In line with Al-Atwi, The transformation of your managerial or theoretical issue(s) or both into a question is your Research Question.
whereas, research objective is your approach towards that issues.
To achieve your research objective positivist mostly develop hypothesis. by testing the hypothesis your are actually achieving your objective which intern answer your research question. Research question, Research Objective, and Research hypothesis must be inline.
For example
A managerial and theoretical issue was found in literature that Pakistani manufacturing SMEs performance is not that satisfactory. After exploring it was further found that entrepreneur skills is a crucial influencing factors toward the success of manufacturing SMEs. To address this issues we develop our research question.
Is there any relationship between entrepreneur skills and Pakistani manufacturing SMEs?
Research Objective
To identify the relationship between entrepreneur skills and Pakistani manufacturing SMEs.
Hypothesis, based on literature as mentioned before
H1: There is a relationship between entrepreneur skills and Pakistani manufacturing SMEs.
The research question is to broad, but just for the sack of understanding,
Research question is actually what a researcher is seeking in the study. It is very much related to a research topic which is kind of a managers dilema why certain issues are the way they are. A research objective is what the researcher anticipates to discover after posing the research question. A research objective most of the time is either a negative or positive while a research question just enables the researcher to pursue to find out what results he/she may get after conducting the study.
If you read the below mentioned book you can get clear idea about the difference between these two concepts. Not only that deep ideas about some key concepts of a research can be seen. "Research methods for Business " . author ; Uma Sekeran and Roger Bougie" .
Research Objectives are broad and encompasses the reasons behind you research willingness into any particular arena or subject. On the other hand Research Questions refers to what outcome or findings the researcher is looking for in his/her research objectives.