Engaged scholarship, as described in the focal article (Voss et al., Reference Voss, Stoffregen, Couture, DiGirolamo, Furman, Haidar, Hammer, Lee, Maneotis, McCloy, Olson and Spector2025), offers a compelling vision for bridging the persistent gap between academic research and organizational practice in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. This model aspires to foster collaborative partnerships between scholars and practitioners, generating research that is not only scientifically rigorous but also practically relevant. At the risk of sounding immodest, the working relationship between Jay, a tenured midcareer academic at an R1 university, and I a practitioner recently recognized with Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award—exemplifies the potential of engaged scholarship. Over the past decade, we coauthored numerous papers landing in some of I-O’s top journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and the International Journal of Selection and Assessment. These papers have all the markings of engaged scholarship—they were written by a mixed team of academics and practitioners, addressed pressing organizational challenges, were grounded in real-world data, and balanced academic rigor with managerial relevance.
Yet, although we have benefited directly from engaged scholarship, the two of us remain deeply skeptical about the generalizability and long-term feasibility of the engaged scholarship model. As we see it, the core issue is an underlying problem of a profound misalignment of incentives across the academic–practice divide that conspire to undermine successful collaboration. These diverging incentives, which seem to grow further apart each year, present fundamental obstacles that often derail promising partnerships before they can bear fruit. Decades ago, Steven Kerr’s (Reference Kerr1975) classic essay, “The Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” highlighted how misaligned incentives can thwart even the best-intentioned efforts. The same principle applies to the scientist–practitioner gap. Unless incentive misalignments are recognized and addressed at the university, organization, and field level, the promise of engaged scholarship will remain unfulfilled. Our goal in this response is to deepen the conversation initiated in the focal article by identifying several incentive-based barriers we have observed over the year and illuminating areas where we believe targeted reforms could create the conditions necessary for engaged scholarship to thrive.
Misaligned incentives that hinder practitioner collaboration
Practitioners face significant challenges in research collaborations. Chief among these are time and resource constraints. Organizations prioritize short-term deliverables and immediate results, which results in long-term research initiatives being relegated to the domain of interesting but ultimately unnecessary and expendable luxuries. Even when practitioners value collaboration, managers often view such efforts as peripheral to core objectives and are reluctant to allocate time or resources to projects with uncertain payoffs. Organizations also prefer leveraging research for marketing or operational goals as soon as possible, which clashes with academics who prefer maintaining confidentiality until publication. The lengthy academic review process, with its high likelihood of rejection, can further discourage organizational buy-in.
Data ownership and permissions present another significant hurdle on the other end of the time spectrum. Sensitive organizational data are essential for many research projects. Yet, gaining approval involves navigating legal teams, governance boards, and other stakeholders, often resulting in prolonged delays. Worse, permissions can be (and to our great frustration often are) revoked mid-project, derailing research efforts. In one such instance, nearly 2 years into a project with a partner organization, a newly formed data advisory board attempted to block the paper’s publication over understandable but ultimately misguided concerns that the organization’s identity might get associated with the study data or results (substantial steps had already been taken to ensure the risk of the partner organization being named were minimum at best), resulting in the paper progress coming to an abrupt stop despite it already having advanced all the way to the conditional acceptance stage.
Risk aversion further complicates these collaborations. Organizations fear publishing findings might expose vulnerabilities and legal risks or result in competitive disadvantages. Even favorable results risk treatement by the organization as proprietary strategic insights. Meanwhile, academic reviewers at top journals (again understandably) demand extensive transparency, sometimes requesting data irrelevant to the research’s core questions, creating conflicts between methodological rigor and organizational privacy. Legal teams are often likely to reject such demands, leaving practitioners hesitant to engage in partnerships fraught with potential liabilities. Without clear policies and processes to address these tensions, organizations will continue to view external collaborations as high-risk endeavors, limiting opportunities for impactful, practice-relevant research.
Academic incentives and barriers to practice-oriented research
Academics face their own set of challenges when attempting to engage in practice-oriented research, many of which are again rooted in the incentives foundational to the academic reward structure. For instance, top academic journals overwhelmingly prioritize theoretical novelty, often at the expense of practical relevance. As the focal article notes, emphasizing theoretical contributions marginalizes research with immediate utility for practitioners. The widely cited adage taught to academics, “Nothing is so practical as a good theory” (Van de Ven, Reference Van de Ven1989), suggests practical impact naturally follows theoretical advancement. Yet, although theoretically sound research is undoubtedly valuable in its own right, this perspective inadvertently devalues phenomenon-focused studies that help identify and problematize real-world organizational issues for future academic study. As a result, research designed to bring a foundational understanding of the nature of complex organizational challenges without immediately explaining the “why” of the phenomenon is often relegated to lower tier journals. This creates a disincentive for academics to pursue studies that could illuminate pressing practitioner concerns until they fully understand the phenomenon in question (which is often well past the time when study of the phenomenon could benefit organizations). This structural bias limits the scope of academic inquiry and alienates practitioners seeking actionable, evidence-based solutions.
Strict requirements of methodological rigor in top journals add another layer of complexity. Although, again, necessary for scientific integrity, the methodological standards demanded by top journals are often incompatible with the messy realities of organizational data. Institutional pressures exacerbate these challenges. Promotion and tenure (P&T) systems remain deeply entrenched in traditional metrics, such as citation counts and publications in a select list of high-impact journals. These criteria often discourage academics, particularly those housed in business schools, from prioritizing research with practical applications, as such work may not align with institutional expectations. Collaborating with practitioners also demands additional time and effort, particularly when practitioners are unfamiliar with the academic publishing process. These dynamics reinforce a system that rewards insular scholarship while marginalizing broader, practice-relevant contributions.
Ideas for actionable reforms to bridge the science–practice gap
It is one thing to recognize that a problem exists. It is another to try and fix it. Still, if our field is to overcome incentive gaps and realize the promise of engaged scholarship, systemic reforms are necessary across academia, organizations, and journal publishing practices. Addressing the structural misalignments outlined earlier requires intentional changes to incentive systems, research priorities, and organizational processes. In this section, we propose ideas for how existing incentive structures within each domain can be modified to benefit scientist–practitioner collaboration and facilitate a more practically grounded science and higher functioning organizations.
Ideas for reforming university-level incentives to support practical impact
Universities play a pivotal role in developing incentive systems for fostering practice-oriented research. For instance, university decision-makers might consider establishing internal grants for projects demonstrating meaningful collaboration with practitioners. These grants could prioritize studies that translate theoretical research into actionable solutions or focus on phenomenon-centric research to understand pressing organizational challenges. Through targeted funding, universities can create a supportive environment where faculty feel encouraged to pursue practice-oriented work without compromising their ability to meet traditional academic benchmarks. Clear criteria for these grants could include collaborative outputs, practitioner involvement, and potential for real-world application, signaling a shift in what is valued.
Fellowship programs are another potentially transformative tool for fostering greater integration between academics and practitioners. Such an initiative might allow practitioners with a strong academic orientation to spend time within university settings, where they can contribute to research design and pedagogy (and potentially even teach a class or two). Concurrently, academics could embed within organizations to conduct fieldwork and gain first-hand exposure to the complexities of real-world constraints. These exchanges would cultivate mutual understanding and establish a pipeline of individuals adept at navigating academic rigor and organizational imperatives, thereby bridging the science–practice divide effectively.
Finally, one of the most impactful reforms universities could adopt is the inclusion of practical impact metrics in promotion and tenure evaluations. Although traditional metrics like external funding, journal impact factors, and citation counts remain important to evaluating scholarly impact and reputation, they often fail to capture the full spectrum of an academic’s contributions to practice. Institutions looking to maximize real-world impact should explore a more holistic evaluation of faculty achievements by recognizing evidence of organizational change associated with scholarship. Allowing, or even requiring, endorsements from practitioners as part of a promotion and tenure dossier could provide an additional valuable perspective on how an academic’s research has supported real-world work and contributed to organizational outcomes. Such reforms would directly incentivize scholars to prioritize research that delivers meaningful, real-world benefits while maintaining academic rigor.
Building organizational capacity for collaborative research
Another way to encourage scientific–practitioner collaborations is to deputize practitioners trained in I-O psychology to act as liaisons between organizations and academics. These individuals are uniquely positioned to advocate for the value of scientific contributions to skeptical internal stakeholders. Perhaps even more importantly, managers who recognize the long-term value of engaged scholarship should proactively help carve out time and space for their direct reports to participate in research partnerships and reward their efforts in performance evaluations. This alignment would strengthen the organizational infrastructure needed to sustain partnerships.
Professional organizations like SIOP can also help reduce barriers to collaboration by developing standardized templates for data-sharing agreements that address common concerns about confidentiality and data usage. These templates would provide organizations with greater clarity and security, facilitating quicker negotiations and smoother partnerships. Additionally, SIOP could be useful in establishing research incubators that bring academics and practitioners together to co-design studies and offer resources like access to data, logistical support, and mentorship for academics inexperienced in practice-focused research. As a proof of concept, a recent collaboration between HireVue and graduate students at Central Michigan University allowed students access to real-world data for academic development while providing actionable insights to the organization. Such initiatives offer organizations low-cost, tailored research relevant to organizational problems while giving academics and students practical experience and publication opportunities, fostering innovation and mutual benefit.
Transforming journal practices and professional recognition
Academic journals will also play a pivotal role in addressing the incentive gap in several ways. One persistent challenge in academic–practitioner collaborations is balancing the transparency required for methodological rigor with the privacy concerns of organizations. To mitigate this, journals could consider adopting formal processes for allowing sensitive data to be shared privately with editors and reviewers during peer review without requiring public disclosure. Indeed, in another one of our collaborations, an impasse arose between our need to respond to reviewer requests for data transparency while also adhering to the organization’s confidentiality constraints. In this case, sharing data privately with the editor and in the response letter to establish the veracity of a claim, but ommiting those analyses from the manuscript in the interest of individual and organizational privacy was enough satisfy both parties, allowing the paper to proceed. Standardized protocols for such practices could foster greater trust and participation from practitioners while upholding academic standards.
Journals could also create dedicated sections or special issues for phenomenon-centric research. These initiatives would prioritize studies that illuminate emerging organizational challenges, even if they do not fully address theoretical questions. A great example of this was the recent special issue in Personnel Psychology on lessons from machine learning highlights how practitioner input can guide meaningful academic exploration (Campion & Campion, Reference Campion and Campion2023). This model could include forums in outlets like IOP, where practitioners present data on pressing organizational problems to the science, creating a marketplace of ideas where academics engage with these phenomena to develop actionable solutions.
Finally, professional organizations like SIOP should amplify the visibility of bridging awards that celebrate exemplary academic–practitioner partnerships. If adequately funded and widely publicized, these awards could inspire others to pursue similar collaborations, demonstrating their value in advancing both science and practice. Together, such reforms could help transform journal practices into a catalyst for engaged scholarship, addressing critical barriers while fostering innovation and collaboration across the field..
Conclusion
Engaged scholarship holds tremendous promise, but its success depends on addressing the systemic barriers that hinder collaboration. By reforming academic incentives, revising journal publishing practices, and fostering organizational support, we can create an ecosystem that values and facilitates meaningful partnerships. Our experience demonstrates that such collaborations can be both possible and immensely rewarding. However, realizing the full potential of engaged scholarship requires collective action and a commitment to bridging the gap between science and practice. The future of impactful, practice-relevant research depends on it.
