if your topic is meaningful is to do a quick online  scan to see if your topic represents one of the current research trends or top concerns in the world of practice. If you receive a large number of results, you know you may face a bigger challenge to “build your case.”

• However, if you get few or no hits, you might want to redress your decision to proceed why your topic has not received much attention.

• Another way that may help you determine the significance of your topic is to look at pop literature. For example, "Deloitte has conducted an annual global human capital trends survey since 2013. Each survey has led to a list of human resource (HR) trends identified by leaders across the world. These trends represent concerns that matter most to businesses and industries and shed light on critical issues for future research."

• Is there any knowledge gaps related to your research topic?

• This is when you decide what subject matters or aspects of your topic have been well studied, inadequately studied, or not studied at all. For example, “employee  engagement” is a hot topic that has received a lot of scholarly attention in recent years.

• However, different authors have looked at this concept from different angles. Some studied antecedents of engagement, some explored engagement outcomes, and some looked at the opposite side of engagement - disengagement.

• By building a holistic understanding of the literature on your topic area, you will be able to see what dimensions of the concept have been studied, and therefore, identify areas that warrant further investigation.

It is about... 

• How the study push the boundary of knowledge.

• Any theory/model/concept is developed from the research?

• Any shortcoming from previous theory/model & the research has successfully overcome it? 

• Any new relationship is found? (i.e. third variable that alter the relations of between two variables in the theoretical framework). 

• This question deals with the theoretical underpinning of a research study. In other words, what theories or theoretical frameworks have been used to guide the research on your topic? Answers to this question can be very helpful not only in testing the rigor of existing theories, but more importantly, in building new theories.

• A review of work–life balance literature, you may find that most previous studies on this issue were guided by career theories.

• However, few studies looked at this issue through a cultural lens - whether national or institutional culture has a direct impact on work–life balance. If this is the case, a study of work–life balance from a cultural perspective is likely to generate new insights.

• How has your selected topic been studied by other researchers? This question consists of two aspects: research design (methodology) and research methods (techniques used for data collection and analysis).

• For example, in your review of literature, you may find quantitative approaches have dominated the study of your topic, or you may find a lack of diverse methods used for data collection or analysis.

• In addition, you may find your topic has been primarily investigated conceptually, not empirically.

• Another element is research sampling in terms of the context and population, if you find most of the studies on your topic focus on business professionals in the U.S. corporations, or male professionals, with little attention to professionals in other occupations or countries, or career women.

• To answer this question, you need to analyze findings from various studies on your topic. Most studies on workplace incivility focus on the causes and consequences of workplace incivility.

• However, very few studies revealed strategies to prevent the occurrence of uncivil incidents, or strategies to minimize the impact of negative experiences. Furthermore, it is widely recognized that incivility can be triggered by power distance, meaning, people in power tend to demonstrate uncivil behaviors to people with less power.

• Therefore, many incivility studies have focused on subordinates being treated uncivilly by their supervisors; very few scholars have looked at this phenomenon from other perspectives, for example, what is a supervisor’s experience of being mistreated by his or her subordinates? What is a faculty’s experience of being mobbed by a group of students?

Wang, J. (2019). Enhancing Research Significance by Addressing “Why”. Human Resource Development Review, 18(3), 291-293. doi:10.1177/1534484319867803 (Click Here)