Re-state the research topic, research goal, and research questions
o Re-state your findings in brief
o Now bring in the literature from your Introduction and other literature that helps you make sense of your findings, *in relation to your research question* (always stay close to your RQ! Don’t write anything in your discussion that may well be interesting but that is unrelated to your RQ)
o Try to structure your conclusions in the following ways –
§ Contribution (sometimes also called “Implications”) to Theory: This means nothing more than, how do your findings and conclusions help us understand the topics better that you have presented to us in the Introduction. For example, can you now formulate a new rule for how women can become successful leaders? Can you now argue that another factor needs to be considered when researchers discuss managing change during Mergers and Acquisitions?
§ Contribution to Practice: This is a related topic, but there is a subtle and important difference here: how can your conclusions help managers and leaders in organisations who have *concrete* business problems and who would like to apply your research in their work? For example, what additional steps can managers take now when planning out a new series of AVIs? How should managers approach this task? What should they remember? How should they go about implementing your conclusions in practice? Essentially, in this section you also need to create valid and reliable insights, but we are less concerned about how this extends the literature on this topic, and instead we want you to articulate clearly how your work helps organisations manage people better.
§ Limitations: of your research method / your particular approach in answering your RQ / of the sample you used / of your sampling method / of the scope of your work in relation to how much time you had – and most importantly, add in this section what you would do differently next time.
· Be as critical as you can be, whilst not ‘dissing’ your work completely. Here you have a great opportunity to demonstrate that you now have learned a great deal about how to conduct scientific research that is capable of generating valid and reliable results, independent of the quality of the data you collected. The less defensive and more learning-oriented you are here, the better. We want you to become a critical thinker and a reflective practitioner; this is your big opportunity to show off your skills in this area!
§ Follow-up research opportunities: if you can, formulate related RQs that follow on from your work, i.e. suggest where there are still open questions that future researchers can help answer, and outline how they should approach this task.
