How to Design a New and Original Research Model? (Updated and Edited)

Designing a new, publishable research model starts with finding credible gaps in existing scholarship—and then turning those gaps into new variables, relationships, mediators, and moderators. Getting this step wrong leads to work that journals won’t accept, because the study ends up duplicating what’s already been done or failing to add anything testable. The practical workflow begins by searching recent, high-quality peer-reviewed outlets and databases (such as Emerald, Sage, Springer, ScienceDirect, and Taylor & Francis) and extracting two kinds of gaps: explicit gaps named in “limitations” and “future research” sections, and implicit gaps that appear when a topic is under-studied in a relevant context.

A common example used is servant leadership research. After reviewing many papers, the literature may reveal that servant leadership has little coverage in public sector organizations—an observation that becomes a documented gap and later shapes the introduction. From there, the process shifts from “finding” to “organizing”: documenting the search strategy (including search strings and justification), tracking what was found, and building a critical literature view so future searches don’t repeat unproductive paths. For systematic literature reviews, documenting the search process becomes especially important because it supports transparency and replicability.

To draft a strong introduction, the method emphasizes storing structured information from each paper in a dedicated spreadsheet (the transcript suggests using an Excel sheet). For every paper, the researcher should capture: the title and study area, the value/importance of the topic, what existing research says, the specific gaps and limitations the paper addresses, the theory used, the paper’s contributions, and the limitations that can be improved in future work. This stored material then becomes the raw material for writing an introduction that doesn’t recycle others’ work.

The transcript then demonstrates how a “new model” can be built even when no original model exists yet. Starting with a recent paper—“Impact of servant leadership and transformational leadership on learning organization: a comparative analysis” (accepted January 2, 2020)—the limitations and future directions suggest adding organizational culture as a moderating variable between leadership and learning organization. The model becomes more publishable by introducing new constructs and relationships rather than only changing the country context (e.g., moving from one nation to another without adding conceptual novelty).

To avoid the risk of being beaten to publication by someone else using the same gap, the approach recommends pulling gaps from multiple sources. A second paper’s future directions may point to additional mediators beyond career satisfaction—such as self-efficacy, promotion focus, career commitment, work-life balance, work-life enrichment, job stress, and employee well-being. Incorporating career commitment as an additional outcome and positioning organizational learning as a mediator yields a more complex, more distinctive framework.

Finally, the transcript shows how additional papers can expand the model further. By mining a review of empirical research on leadership and organizational learning (published May 2020) and another study linking organizational learning capacity to innovation outcomes, the model can incorporate variables like market orientation and organizational innovation. After combining insights from several recent papers, the result is a substantially revised, testable research model—built from documented gaps, supported by theory, and shaped into an introduction using the spreadsheet as a guide.