Moving from Ideas to a Theoretical Contribution: Comments on the Process of Developing Theory in Organizational Research‪.‬

INTRODUCTION The topic of theory development remains an ongoing area of interest and debate among management scholars. The Academy of Management Review has dedicated two special issues to the topic, (in 1989 and 1999), and has continued to address the topic through the "Editor's Comments" series. Administrative Science Quarterly has too offered a special forum on theory building in 1995. These are valuable resources that can help authors develop a better understanding of how the field of management defines theoretical contribution. In a recent article tided "Building Theory about Theory Building" Corley and Gioia (2011, p. 18) survey the discussions of the issue and conclude, "The upshot of our synthesis of the literature, then, is the recognition that the current state of the art for developing conceptual papers that are deemed to provide a theoretical contribution rests in a scholar's ability to produce thinking that is original (and especially revelatory or surprising) in its insight and useful (preferably in a scientific manner) in its application." Although a paper, and several earlier contributions on the topic of what theory and/or good theory is (see Bacharach 1989; Whetten 1989; Kilduff 2006) focus on the development of theory papers, they nevertheless provide very useful guidance about what constitutes a "value-added" theoretical contribution in both theoretical and empirical papers.