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Using Outliers for Theory Building

  • Gibbert, Michael Facoltà di scienze della comunicazione, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
  • Nair, Lakshmi Balachandran ORCID Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands
  • Weiss, Matthias Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Transformation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany
  • Hoegl, Martin Institute for Leadership and Organization, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
  • 2020-1-10
Published in:
  • Organizational Research Methods. - SAGE Publications. - 2020, p. 109442811989887
Management of Technology and Innovation
Strategy and Management
General Decision Sciences
English Outliers are promising candidates for theory building because they defy expected cause-and-effect relationships. Nonetheless, researchers often treat them as a nuisance and exclude them from further study. In fact, our analysis founds only two article using outliers for theory development in all quantitative articles published from 1993 to 2012 in six major management journals, and less than 5% cared to even mention them (relaying reasons for deleting them, mostly). To rectify this, we provide a roadmap for empirical researchers interested in theory building.
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  • English
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bronze
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https://sonar.ch/global/documents/63033
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