Qualifiers are defined as empirical

Qualifiers are defined as empirical articles that
contain moderate levels of both theory testing and
theory building. Such articles qualify previously
established relationships or processes using conceptual
arguments rooted in the extant literature.
An exemplar of this category is Skarlicki, Folger,
and Tesluk’s (1999) examination of personality as a
moderator of the relationship between organizational
justice and counterproductive behaviors. The authors
showed that the justice-counterproductive
behavior link could be qualified by negative affectivity
and agreeableness and supported those findings
using conceptual arguments from the personality
literature. Another article falling into the
qualifier category is Nohria and Gulati (1996); these
authors further examined the relationship between
slack resources and organizational innovation. Responding
to the conflicting findings of past research,
they showed that the slack-innovation relationship
was actually curvilinear, with innovation
being hindered by either too little slack or too much
slack.