Academic engagement and faculty participation in higher education strategy-making: evidence from Colombia

1 Introduction

Higher education institutions are undergoing a profound transformation in the ways they produce knowledge, engage with external actors, and define strategic priorities. This transformation is not limited to demonstrating scientific productivity, improving knowledge transfer indicators, or expanding university–industry links; it also requires universities to convert knowledge into organizational capacity to respond to social, organizational, productive, and territorial challenges. In this context, science–industry relations have moved beyond approaches centered on research management toward broader architectures of innovation, intermediation, and knowledge mobilization, in which universities coordinate distributed capacities and translate external problems into academically relevant agendas (Yström et al., 2025). The key issue, therefore, is not only whether universities intensify their interaction with external environments, but also how such interaction feeds back into the institution and strengthens internal processes of learning, deliberation, and strategy-making.

Within this debate, academic engagement (AE) offers a particularly useful lens for analyzing forms of interaction that are not reducible to formal mechanisms of technology commercialization. Unlike patents, licenses, or spin-offs, academic engagement encompasses collaborative research, contract research, consulting, specialized training, technical advice, and participation in professional networks through which faculty members mobilize knowledge in concrete contexts of use (Perkmann et al., 2013). This distinction is important because it frames external collaboration as a relational practice rather than as a linear transfer of research outputs. Faculty members do not simply provide knowledge that has already been produced; they also encounter problems, constraints, languages, expectations, and criteria of usefulness that can reshape their research agendas (Rossi et al., 2017). Academic engagement should therefore not be treated as peripheral to teaching and research but as a form of knowledge coproduction through which universities expand their capacity to generate public value (Perkmann et al., 2021).

Recent research shows that academic engagement can generate academic benefits when external interactions are aligned with research trajectories of faculty members. Nast et al. (2025) argue that such interactions may strengthen scientific impact by providing access to relevant problems, difficult-to-obtain data, technical capacities, and empirical validation settings. Similarly, university–industry collaboration can produce multidimensional impacts, combining tangible and intangible, direct and indirect, academic, organizational, and social effects that cannot be captured by a single indicator (Cohen et al., 2025). Evidence from Colombian university faculty also suggests that academic engagement can operate as a robust mechanism linking individual and institutional determinants with knowledge transfer and scientific productivity, thereby challenging the assumption that external collaboration necessarily competes with scientific production (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026a). However, this literature has largely examined the external outcomes of engagement, while its internal strategic implications for the university remain less understood.

This gap matters because faculty members who engage with external actors do not only connect the university with firms, public agencies, social organizations, or professional communities. They also accumulate situated knowledge about emerging needs, implementation constraints, technological demands, user expectations, innovation opportunities, and institutional capacities that may be relevant for university strategy-making (Scandura and Iammarino, 2022). From this perspective, academic engagement can become a source of individual learning (IL), as it exposes faculty members to languages, time horizons, incentives, and decision criteria that differ from those of the strictly academic field (Franco and Haase, 2015). It may also strengthen strategic awareness by helping faculty members interpret the distance between the university's internal capacities and the demands of its environment. The central question is therefore not only why faculty members collaborate with external actors, but under what conditions such collaboration supports their participation in university strategy-making.

The open strategy perspective provides a useful framework for addressing this question because it understands strategy as a process of openness, inclusion, and transparency rather than as an activity reserved for senior management teams (Whittington et al., 2011). This perspective is especially relevant in higher education, where universities are knowledge-intensive organizations shaped by academic autonomy, collegial governance, state regulation, financial constraints, and growing demands for social relevance (Hautz et al., 2017). Faculty participation in strategy cannot therefore be reduced to attending meetings, completing surveys, or validating plans that have already been formulated. It involves contributing situated knowledge to problem identification, priority setting, and the interpretation of institutional alternatives (Seidl et al., 2019). This distinction is important because recent studies show that faculty members, directors, and deans may differ in how they evaluate the costs, benefits, and actual influence of university strategic processes (Graves and Erickson, 2024). Faculty participation in strategic planning depends not only on the existence of formal spaces but also on faculty attitudes toward the process, their perceived influence, and the extent to which they believe their contributions are taken seriously (Thompson, 2017).

Accordingly, this article does not approach strategic planning as a formal document but examines strategy-making as a practice of formulating, deliberating, interpreting, and translating institutional priorities. Recent work on open strategy shows that strategic openness can generate tensions when participatory discourses coexist with conventional forms of authority, control, confidentiality, and managerial legitimacy (Langenmayr et al., 2024a). Research on inclusive and transparent strategizing further suggests that openness requires methods, channels, and organizational conditions that can turn participation into influence rather than symbolic consultation (Raaijmakers et al., 2025). These tensions are particularly relevant in universities, where strategic plans may become exercises in image, identity, or compliance if they do not orient actual decisions about resources, academic priorities, and institutional responsibilities (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2025). Studying faculty strategy participation (SP) therefore requires examining which forms of knowledge enter the strategic process and which are recognized as legitimate.

The institutional logics perspective complements this argument by showing that universities do not operate under a single rationality but within academic, professional, state, social, territorial, and market logics that coexist and compete with one another (Thornton et al., 2012). In university–industry collaboration, these logics may support knowledge openness, but they may also restrict it through concerns related to intellectual property, trust, competition, private appropriation, and academic reputation (Lattu and Cai, 2023). This ambivalence helps explain why academic engagement may be interpreted within the same institution as a legitimate extension of the university mission, a source of applied learning, a market pressure, or a peripheral activity when compared with traditional criteria of academic evaluation (Cai and Mountford, 2022). Organizational culture (OC) is therefore central because it shapes which practices are valued, which forms of external interaction are recognized, and which types of knowledge are allowed to enter strategic deliberation (Zhao et al., 2020).

University leadership is also central, although it should not be assumed to function as a linear or automatic enabler of strategic participation. Recent literature on leadership in higher education shows that the field combines traditionalist, reformist, and pragmatic perspectives, each of which carries different assumptions about authority, academic self-governance, inclusion, and change management (Macfarlane et al., 2024). In this context, organizational leadership (OL) may open deliberative spaces, recognize the external experience of faculty members, and channel situated knowledge into institutional decisions. However, it may also filter, formalize, or restrict the ways in which such experience becomes strategic influence. This interpretation is consistent with the study model, which treats organizational culture and organizational leadership as organizational conditions that may operate both as direct antecedents and as moderators of the relationships among individual learning, academic engagement, and strategy participation. Academic engagement is therefore conceptualized not as an isolated individual behavior but as a relational pathway conditioned by the institutional environment.

The Colombian context reinforces the relevance of this discussion. Universities in Colombia operate within a higher education system marked by institutional heterogeneity, territorial asymmetries in science, technology, and innovation, and growing demands for articulation with social, public, and productive actors. The performance of Colombian universities in research and knowledge mobilization varies depending on the indicators considered, particularly when publications, patents, and other products related to knowledge appropriation, circulation, or use are compared (Barra et al., 2024). Scientific and technological capacities are also territorially concentrated, which creates the need to strengthen regional knowledge ecosystems without reducing university–environment relations to linear models of transfer (Pinedo-López et al., 2025a). In this setting, academic engagement provides a useful way to examine how faculty members transform external interaction into learning, knowledge circulation, and strategic awareness, especially in institutions seeking to expand their public, territorial, and organizational contribution (Valencia-Arias et al., 2025).

Building on this problem, the present study examines whether academic engagement is associated with faculty participation in university strategy-making and analyzes the individual and organizational conditions that may strengthen or constrain this relationship. The proposed model includes access to in-kind resources (IA) and individual learning as individual-level antecedents because both capture conditions that may expand faculty members' capacity to interact with external actors and learn from such interaction (Marullo et al., 2021). It also includes faculty perceptions of organizational culture and organizational leadership as perceived organizational conditions, given their role in shaping the legitimacy, recognition, and internal translation of engagement (Bogale and Debela, 2024; Meyer and Tse, 2025). Finally, the model positions academic engagement as a relational pathway and strategy participation as a strategic outcome, with the aim of explaining how external interaction can become a source of deliberative, interpretive, and participatory capacity within the university.

Empirically, the study draws on survey data from 147 full-time faculty members at a Colombian higher education institution and estimates the proposed relationships using partial least squares structural equation modeling. This approach makes it possible to examine direct and moderating effects simultaneously in a model designed to explain how individual antecedents and organizational conditions are associated with academic engagement and strategy participation. The article makes three contributions. First, it shifts the understanding of academic engagement from its external outcomes toward its internal implications for university strategy-making. Second, it connects the open strategy and institutional logics perspectives to explain why faculty members' external experience becomes strategy participation only under specific organizational conditions. Third, it provides evidence from Colombia, a Latin American context in which universities face the dual challenge of strengthening external engagement and developing more open, situated, and academically meaningful institutional strategies.

2 Literature review

2.1 Open strategy in higher education

Open strategy theory makes it possible to understand university strategic planning as a deliberate process of opening the institutional conversation about the future, in which strategy is no longer treated as a matter reserved for small senior management groups but is shaped through greater transparency and the inclusion of internal and external actors (Whittington et al., 2011). In higher education, this perspective is especially relevant because universities are complex academic communities shaped by faculty autonomy, collegial governance, state regulation, quality assurance requirements, financial sustainability pressures, and growing expectations of social relevance. Accordingly, formulating strategy does not simply mean drafting a plan or defining institutional goals. It also involves creating the conditions for faculty, students, administrative staff, alumni, employers, territorial partners, and public agencies to recognize common problems, contribute situated information, and participate in the definition of legitimate, sustainable, and institutionally appropriable priorities that can guide academic strategic decisions over time (Hautz et al., 2017). This interpretation is also consistent with studies that examine strategic planning from the faculty perspective, showing that its appropriation depends on how academic actors understand, participate in, and value the institutional process (Al Basel and Osman, 2020).

The central contribution of open strategy lies in understanding strategic openness as the articulation of two interdependent dimensions: inclusion and transparency, rather than as instrumental participation or the unilateral disclosure of institutional information (Seidl et al., 2019). Inclusion refers both to the range of actors invited into the process and to their effective capacity to influence the definition of problems, alternatives, and strategic decisions (Raaijmakers et al., 2025). Transparency, in turn, requires that diagnoses, constraints, indicators, prioritization criteria, progress, and results be visible, understandable, and open to discussion among those participating in the process (Langenmayr et al., 2024a). In universities, these dimensions help distinguish merely consultative planning from genuinely open strategy, because participation acquires strategic value only when actors have recognizable roles, differentiated influence, and real capacity to affect institutional formulation and implementation (Falqueto et al., 2020). Surveys, workshops, or committees are therefore insufficient if they do not alter who interprets evidence, prioritizes issues, makes decisions, and remains accountable for their institutional consequences (Menon et al., 2026).

Open strategy in universities should not be confused with the simple expansion of consultative spaces, because openness becomes substantive only when it transforms the conditions under which actors can influence, interpret, and participate in decision-making within the strategic process. Recent literature shows that transparency and inclusion do not operate as isolated dimensions but as dynamic relationships in which shared information can modify the range of participants, their rights of intervention, and their strategic commitment (Cai and Canales, 2022). Along these lines, inclusion should not be justified only by its instrumental benefits but also by its capacity to problematize inequalities, asymmetries of voice, and power relations in strategy formulation (Langenmayr et al., 2024b). This distinction is crucial because formal participation may coexist with significant differences in how faculty members, directors, and deans perceive the value, influence, and appropriation of the strategic process (Graves and Erickson, 2024). Strategic plans should therefore be analyzed as devices whose effective openness depends on who interprets, decides, and responds for institutional consequences (Hall and Lulich, 2021).

Recent developments in open strategy allow strategic openness in universities to be understood as a practice of institutional governance oriented toward public value, legitimacy, and shared responsibility and not merely as a mechanism for socializing previously defined plans. In public organizations, openness depends on the strategic purpose, the subjects included, the community convened, the object under deliberation, and the practices that make it possible to transform participation into strategic orientation (Hansen et al., 2024). This perspective is relevant for higher education because universities perform public functions related to education, research, citizenship, social mobility, innovation, and territorial development, even when they are legally private institutions. Moreover, opening strategic processes to external participants may strengthen inclusion and transparency, but it also requires conditions for convening, guiding, and processing contributions in ways that prevent participation from becoming merely symbolic (Baartmans et al., 2025). University openness should therefore generate verifiable influence, community appropriation, and observable effects on priorities, resources, and institutional decisions that are actually implemented and evaluated (Graves and Erickson, 2024).

Open strategy also makes it possible to analyze university strategy-making as a field of discursive contestation, rather than as a linear movement toward institutional consensus. Open processes may intensify interdiscursive struggles when participatory discourse coexists with conventional languages of authority, control, confidentiality, and managerial legitimacy (Langenmayr et al., 2024a). In higher education, these tensions become more complex because university leadership combines traditions of academic self-governance, demands for democratic inclusion, and pragmatic pressures for effective management (Macfarlane et al., 2024). A faculty may defend curricular autonomy, while financial, regulatory, or quality assurance units impose criteria of feasibility, evidence, and institutional reputation. Indeed, university strategic plans may drift toward image work or organizational identity work rather than providing substantive strategic orientation for collective institutional action (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2025). For this reason, openness should avoid a consensual rhetoric that conceals legitimate conflicts over costs, trade-offs, beneficiaries, academic risks, and political responsibilities (Free and Garbuio, 2025).

Digital transformation adds further complexity to open strategy in universities because it changes the conditions under which strategic information is accessed, circulated, interpreted, and used. Digitalization does not merely involve the adoption of technologies; it also entails disruptions that require institutions to redefine processes, structures, and strategic responses (Vial, 2019). In universities, this transformation is expressed in institutional analytics, dashboards, collaborative platforms, repositories, and artificial intelligence, all of which may expand transparency but may also reorganize who produces evidence and who makes decisions based on it (Komljenovic et al., 2025). The datafication of teaching shows that educational data are not neutral, because they shape pedagogical practices, evaluation criteria, and forms of academic governance (Williamson et al., 2020). In addition, the behavioral visibility generated by digital technologies can increase the traceability of actions, while also intensifying surveillance, exposure, and power asymmetries (Leonardi and Treem, 2020). A digitally mediated open strategy must therefore ask who defines indicators, who interprets data, who decides, and who remains excluded from university deliberation.

Finally, open strategy helps evaluate the real appropriation of university strategy-making by shifting the analysis from the formal existence of a plan to its capacity to guide decisions, resources, and institutional practices. The effectiveness of planning cannot be assumed from the rhetorical quality of the document but depends on the existence of mechanisms that make it possible to assess whether its priorities are implemented, monitored, and translated into organizational learning (Howes, 2018). In universities, strategic plans may also be limited by institutional cultures that filter, reinterpret, or neutralize their formal orientations, especially when academic units do not recognize the plan as an effective guide for action (James-MacEachern and Derrick, 2020). At this point, institutional values play an articulating role because they connect organizational culture, strategic management, and strategic communication, preventing strategy from being reduced to a formal document disconnected from everyday practices (Allison, 2019). Strategic openness therefore requires rigorous management of internal and external stakeholders, capable of articulating participation, governance, innovation, social responsibility, and organizational change (Anholon et al., 2026). Participation is substantive only when it strengthens commitment, traceability, and shared institutional responsibility, rather than operating as symbolic consultation (Crocco et al., 2024).

2.2 The institutional logics perspective in higher education

The institutional logics perspective provides a contemporary framework for understanding university strategic planning as a process of translation, prioritization, and articulation among multiple rationalities, rather than as a homogeneous response to external pressures. Its central contribution is to show that organizations act within orders of meaning composed of material practices, values, beliefs, rules, and identities that define what is considered legitimate, appropriate, and desirable within a given organizational field (Thornton et al., 2012). In higher education, this perspective has become a relevant analytical tool for studying governance, organizational change, internationalization, research, quality assurance, and the university third mission, understood as the articulation of knowledge transfer, innovation, extension, social engagement, and interaction with external actors (Cai and Mountford, 2022). Recent debates also suggest that logics should be understood as relational configurations that connect, compete, overlap, and hybridize in concrete contexts of institutional complexity (Mountford and Cai, 2023).

This perspective is especially useful for studying contemporary universities because it explains how different rationalities become operational in decisions, controls, priorities, and governance arrangements without assuming a single institutional logic of action. In university contexts, middle managers play a decisive role by mobilizing control systems that translate state, professional, market, and cultural logics into concrete administrative and academic practices (Bui et al., 2025). Universities may also orient their behavior through logics centered on opportunity, access, and equity, particularly when they serve historically underrepresented populations and seek to expand educational trajectories (Núñez, 2025). In the financial domain, institutional logics help explain how certain budgeting practices persist even when they create tensions among efficiency, fiscal discipline, and academic priorities (Bertheussen, 2025). Moreover, institutional exploration may vary according to organizational status and the congruence between public and private logics (Kim et al., 2024). University strategic planning should therefore be understood as situated translation among concurrent rationalities.

The analytical strength of this perspective lies in its capacity to approach university strategic planning as a situated practice in which values, interests, and institutional routines are articulated contingently. This translation is especially visible in processes of institutional transformation, where middle managers interpret demands for change, confront historical hierarchies, and produce micro-actions capable of activating, modulating, or blocking broader transformations (Idahosa and Love, 2025). Similarly, university hybrid work policies show that institutions do not adopt digitalization as a purely technical solution but as an arrangement that combines academic autonomy, administrative coordination, digital infrastructure, and institutional control (Wilkesmann et al., 2025). Consequently, university strategy is not implemented mechanically from senior management. It is reinterpreted in faculties, programs, research centers, and administrative offices through everyday agreements about evidence, resources, responsibility, authority, and institutional priorities.

Recent literature in higher education has strengthened the institutional logics perspective as a tool for studying how universities differentiate themselves, undergo reform, and reorganize governance practices amid multiple rationalities. At the global level, the organizational characteristics of higher education institutions vary according to sector, historical trajectory, and dominant logics of academic structuring (Buckner and Zapp, 2021). In systems undergoing reform, public universities reinterpret new demands for governance, accountability, and strategic steering according to their internal arrangements of authority and institutional legitimacy (Urbanek, 2021). In university governance, university councils may incorporate external perspectives oriented toward social and economic relevance, although their effective influence on decision-making may remain limited (Antonowicz et al., 2024). Likewise, research support professionals do not necessarily displace academic norms but mediate among academic, professional, and market logics (de Jong and Kantimm, 2024). Finally, cost calculation devices show how administrative tools can become institutionalized between academic, financial, and managerial logics (Allain et al., 2024).

In terms of university governance, this perspective helps explain why strategic reforms are rarely implemented in a linear way, even when they adopt the language of modernization, innovation, collaboration, or sustainability. Universities may attempt to reconcile state, corporate, and market logics through personnel management reforms, but such reforms do not automatically eliminate tensions among regulation, academic autonomy, and organizational ambidexterity (Xia et al., 2024). Similarly, innovation in higher education may be conditioned by institutional dissonances that affect value cocreation among universities, students, communities, employers, and other actors in the service ecosystem (Chandler, 2025). In this sense, university strategy is not only designed by senior management, but filtered, negotiated, and reinterpreted through institutional arrangements in which expectations of public legitimacy, organizational adaptation, financial sustainability, and social contribution coexist.

The institutional logics perspective also helps explain how universities organize tensions among education, research, sustainability, entrepreneurship, and social responsibility. In business schools, the integration of courses associated with B Corp shows that curricular sustainability does not depend only on academic decisions but also on the coexistence of educational, social, professional, and market logics that shape what is taught, how it is legitimized, and to whom the institution responds (Lähteenkorva, 2025). Similarly, the transition toward sustainable entrepreneurial universities reveals tensions among logics of entrepreneurship, sustainability, impact, and institutional governance, especially when universities seek to respond simultaneously to economic, social, and environmental demands (Cai et al., 2025). University strategy should therefore not be understood as the simple alignment of objectives but as a practice of institutional composition through which different rationalities are translated into academic, curricular, reputational, and territorial priorities.

Research, innovation, and university–environment interaction constitute particularly fertile fields for analyzing logical configurations in tension. Open science practices in university–industry collaboration are shaped by state, market, corporate, professional, and community logics, some of which facilitate the openness of knowledge, while others restrict it because of concerns related to ownership, trust, competition, or private appropriation (Lattu and Cai, 2023). This interpretation makes it possible to understand that knowledge transfer cannot be reduced to technical capacities, innovation offices, or contractual incentives. It depends on how actors interpret openness, protection, social usefulness, and the economic value of knowledge. University strategic planning should therefore recognize that applied research, innovation, open science, and cooperation with external actors may produce substantive collaboration but also tensions among public mission, academic reputation, business interests, and institutional sustainability.

The third mission and engagement with the environment can also be understood as differentiated expressions of competing institutional logics. European universities show diverse profiles of external interaction, in which forms of engagement depend on institutional characteristics and environmental conditions, confirming that the university–society relationship does not follow a single organizational trajectory (Meerman and Davey, 2025). Entrepreneurial universities are also not homogeneous, as they may differ according to market orientation, institutional autonomy, strategic intention, and the capacity to articulate academic functions with entrepreneurship and innovation activities (Löfsten, 2025). In this sense, the third mission should not be treated as a peripheral extension of teaching and research but as a strategic space in which universities define the type of public, productive, territorial, or social contribution they are willing to prioritize in their institutional project.

In summary, recent studies strengthen the argument that university strategic planning should be analyzed as a practice of translation among multiple logics, rather than as the neutral execution of a formal plan. Personnel reforms reveal tensions among state regulation, corporate management, and university ambidexterity (Xia et al., 2024). Innovation shows institutional dissonances that affect value cocreation in higher education (Chandler, 2025). Curricular sustainability reveals the coexistence of educational, social, and market logics (Lähteenkorva, 2025). Open science shows tensions among openness, ownership, trust, and university–industry collaboration (Lattu and Cai, 2023). Finally, studies on engaged and entrepreneurial universities show that institutions do not interact with their environments in only one way but through differentiated strategic profiles (Löfsten, 2025; Meerman and Davey, 2025).

2.3 Academic engagement in university–industry collaboration

Academic engagement can be understood as a relational modality of academic work through which university faculty connect their scientific capacities with problems, actors, and contexts of use located beyond the strictly disciplinary community. Its specificity lies in the fact that it is not limited to formal mechanisms of technology transfer, such as patents, licenses, or spin-offs, but unfolds through collaborative research, contract research, consulting, specialized training, and participation in professional or sectoral networks (Perkmann et al., 2013). This variety of channels confirms that university–industry links do not follow a single mode of interaction, but rather diverse combinations of research, consulting, mobility, specialized services, and applied collaboration (D'Este and Patel, 2007). This distinction shifts the analysis from the formal appropriation of knowledge toward the processes through which knowledge is interpreted, adapted, negotiated, and made useful in concrete contexts, particularly when addressing public, productive, or territorial problems.

Academic engagement is therefore not a marginal or merely complementary activity but a practice through which universities update their public mission and turn research into a socially mobilizable resource (Perkmann et al., 2021). This interpretation is also consistent with the literature on open innovation in Colombian contexts, where relationships with external actors become valuable when they provide access to specialized knowledge, complementary capacities, and opportunities for applied learning. Evidence on Colombian small and medium-sized enterprises shows that universities can act as relevant partners within innovation ecosystems, insofar as they contribute scientific knowledge, technical capacities, talent, and methodological support to address problems that firms would find difficult to solve using only internal resources (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026b). External collaboration thus becomes a way to translate academic capacities into situated, socially relevant solutions connected to real needs in the environment.

From this perspective, academic engagement should not be understood as a simple transfer from the university to the environment but as a bidirectional process of interaction in which knowledge is transformed as it circulates among heterogeneous actors. Researchers do not only provide previously stabilized results; they also receive problems, constraints, languages, and expectations that can modify their research questions, methods, and criteria of relevance. In this sense, collaboration with firms, public agencies, and social organizations allows academic knowledge to be coproduced and adjusted to specific conditions of application (Rossi et al., 2017). The results of these interactions may take the form of technical reports, diagnoses, prototypes, databases, decision instruments, training programs, policy recommendations, and scientific publications. This breadth shows that academic impact is not exhausted by publication or commercialization but includes intermediate forms of social, organizational, and territorial value (Mascarenhas et al., 2024).

Academic engagement also redefines the role of university faculty within innovation ecosystems and contemporary university–environment arrangements. Rather than operating only as producers of articles or transmitters of knowledge, academics act as mediators among epistemic communities, user organizations, and public problems. This function requires translating scientific concepts into languages that external actors can understand, while also incorporating practical knowledge, institutional constraints, and implementation needs into the production of new knowledge (Scandura and Iammarino, 2022). Academic engagement may therefore strengthen the social quality of research, as it exposes conceptual frameworks to real situations, challenges disciplinary assumptions, and expands the sources of empirical learning and contextual validation. In the Colombian context, recent evidence indicates that academic engagement can operate as a robust mechanism connecting academic work with external uses, without necessarily weakening scientific productivity (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026a).

Individual motivations are a decisive component for explaining why some faculty members engage more intensely than others with external actors. In particular, education-oriented university–industry cooperation shows that academic motivations are not limited to research or technology transfer but also include formative, pedagogical, and professional interests that shape faculty members' willingness to collaborate with external organizations (Orazbayeva et al., 2020). Epistemic motivation refers to the interest in understanding complex problems, developing more elaborate explanations, and expanding the conceptual frameworks available for interpreting reality (Miron-Spektor et al., 2022). When this orientation is present, external collaboration is not perceived only as an institutional requirement or funding opportunity, but also as a source of intellectual learning, empirical contrast, and analytical refinement. In these cases, problems emanating from firms, governments, or communities can activate new questions, reveal the limits of existing theories, and support methodological designs that are more sensitive to context. Academic engagement is therefore strengthened when faculty members recognize that contact with non-academic actors can enrich research, broaden its public meaning, and produce knowledge that is more relevant for addressing social, productive, or territorial problems (Franco and Haase, 2015; Lunn Brownlee et al., 2017).

However, academic engagement may also be driven by instrumental motivations. Faculty members may collaborate with external actors to access funding, data, infrastructure, professional networks, visibility, recognition, or new research opportunities, thereby expanding the material conditions for developing more robust scientific agendas (Perkmann et al., 2021). This interpretation is consistent with studies on academics' individual motivations for engaging with industry, which show that such motivations combine research interests, access to resources, learning, and professional opportunities (D'Este and Perkmann, 2011). These motivations should not be interpreted reductively, as if they were necessarily opposed to the academic ethos. When properly regulated, they can create conditions for more ambitious, sustainable, and application-oriented research. The critical point is that the search for resources should not replace criteria of quality, independence, and scientific openness, nor should it reduce collaboration to a transactional logic. In this sense, academic engagement requires institutional arrangements that articulate academic interests and external demands, preserve research autonomy, and avoid turning research into short-term service provision (Bandhu et al., 2024; Borlaug et al., 2024; Trouwborst et al., 2024).

Previous experience with external actors is another relevant factor, because it enables faculty members to develop capacities for working in diverse, uncertain, and collaborative interorganizational contexts. Those who have participated in applied projects tend to better understand the rhythms, languages, constraints, and expectations of non-academic partners, which facilitates coordination and reduces interaction costs (Hrivnák and Jarábková, 2022). This familiarity reduces uncertainty, improves coordination, supports joint problem formulation, and helps anticipate tensions related to timing, expected results, intellectual property, or the use of information (Woroniecki et al., 2020). Accumulated experience also expands researchers' relational capital, strengthens their reputation among external actors, and increases the likelihood of establishing more stable future collaborations (Evans et al., 2023; Fu and Wang, 2024). External experience therefore does not only reflect past collaborations; it functions as a strategic capacity for sustaining new forms of university–environment interaction (Rossi et al., 2024).

The institutional environment largely determines whether academic engagement becomes consolidated as a legitimate practice or remains an exceptional activity. Universities may support it through clear policies, coherent incentives, transfer offices, administrative support, seed funding, and evaluation criteria that recognize outputs oriented toward the external environment (Compagnucci and Spigarelli, 2020). This need for institutional support has also been observed in recent studies on university–industry collaboration in African higher education, where the consolidation of external links depends on institutional capacities, sectoral relevance, and sustained coordination mechanisms (Sassi and Mshenga, 2025). These arrangements reduce coordination costs and signal what the institution considers valuable. When external collaboration is recognized in workload allocation, promotion, faculty evaluation, and strategic plans, researchers have stronger incentives to incorporate it into their academic identity (Perkmann et al., 2013). By contrast, when institutional systems reward only traditional publication, academic engagement may be perceived as risky or secondary. Empirical evidence shows that the university context and individual characteristics interact in promoting academic engagement, and therefore, institutional policies produce effects only when they are credible and visible (Zhao et al., 2020).

Social norms also affect faculty members' willingness to collaborate with external actors. Departments, research groups, and faculties function as normative communities that define which activities are recognized as academically valuable. If the immediate environment values interaction with firms, public agencies, or communities, faculty members are more likely to perceive academic engagement as a legitimate practice compatible with a solid academic career (Zhao et al., 2020). Conversely, when a culture that associates excellence exclusively with disciplinary publications predominates, external collaboration may be interpreted as deviation, loss of time, or a threat to academic prestige. For this reason, academic engagement does not depend only on individual motivations or formal policies and explicit incentives, but also on local climates of recognition, trust, and peer validation. These norms help explain why universities with similar policies may show different levels of collaboration across faculties, groups, and disciplines (Bogale and Debela, 2024; Gelfand et al., 2024; Medina-Bueno et al., 2024).

In terms of outcomes, academic engagement strengthens knowledge transfer because it creates flexible channels of interaction that allow scientific knowledge to be adapted to specific needs. Unlike formal commercialization mechanisms, these practices can operate even when conditions for appropriability, intellectual property, or technological scaling are absent. Consulting, specialized training, applied research, joint workshops, and participation in networks allow knowledge to circulate in situated ways, increasing the likelihood that it will be understood, adjusted, and incorporated by users (De Silva et al., 2023). This turns transfer into a process of translation rather than a simple delivery of previously defined results. It also allows universities to interact with organizations that do not always have access to formal transfer channels. Research on knowledge and impact shows that academic collaboration with industry can generate commercial and social effects when it is structured around concrete problems, trust, and absorptive capacities (Marullo et al., 2021). University–industry collaboration may also affect university innovation performance when institutions have the capacity to transform external interaction into research, transfer, and technological application outcomes (Tseng et al., 2020).

Academic engagement may contribute to scientific productivity when external collaborations are coherently connected to research agendas and developed under appropriate arrangements of academic governance. Projects with external actors can provide access to hard-to-obtain data, relevant empirical settings, specialized infrastructure, practical knowledge, and emerging problems that enrich scientific production (Marullo et al., 2021; Romero-Sánchez et al., 2024). Recent reviews on university–industry collaboration show that these interactions can open new lines of research, strengthen methodological design, and support publishable results when thematic coherence and institutional support are present (Romero-Sánchez et al., 2024). However, these effects are not automatic. If collaboration is added to already saturated workloads or responds to demands disconnected from academic trajectories, it may fragment time, weaken research concentration, and reduce publication capacity. The strategic value of academic engagement therefore depends on its integration with academic careers, institutional incentives, and scientific evaluation criteria (Nast et al., 2025).

Finally, recent evidence based on Colombian university faculty suggests that academic engagement may be positively associated with both knowledge transfer and scientific productivity, reinforcing the need to analyze its dual effects within contemporary university management (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026a). This evidence is relevant because it challenges the view that external collaboration necessarily displaces publishable research. Rather, it suggests that the effect of academic engagement depends on its organizational design, its articulation with academic agendas, the institutional recognition of its outputs, and the availability of protected academic time. The challenge, therefore, is not to oppose social impact and scientific productivity but to build the conditions under which university–environment interaction can feed research questions, strengthen methodological capacities, and produce outcomes that are evaluable by both academic communities and social, productive, and public actors (Nast et al., 2025; Perkmann et al., 2021).

2.4 The Colombian context

In Colombia, universities operate within a higher education system in which scientific production, knowledge transfer, and contributions to regional development have become increasingly visible strategic demands. However, the performance of Colombian universities in research and knowledge mobilization remains heterogeneous and varies according to the indicators considered, particularly when publications, patents, and other outputs related to the appropriation, circulation, or use of knowledge are compared (Barra et al., 2024). This heterogeneity suggests that institutional capacity to transform research into public, productive, or territorial value does not depend only on the existence of research groups but also on organizational strategies, internal incentives, management capacities, and effective links with external users. In this sense, university–environment relations provide a useful lens for examining how institutions convert academic capacities into applicable knowledge, organizational learning, and mechanisms for responding to social, productive, and territorial needs.

The Colombian context is also marked by deep territorial asymmetries in science, technology, and innovation, which shape how universities produce, mobilize, and connect knowledge with regional problems. Recent evidence shows that Bogotá-Cundinamarca, Antioquia, Valle del Cauca, and Santander concentrate a significant proportion of research groups and researchers, while many other departments participate with comparatively more limited scientific capacities (Pinedo-López et al., 2025a). These gaps do not only reflect differences in academic productivity but also structural inequalities in funding, scientific infrastructure, institutional development, and the density of actors able to absorb, adapt, and use knowledge. In this setting, the articulation of university capacities, productive sectors, public policy, and territorial actors becomes strategically important for strengthening regional knowledge and innovation ecosystems, without reducing the analysis to linear models or conventional schemes of interinstitutional cooperation (Pinedo-López et al., 2025b). Colombia therefore offers a relevant setting for examining how interaction among actors can expand institutional capacities and transform scientific knowledge into social value.

Within this context, academic engagement provides a particularly useful category for analyzing how university faculty connect research with external needs without reducing university–environment relations to patents, licenses, or formal mechanisms of technology transfer. This distinction is relevant for Colombia, where a recent systematic review shows that technology transfer contributes to innovation and regional development but continues to face institutional, economic, and cultural barriers, including institutional fragmentation, low investment in research and development, limited incentives for collaboration, and weak trust between academia and industry (Valencia-Arias et al., 2025). These barriers are not exclusive to Colombia, as studies in other developing higher education systems show that university–industry engagement is often limited by institutional weaknesses, low coordination, and the absence of stable mechanisms for collaboration (Gashahun, 2020). Evidence from African institutions also confirms that university–industry relations require institutional structures, clear incentives, and intermediation capacities if they are to become sustained practices rather than occasional interactions (Gemeda et al., 2023). Recent empirical evidence further indicates that academic engagement may be positively associated with both knowledge transfer and scientific productivity, challenging the assumption that external collaboration necessarily displaces publishable research (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026a). For this reason, the Colombian case makes it possible to examine how faculty interaction with external actors can be translated into academic learning, knowledge circulation, and strategic capacity within the university.

2.5 Synthesis and research gap

Academic engagement has been widely studied as a relational practice through which university faculty connect their scientific capacities with external actors, mobilize specialized knowledge, and contribute to knowledge transfer, innovation, the third mission, and scientific productivity (Perkmann et al., 2013, 2021). This literature has been important in distinguishing academic engagement from formal mechanisms of technology commercialization, showing that university–industry interaction also takes place through joint research, consulting, specialized training, professional networks, and collaborative problem-solving (Mascarenhas et al., 2024; Rossi et al., 2017). However, much of this debate has focused on the external effects of engagement, such as producing useful knowledge, strengthening links with non-academic users, or generating social and productive impacts. Less attention has been paid to how this experience returns to the university and becomes a source of learning, situated judgment, interpretive capacity, and participation in institutional decision-making. This internal strategic dimension is crucial for understanding the broader value of academic engagement in higher education.

This gap is relevant because faculty members who interact with industry do not only transfer knowledge to external environments. They also incorporate languages, constraints, expectations, criteria of usefulness, coordination practices, and emerging problems that can enrich the university's understanding of external demands. Academic engagement can therefore be analyzed as a source of applied learning and strategic capacity for the university, rather than only as a channel for transfer or an expression of the third mission (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026a; Scandura and Iammarino, 2022). This perspective shifts the focus from the conventional question of what motivates faculty members to collaborate with industry toward a more substantive issue: under what conditions such collaboration strengthens their influence on planning, deliberation, and institutional orientation? This question is especially relevant when universities seek to develop strategies that are more open, situated, relevant, and academically appropriable in contexts of organizational complexity, external pressure, and sustained institutional transformation.

The articulation of academic engagement with the open strategy and institutional logics perspectives helps specify this problem without displacing academic engagement from the center of the analysis. From an open strategy perspective, strategic participation requires more than consultative spaces; it requires conditions under which actors with situated knowledge can influence the definition of problems, priorities, and institutional decisions (Hautz et al., 2017; Seidl et al., 2019; Whittington et al., 2011). From the institutional logics perspective, universities operate among academic, regulatory, professional, social, territorial, and market demands that must be translated into concrete governance and management arrangements (Cai and Mountford, 2022; Mountford and Cai, 2023; Thornton et al., 2012). In this framework, faculty members with experience in industry interaction may connect external rationalities with internal debates and provide situated evidence for strategic decisions that are more relevant, deliberative, and responsive to the university's social and productive environment, without reducing strategy to a closed managerial exercise.

The Colombian context reinforces the relevance of this gap, as universities face unequal scientific capacities, territorial asymmetries, and growing demands to connect with productive, public, and social needs. Evidence shows that the performance of Colombian universities in research and knowledge mobilization is heterogeneous, especially when publications, patents, and other outputs related to the appropriation, circulation, or use of knowledge are considered (Barra et al., 2024). Science, technology, and innovation capacities are also unevenly distributed across regions, which makes it necessary to strengthen territorial knowledge and innovation ecosystems without reducing the analysis to linear models of interinstitutional cooperation (Pinedo-López et al., 2025a, b). In this setting, examining the strategic return of faculty engagement makes it possible to connect the international debate with a concrete institutional, territorial, and Latin American problem, marked by gaps in capacity, coordination, and recognition of applied knowledge within contemporary university management.

Consequently, this study examines the association between AE and SP in higher education. The central argument is that faculty interaction with industry can expand networks, activate individual learning, strengthen awareness of the external environment, and generate practical knowledge that is relevant for university strategic deliberation. However, this effect should not be assumed to be automatic, as it depends on organizational conditions that enable or restrict the conversion of external experience into strategic participation. These conditions include IL, IA, OC, and OL. The article therefore contributes to showing that academic engagement not only connects the university with industry but may also strengthen its internal capacity for learning, strategic orientation, and institutional response to complex and changing external demands that are relevant to its academic, public, territorial, organizational, and long-term transformative mission.

3 Conceptual model and hypotheses development

3.1 Academic engagement and strategy participation

Academic engagement is a relational practice through which university faculty mobilize scientific knowledge, technical capacities, and professional experience in interaction with external actors. It can therefore be understood as a situated form of articulation among research, collaboration, and the social use of knowledge (Perkmann et al., 2013, 2021). Unlike formal mechanisms of technology transfer, which are usually centered on patents, licenses, or spin-offs, academic engagement is expressed through broader and less formalized activities such as joint projects, consulting, applied research, specialized training, technical advice, and participation in interinstitutional networks (Perkmann et al., 2013). These practices support the bidirectional circulation of knowledge, as they make it possible to translate academic capacities into relevant solutions for external actors while incorporating problems from the external environment into research, teaching, and institutional outreach agendas (Rossi et al., 2017). Academic engagement should therefore not be understood as peripheral to teaching and research but as a mechanism through which universities expand their capacity to generate public value in relation to their social, productive, and institutional environments (Mascarenhas et al., 2024).

This understanding of academic engagement helps explain its possible relationship with faculty strategy participation, because interaction with external actors provides faculty members with situated information about social needs, technological demands, organizational constraints, and innovation opportunities (Yström et al., 2025). Academics who participate in collaborative projects do not merely apply previously produced knowledge. They also develop practical criteria for understanding the conditions under which the university's internal capacities can be connected with concrete problems in the external environment (Wang et al., 2025). This relationship has recently been examined by Gudissa et al. (2025), who show that the intensity of faculty members' academic engagement with industry is positively associated with their level of strategy participation in higher education strategy formulation processes. This relational learning may strengthen faculty contributions to strategic deliberation, formulation, and implementation, especially when institutional strategy requires a more precise interpretation of stakeholder expectations, available capacities, and realistic possibilities for academic action (Ahmed et al., 2022). Academic engagement thus expands faculty members' cognitive and relational repertoires, which may increase their capacity to participate in discussions about institutional priorities, strategic partnerships, innovation, knowledge transfer, and university positioning (Borlaug et al., 2024).

From an open strategy perspective, university strategy cannot be understood only as a formal decision made by senior management, because its effective development depends on the interpretation, appropriation, and action of academic actors who design programs, implement projects, build collaborative networks, and sustain relationships with the external environment. In this framework, faculty members are not merely implementers of institutional decisions but actors who hold distributed knowledge about the university's capacities, constraints, and opportunities. This idea is consistent with the literature on academic engagement, which recognizes faculty members as boundary actors capable of connecting expert knowledge, external problems, and value creation processes (Perkmann et al., 2021). Consequently, when faculty members participate in academic engagement practices, they acquire interpretive inputs that may enrich their strategy participation, especially in matters related to academic relevance, applied research, knowledge transfer, and institutional impact (Cohen et al., 2025).

Recent literature shows that the effects of academic engagement are heterogeneous and depend on its specific modalities, disciplinary contexts, and the organizational conditions in which it takes place (Borlaug et al., 2024). This heterogeneity is relevant because it suggests that engagement does not only produce external outcomes, such as knowledge transfer or scientific productivity, but may also transform how faculty members understand their role within the university (Cohen et al., 2025). In this direction, academic engagement may operate as an antecedent of strategy participation when external collaboration experiences become inputs for deliberating, prioritizing, coordinating, and implementing institutional decisions. In this way, engagement not only connects the university with external actors but also strengthens internal capacities for building strategy with greater sensitivity to the external environment, deeper knowledge of social demands, and stronger articulation between academic capacities and institutional priorities.

• H1: The intensity of faculty members’ academic engagement is positively associated with their level of strategy participation.

3.2 Individual and organizational antecedents of academic engagement

Academic engagement does not emerge spontaneously, nor can it be explained only as the result of individual willingness of faculty members. Its configuration depends on motivations, resources, learning, previous experiences, and institutional conditions that make sustained collaboration with external actors possible (Perkmann et al., 2021). In the proposed model, academic engagement is positioned as an intermediate relational construct associated with individual and perceived organizational conditions, as well as with differentiated academic and strategic outcomes. Indeed, university–environment relations constitute a broad conceptual field in which knowledge transfer, open innovation, academic entrepreneurship, knowledge management, and interorganizational collaboration converge, as shown by previous bibliometric analyses of university–industry knowledge transfer and open innovation in university–industry collaborations (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2025a, 2025b). For this reason, academic engagement cannot be reduced to a simple frequency of external contacts or to a list of isolated activities, because its modalities respond to specific determinants and produce different effects depending on the interaction context (Borlaug et al., 2024; Marques et al., 2024). On the same lines, the literature has shown that scientists' academic engagement depends on particular combinations of individual, organizational, and contextual conditions that affect their willingness, capacity, and opportunity to interact with external actors (Greven et al., 2020).

In this study, individual factors are approached from the resource-based view, insofar as access to resources and learning opportunities can expand faculty members' capacities to participate in external interaction dynamics. From this perspective, academic engagement depends partly on the availability of tangible and intangible resources that strengthen research, facilitate collaboration, and reduce coordination costs, especially when these resources provide access to data, infrastructure, expertise, or application settings that are not always available within the university (Marullo et al., 2021; Romero-Sánchez et al., 2024). Organizational factors, in turn, are interpreted from the institutional logics perspective, because institutional culture and participatory leadership influence how faculty members judge the legitimacy, value, and risks associated with participation in collaborative practices (Cai and Mountford, 2022). The proposed model therefore articulates resources, learning, culture, and leadership as explanatory conditions for the intensity of academic engagement and its possible translation into strategy participation.

3.2.1 Individual factors

Access to in-kind resources may constitute a relevant antecedent of academic engagement because it expands the material, technical, and relational conditions available for academic work. These resources may include laboratories, specialized equipment, databases, technological infrastructure, application settings, expert knowledge, professional networks, or technical capacities provided by external actors. In line with the discussion on instrumental motivation, this type of resource may increase faculty members' willingness to participate in engagement activities because it reduces research costs, expands the scope of projects, and strengthens the connection between academic capacities and external problems (Perkmann et al., 2021). It may also improve access to information that is difficult to obtain and facilitate the production of outcomes with academic, organizational, and social value (Ozdemir et al., 2023). When these resources are aligned with academic standards and public value purposes, external collaboration can strengthen both the applicability of knowledge and the quality of academic work (Bandhu et al., 2024; Trouwborst et al., 2024).

However, in-kind resources should not be interpreted as a purely operational incentive or as an automatic guarantee of engagement. Their effect depends on how faculty members integrate them into their academic trajectories, research lines, and professional expectations. When these resources provide access to empirical data, enable knowledge validation in real contexts, or strengthen projects with publication and transfer potential, they are more likely to become an effective stimulus for academic engagement (Marullo et al., 2021). By contrast, when they are perceived as disconnected from academic interests or associated with excessive operational burdens, their capacity to mobilize collaboration may decrease. Their importance lies in their role as an enabling condition that can transform interaction with external actors into an opportunity to strengthen research, expand methodological capacities, and consolidate outcomes with greater applied relevance (Romero-Sánchez et al., 2024). This condition is particularly important when universities seek to align external collaboration with recognizable academic outputs, protected research time, and clear rules for formalizing results (Nast et al., 2025). Individual learning is another central antecedent of academic engagement because interaction with external actors exposes faculty members to practical problems, professional languages, organizational constraints, technological demands, and implementation processes that are not always visible from within strictly academic spaces. In this sense, collaboration with the external environment can become a source of learning that expands faculty members’ cognitive frameworks and strengthens their capacity for contextual interpretation (Franco and Haase, 2015). This logic is related to epistemic motivation, understood as the willingness to understand complex problems, revise assumptions, and explore alternative explanations (Miron-Spektor et al., 2022). When faculty members learn through external interaction, they can formulate more relevant research questions, enrich their methods, and connect their academic agendas more effectively with socially relevant problems (Lunn Brownlee et al., 2017).

• H2: Faculty members’ access to in-kind resources is positively associated with the intensity of their academic engagement.

Individual learning also strengthens the relational competencies required to sustain academic engagement. Faculty members who value the learning derived from contact with non-academic organizations develop greater sensitivity to rhythms, incentives, languages, and decision criteria that differ from those of the university (Woroniecki et al., 2020). This sensitivity reduces coordination frictions, facilitates trust-building, and makes it possible to design projects that are simultaneously relevant to external actors and meaningful for academic agendas (Hrivnák and Jarábková, 2022). To this extent, individual learning is not only an outcome that follows engagement but also a condition that may drive its intensification when faculty members perceive that external collaboration enriches their research, teaching, project management capacity, and understanding of social or productive problems (Evans et al., 2023). This dynamic reinforces the bidirectional character of engagement, because the university transfers knowledge to the external environment, while faculty members incorporate external learning that transforms their own academic practices (Rossi et al., 2024).

• H3: Faculty members’ individual learning is positively associated with the intensity of their academic engagement.

3.2.2 Organizational factors

Organizational culture plays a decisive role in shaping academic engagement because it establishes which practices are considered legitimate, valuable, and compatible with the university's academic identity. In a favorable organizational culture, collaboration with external actors is not interpreted as a deviation from teaching and research but as a legitimate extension of academic work and the university mission (Perkmann et al., 2013). This type of culture reduces reputational risks, normalizes interaction with the external environment, and recognizes the diversity of outputs derived from collaboration (Zhao et al., 2020). By contrast, when closed cultures prevail, centered exclusively on traditional indicators of academic production, engagement may be perceived as peripheral, instrumental, or poorly aligned with dominant criteria of recognition (Medina-Bueno et al., 2024). This relationship between culture and strategic orientation has also been observed in organizational studies showing how cultural traits influence the way organizations formulate, interpret, and implement their strategies (Baird et al., 2007).

A favorable organizational culture may also influence faculty members' strategy participation. When the university promotes values of openness, collaboration, collective learning, and connection with the external environment, academics find better conditions for becoming involved in strategic processes. In such contexts, strategy ceases to be an exclusively administrative practice and becomes an organizational process that requires distributed knowledge, situated interpretation, and academic commitment. Faculty members may participate more intensely when they perceive that their experience, external links, and disciplinary knowledge are recognized as relevant inputs for decision-making (Compagnucci and Spigarelli, 2020). Consequently, an open organizational culture not only supports outward engagement but also creates internal conditions for faculty members to contribute to the formulation, adaptation, and implementation of university strategy (Kitchener et al., 2022). This relationship is consistent with the idea that favorable academic cultures can incorporate external collaboration into professional identity and institutional recognition criteria (Bogale and Debela, 2024). Organizational culture may also moderate the relationship between academic engagement and strategy participation. Engagement allows faculty members to accumulate situated knowledge about opportunities, constraints, and demands in the external environment. However, this knowledge does not necessarily become strategic participation if the university culture does not create spaces in which it can be recognized, discussed, and incorporated into institutional action. In cultures oriented toward collaboration and learning, highly engaged faculty members may find more favorable conditions for translating their external experiences into proposals, diagnoses, initiatives, and strategic decisions (Kitchener et al., 2022). By contrast, in cultures that are fragmented, hierarchical, or closed to the external environment, the knowledge derived from engagement may remain confined to individual projects or isolated relationships, without reaching organizational influence. Culture therefore not only promotes or inhibits engagement but also conditions the possibility that the learning derived from engagement becomes an effective contribution to university strategy. Complementarily, organizational culture may condition the relationship between individual learning and academic engagement. Learning derived from interaction with external actors may increase individual willingness to collaborate, but this willingness requires an institutional environment that legitimizes and values such learning. When the university culture recognizes interaction with the external environment as a valid source of knowledge, individual learning may be more easily translated into sustained engagement practices (Bogale and Debela, 2024). Conversely, when the institutional culture distrusts external collaboration or considers it secondary to other performance criteria, individual learning may remain a personal experience without becoming fully institutionalized as an academic practice. This logic is consistent with the idea that the norms, expectations, and collective signals of the academic environment influence how faculty members interpret the risks, rewards, and possibilities of collaboration (Gelfand et al., 2024). It also helps explain why the legitimacy of engagement depends on visible, consistent, and credible cultural signals within the organization (Meyer and Tse, 2025). Organizational leadership constitutes another relevant organizational condition for explaining academic engagement and strategy participation. Leadership that promotes dialogue, recognizes distributed expertise, and facilitates faculty participation can reduce the distance between institutional management and everyday academic work. In relation to academic engagement, participatory leadership sends signals of legitimacy regarding collaboration with external actors, facilitates internal coordination, and supports the management of partnerships. This idea is consistent with the literature suggesting that the symbolic support of leaders and peers influences the professional legitimacy of engagement (Perkmann et al., 2021). Leadership therefore does not operate only through formal rules but also through signals, recognition, and the construction of organizational trust (Meyer and Tse, 2025). When leaders support interaction with the external environment, faculty members may perceive engagement as an institutionally valued practice rather than as an additional burden or isolated initiative (Kitchener et al., 2022).

• H4: A favorable organizational culture is positively associated with the intensity of faculty members’ academic engagement.
• H5: A favorable organizational culture is positively associated with faculty members’ level of strategy participation.

• H6: Organizational culture moderates the relationship between academic engagement and strategy participation.

• H7: Organizational culture moderates the relationship between individual learning and academic engagement.

Organizational leadership may also directly support strategy participation. In universities, strategy is implemented to a large extent through academic, curricular, research, and relational decisions that depend on faculty members and their units. Therefore, when leaders open deliberative spaces, consult academics, and incorporate their experience, strategy is more likely to be appropriated and implemented. In these settings, strategic participation is not limited to attending meetings or validating decisions already made; it involves contributing information, professional judgment, and situated knowledge about institutional capacities. This understanding is consistent with the idea that institutional support and organizational legitimacy are necessary conditions for engagement practices to become consolidated as part of academic work (Perkmann et al., 2021). Participatory leadership may therefore transform strategy into a more distributed process in which faculty members participate as substantive actors and not only as recipients of managerial guidelines. Organizational leadership may moderate the relationship between academic engagement and strategy participation, because the experience accumulated by faculty members through external interaction requires institutional channels in order to become a strategic contribution. Faculty members with higher levels of engagement may hold valuable information about social demands, productive needs, innovation opportunities, partner expectations, and implementation constraints. However, this information influences strategy only when leaders create conditions for listening to it, processing it, and integrating it into institutional decisions. In this sense, participatory leadership may amplify the effect of academic engagement on strategy participation by opening spaces in which knowledge produced through university–environment relations is recognized as a legitimate input for strategy. This function is consistent with arguments that highlight the role of institutional signals, recognition, and organizational legitimacy in sustaining academic engagement (Kitchener et al., 2022; Meyer and Tse, 2025). Finally, organizational leadership may moderate the relationship between individual learning and academic engagement. Faculty members may derive substantial learning from interaction with external actors, but the translation of that learning into engagement practices depends on leadership capable of creating opportunities, removing barriers, articulating networks, recognizing efforts, and protecting time for collaboration. When leaders facilitate these conditions, individual learning can become a more stable, visible, and institutionally recognized engagement practice. In the absence of this support, learning may remain restricted to isolated initiatives, without sufficient continuity or organizational legitimacy. This relationship reinforces the idea that academic engagement does not depend only on individual dispositions but also on institutional environments that legitimize, recognize, and sustain collaboration with external actors (Perkmann et al., 2021). To this extent, participatory leadership operates as a condition that may strengthen the transition from individual learning to sustained collaborative action.

• H8: Organizational leadership is positively associated with the intensity of faculty members’ academic engagement.
• H9: Organizational leadership is positively associated with faculty members’ level of strategy participation.

• H10: Organizational leadership positively moderates the relationship between academic engagement and strategy participation, such that the positive association between academic engagement and strategy participation becomes stronger at higher levels of perceived organizational leadership.

• H11: Organizational leadership moderates the relationship between individual learning and academic engagement.

3.3 Conceptual model

The conceptual model translates the theoretical argument of the study into an analytical architecture organized according to levels of analysis and explanatory functions. In this sense, Table 1 does not present a merely descriptive grouping of variables but classifies the constructs according to the role they play within the proposed model. IA and IL are positioned as individual-level antecedents, as they represent faculty members' perceived conditions for accessing external resources and learning from interaction with non-academic actors. Organizational culture (OC) and organizational leadership (OL), in turn, are defined as perceived organizational conditions because they capture faculty members' assessments of the institutional environment in which academic engagement can be recognized, supported, and translated into a strategically meaningful practice. AE is conceptualized as the relational pathway through which these individual and perceived organizational conditions may be associated with a greater capacity of faculty members to contribute to university strategy. Finally, SP is understood as the strategic outcome of interest. Accordingly, Table 1 summarizes the core constructs of the study and specifies their analytical roles within the conceptual model.

Table 1. Constructs and analytical roles in the proposed model.

Organizational culture (OC) and organizational leadership (OL) are modeled both as direct antecedents and as moderating variables. OC moderates the IL → AE and AE → SP relationships; OL moderates the IL → AE and AE → SP relationships.

Building on this classification, Figure 1 presents the hypothesized relationships that guide the empirical analysis. First, the model proposes direct effects of IA and IL on AE, thereby recognizing the role of resources and individual learning in shaping academic engagement. Second, it incorporates the direct effects of OC and OL on AE and SP, based on the assumption that organizational conditions may influence both external interaction practices and faculty members' participation in strategic processes. Third, it specifies the direct effect of AE on SP, which expresses the central argument of the study: academic engagement may provide faculty members with situated knowledge, relational experience, and interpretive capacity to participate more substantively in university strategy. Finally, OC and OL are included as moderating conditions in two critical relationships: IL → AE and AE → SP. This structure captures the central proposition of the article: Academic engagement is not treated as an isolated faculty behavior but as a relational pathway situated within perceived organizational conditions and associated with faculty strategy participation.

4 Methodology

Methodologically, the study was designed as a cross-sectional quantitative study conducted at a purposively selected higher education institution. Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores was treated as the empirical setting of the analysis and not as the sole unit of inference, because the unit of analysis was the full-time faculty members who completed the survey. This distinction makes it possible to combine an institutionally situated research design with a quantitative testing strategy aimed at examining relationships among constructs through a composite-based modeling approach. The institutional selection was based on field access, the opportunity to collect data, and the relevance of the setting for observing an organizational phenomenon in a non-traditional Latin American higher education context (Drisko, 2025). Accordingly, the study does not seek universal statistical generalization but analytically transferable inferences to institutions with comparable attributes if there is coherence among the contextual delimitation, research questions, evidence, and level of analysis (Younas and Inayat, 2025). The rigor of the design is also supported by methodological transparency and the justification of purposive sampling (Maher, 2025), as well as by the alignment between the research problem, the data, and the analytical strategy (Bouncken et al., 2026).

Data analysis was conducted in R (version 4.5.2) using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with the seminr package (version 2.4.2). PLS-SEM was selected because of the explanatory orientation of the study, the latent-variable structure of the proposed model, and the interest in estimating direct and moderating relationships simultaneously (Hair et al., 2019). This methodological choice was not regarded as a substitute for evaluating the statistical sensitivity of the structural analyses. Although PLS-SEM is suitable for estimating complex models with moderate samples, interaction effects are generally more difficult to detect than direct effects because product terms tend to contain less reliable variance and are particularly sensitive to measurement error and restricted variability (McClelland and Judd, 1993). Accordingly, the moderation results were interpreted by considering the available sample size together with the estimated effect sizes, bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs), and the greater uncertainty associated with latent–variable interactions.

The analysis began with the specification and assessment of a reflective measurement model comprising six constructs: academic engagement, access to in-kind resources, individual learning, organizational culture, organizational leadership, and strategy participation. The questionnaire was treated as an initial item pool, and the final set of indicators was determined through measurement-model refinement. Indicators were assigned to their corresponding measurement blocks and evaluated using a combination of empirical and conceptual criteria. Items were removed when their standardized loadings, indicator reliability, or contribution to construct-level validity and reliability was insufficient, or when their wording introduced substantial redundancy within the same measurement block. Item removal was also assessed conceptually to ensure that the retained indicators continued to represent the substantive domain of each construct. Consequently, the refinement process did not rely on the mechanical application of statistical thresholds but involved a theoretically informed evaluation of measurement quality and content coverage. Appendix A presents the complete initial item pool administered in the questionnaire, whereas Table 4 reports the indicators retained in the final measurement model. Convergent validity was assessed using standardized indicator loadings, indicator reliability, and average variance extracted (AVE), while internal consistency reliability was examined through ρ_A, composite reliability (ρ_C), and Cronbach's α. Discriminant validity was evaluated using the Fornell–Larcker criterion and the heterotrait–monotrait ratio (HTMT), following Henseler et al. (2015).

Subsequently, the structural model was estimated using the PLS algorithm implemented in seminr. Academic engagement was regressed on access to in-kind resources, individual learning, organizational culture, organizational leadership, and the interaction terms OC × IL and OL × IL. Strategy participation was regressed on academic engagement, organizational culture, organizational leadership, and the interaction terms OC × AE and OL × AE. Moderating effects were estimated using a two-stage approach, in which latent construct scores were used to create the corresponding product terms. The assessment of the structural model included standardized coefficients (β), two-tailed significance tests, 95% confidence intervals, coefficients of determination (R²), effect sizes (f²), and variance inflation factors (VIFs), following commonly used criteria for PLS-SEM evaluation (Hair et al., 2019). The stability of the structural estimates was further assessed through bootstrapping with 1,500 resamples. Moderation effects were interpreted jointly by considering the standardized interaction coefficients, incremental effect sizes, bootstrap confidence intervals, and the statistical sensitivity associated with the available sample.

4.1 Sample

To examine the structural relationships proposed in the model, a questionnaire was administered to full-time faculty members at Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores. The instrument collected sociodemographic and academic information related to gender, age, academic rank, field of knowledge, and experience in teaching and research. The sample consisted mainly of assistant and associate professors affiliated with different faculties, with a predominance of participants between 37 and 52 years of age. In terms of sample characteristics, 57% of participants identified as men and 43% as women, while 59% reported more than two years of institutional affiliation. The disciplinary coverage was broad and included Engineering and Basic Sciences; Economics, Administrative and Accounting Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences; Communication Sciences; Psychology; and Law and Political Science. This breadth is methodologically relevant because it situates the study within a contemporary understanding of higher education, in which engagement with external actors and knowledge exchange are part of an expanded notion of the university third mission, beyond teaching and research in the strict sense (Uyarra et al., 2023).

Rather than limiting the analysis to a single academic unit, the diversity of professional trajectories and disciplinary affiliations constitutes a central empirical strength of the study, as it provides a heterogeneous basis for examining the observed associations without allowing them to be overdetermined by the specific logic of one faculty, discipline, or subgroup (Bouncken et al., 2026). From this perspective, such variability strengthens the interpretation of the findings, as it supports cautious transferability within the university context and avoids restricting the scope of the analysis to a single field of education (Drisko, 2025). Consistent with this view, recent methodological literature emphasizes that the interpretive robustness of institutionally situated designs depends on the rigorous specification of the participant selection logic, the level of analysis adopted, the contextual density of the case, and the correspondence between the available empirical evidence and the inferential scope that the study seeks to sustain (Maher, 2025).

Operationally, this sample composition made it possible to capture a meaningful diversity of academic positions and institutional trajectories directly related to the phenomenon under study. The administration of the questionnaire through Microsoft Forms was also consistent with contemporary data collection strategies in higher education, particularly when the aim is to expand coverage, optimize response times, and facilitate faculty participation within a defined time frame. The instrument was administered between August and October 2025 under conditions of voluntary participation, confidentiality, and anonymity. The study also received approval from the Research Ethics Committee of Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores. Following recent methodological literature on self-administered online questionnaires, precautions were adopted to ensure data quality, define explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, and transparently address potentially inattentive, inconsistent, or low-quality responses, to preserve the analytical robustness of the study (Gottfried, 2024).

4.2 Measurement instrument and data analysis

The study constructs were operationalized using five-point Likert-type items. Item development was informed by prior research on access to resources, individual learning, organizational culture, organizational leadership, academic engagement, and strategy participation (Bogale and Debela, 2024; Graves and Erickson, 2024; Macfarlane et al., 2024; Marullo et al., 2021; Perkmann et al., 2021; Rossi et al., 2024). The complete measurement instrument, including the constructs, item codes, statements, and the main references that informed item development, is presented in Appendix A. Before the main survey was administered, the questionnaire was piloted with 12 full-time faculty members from four academic units. The pilot group included faculty members with teaching, research, and external-engagement experience comparable to that of the target population. The pilot assessed the clarity of the instructions, the comprehensibility and contextual appropriateness of the items, and the sequence and usability of the questionnaire. Participants' feedback led to minor revisions in item wording, clarification of potentially ambiguous expressions, and adjustments to the organization of the form. Consistent with the role of pilot testing in the contextual refinement of survey instruments, this stage was intended to improve the questionnaire rather than to establish construct reliability or validity (Pérez-Montesdeoca et al., 2026). The psychometric properties of the retained indicators were subsequently evaluated through the measurement-model assessment.

In total, the questionnaire was emailed to 262 full-time faculty members, and 161 responses were received. Following data collection, the dataset was screened for response consistency, potentially inattentive completion patterns, and compliance with the inclusion criteria established before analysis, in accordance with recommendations for self-administered online surveys (Gottfried, 2024). Fourteen records were excluded, resulting in a final analytical sample of 147 valid cases, equivalent to 56.1% of those invited to participate. Recruitment and data-screening procedures were documented transparently because survey inference depends not only on sample size but also on the traceability of eligibility and data-quality decisions (Holtom et al., 2022). The implications of the final sample for the moderation analyses were examined through an approximate fixed-model R²-increase sensitivity analysis. The calculation was implemented in R using the non-central F distribution and the parameterization employed for fixed-model R²-increase tests in G*Power (Faul et al., 2009). The analysis specified α = 0.05, statistical power of 0.80, one focal interaction term, and five or six total predictors, depending on the corresponding endogenous equation. With N = 147, the minimum detectable incremental effect was approximately f² = 0.054 for both equations, indicating reasonable sensitivity for interaction effects of this magnitude or larger but limited sensitivity for detecting very small moderating effects.

The analysis was then conducted using PLS-SEM. This approach was selected primarily because of the explanatory orientation of the study, the interest in estimating multiple relationships among constructs simultaneously, and the need to examine the model's capacity to explain variation in the endogenous variables, rather than to assess global model fit in the covariance-based sense (Hair and Alamer, 2022). From this perspective, PLS-SEM offered a methodologically congruent strategy for a design aimed at examining complex relationships between individual and organizational dimensions of academic engagement with the external environment. Recent literature has also emphasized that the application of PLS-SEM should be accompanied by explicit reporting criteria, rigorous assessment of the measurement model, and a clear justification of the inferential scope of the structural model, particularly regarding bootstrapping, significance testing, and moderation analysis (Becker et al., 2023). Following these recommendations, the analysis was organized into three successive stages: the assessment of preliminary data conditions, the evaluation of the measurement model, and the estimation of the structural model. This sequence is consistent with standard PLS-SEM procedures, which recommend assessing data quality and the measurement model before interpreting structural relationships among latent constructs (Hair et al., 2014b).

Potential common method bias was examined through complementary diagnostic procedures. First, the analysis of total variance explained, reported in Table 2, showed that the first component accounted for 21.190% of the total variance, below the conventional 50% benchmark commonly used as an initial diagnostic of common method bias (Hair et al., 2014a). Moreover, the first eight components jointly explained 73.507%, indicating that variance was distributed across several components rather than concentrated in a single dominant factor. Kock (2015) proposes full-collinearity VIFs as an additional diagnostic of common method bias. However, the VIF values reported in this study, which ranged from 1.047 to 1.309, correspond to structural-model collinearity diagnostics and are therefore not interpreted as a definitive test of method bias. Overall, the results did not indicate a dominant common source of variance. Nevertheless, because all constructs were measured through the same self-report instrument at a single point in time, common method bias cannot be ruled out completely.

Table 2. Total variance explained.

5 Results

5.1 Sample characterization

Table 3 presents the sociodemographic and academic characteristics of the analytical sample. In terms of gender, men represented the largest group, with 84 participants (57.14%), compared with 63 women (42.86%). In terms of age, the most represented group was faculty members aged 37–42 years, with 46 cases (31.29%), followed by those aged 36 years or younger, with 30 cases (20.41%), those aged 43–47 years, with 28 cases (19.05%), those aged 48–52 years, with 27 cases (18.37%), and, finally, those aged 53 years or older, with 16 participants (10.88%). With respect to academic qualifications, master's degrees were predominant, reported by 128 respondents (87.07%), while 19 participants (12.93%) held a doctoral degree. Overall, these results indicate that the sample was composed mainly of male faculty members, concentrated in intermediate age groups, and characterized by strong postgraduate training.

Table 3. Sociodemographic and academic characteristics.

5.2 Evaluation of the measurement model

The latent constructs were operationalized using five-point Likert-type items whose development was informed by prior research. Their psychometric properties were subsequently evaluated as part of the measurement-model assessment. Following Hair et al. (2019), convergent validity was examined through standardized outer loadings, indicator reliability, and AVE, while internal consistency reliability was assessed using ρ_A, ρ_C, and Cronbach's α. Measurement-model refinement retained 18 indicators and excluded six items: IL1, OL3, AE4, AE5, SP2, and SP3. All indicators originally specified for IA and OC were retained. Item-removal decisions considered empirical performance, inter-item redundancy, and conceptual coverage rather than statistical thresholds alone. Table 4 reports the retained indicators, while Appendix A presents the complete item pool. Standardized outer loadings ranged from 0.609 to 0.919; AVE from 0.579 to 0.840; ρ_A from 0.662 to 0.923; ρ_C from 0.804 to 0.940; and Cronbach's α from 0.603 to 0.905. Overall, the results support acceptable measurement quality, although academic engagement and organizational leadership showed comparatively modest reliability and should be interpreted cautiously, particularly in relation to the OL × AE interaction.

Table 4. Results of the measurement model.

Table 4 reports the retained indicators after measurement-model refinement. The initial item pool is reported in Appendix A. The following items were excluded during refinement: IL1, OL3, AE4, AE5, SP2, and SP3. Item deletion was based on the combined assessment of standardized loadings, indicator reliability, interitem redundancy, and conceptual coverage. Slightly lower retained loadings were preserved when theoretically justified and when construct-level AVE and reliability remained acceptable.

Particular consideration was given to SP1, which displayed the lowest standardized loading in the model (0.609) and a correspondingly modest indicator reliability of 0.371. The item was nevertheless retained because it captures a conceptually distinctive and foundational component of strategy participation: faculty inclusion in discussions concerning the university's strategic priorities. From an open strategy perspective, participation encompasses not only demonstrable influence over final decisions but also access to strategic conversations and opportunities to contribute at the initial deliberative stage. This dimension is not fully represented by the remaining indicators, which reflect progressively more intensive forms of participation: discussing strategic alternatives (SP4), contributing to the definition of strategic initiatives (SP5), and influencing the university's future orientation (SP6). Removing SP1 would therefore shift the construct toward advanced forms of strategic influence and underrepresent the broader deliberative domain of faculty participation. Its retention was further supported by the satisfactory construct-level performance of strategy participation, with an AVE of 0.716, ρ_A of 0.923, ρ_C of 0.908, and Cronbach's α of 0.860. Nevertheless, SP1 should not be interpreted as psychometrically strong in isolation. Its comparatively weak performance warrants caution and indicates that its wording and measurement properties should be refined and reassessed in future studies and across different institutional settings.

A separate measurement consideration concerns IA. The construct was specified a priori using two indicators and was not reduced to a two-item measure during measurement-model refinement. Both original indicators were retained. IA1 captures perceived access to empirical and informational resources, including data, cases, technical information, and field settings, whereas IA2 captures perceived access to material, technical, infrastructural, expertise-based, and practical support. Together, these indicators operationalize a deliberately focused construct concerning faculty members' perceived access to non-financial resources made available through interaction with external actors and directly applicable to their academic activities. The standardized loadings of 0.894 and 0.880, together with an AVE of 0.787, ρ_A of 0.781, ρ_C of 0.881, and Cronbach's α of 0.729, provide satisfactory evidence of convergent validity and internal consistency for this parsimonious operationalization. However, strong psychometric performance does not imply exhaustive content coverage. Because IA is represented by only two indicators, it should be interpreted as a focused measure of perceived external resource access rather than as a comprehensive representation of all resource conditions that may influence academic engagement. This distinction is particularly important when interpreting the non-significant relationship proposed in H2.

Complementarily, discriminant validity was examined using the Fornell–Larcker criterion and the HTMT, following Henseler et al. (2015). As shown in Table 5, the square roots of the AVE, displayed on the main diagonal, were higher than the interconstruct correlations in all cases. This result indicates that each latent variable shares more variance with its own indicators than with the other constructs in the model, supporting the empirical distinctiveness of AE, IA, IL, OC, OL, and SP. This evidence is further confirmed in Table 6, where HTMT values ranged from 0.067 to 0.525, remaining clearly below the conservative threshold of 0.85 recommended for conceptually distinct constructs (Hair et al., 2019). Accordingly, the results indicate that the model satisfies the criteria for discriminant validity and provides an adequate basis for estimating the structural relationships.

Table 5. The Fornell–Larcker criterion.

Table 6. The HTMT ratio.

5.3 Evaluation of the structural model

Once the adequacy of the measurement model had been established, the analysis focused on the structural model to determine the extent to which the empirical evidence supports the logic of the proposed conceptual framework. As shown in Table 7 and following the evaluation criteria recommended for PLS-SEM, collinearity among predictors was first examined, followed by the magnitude, direction, and significance of the structural relationships. VIF values ranged from 1.047 to 1.309, remaining clearly below the threshold of 5 suggested in the literature. This indicates the absence of relevant collinearity problems. The model also reached R² values of 0.185 for AE and 0.209 for strategy participation (SP). Taken together, these results suggest that the structural specification provides adequate estimation conditions and modest explanatory capacity, although one that is appropriate for a study on higher education, organizational behavior, and faculty strategy participation.

Table 7. Structural model results.

AE, academic engagement; IA, access to in-kind resources; IL, individual learning; OC, organizational culture; OL, organizational leadership; SP, strategy participation; f², effect size; VIF, variance inflation factor; β, standardized path coefficient. p-Values are based on two-tailed tests, and values below 0.001 are reported as p < 0.001. An approximate fixed-model R²-increase sensitivity analysis indicated that, with N = 147, α = 0.05, and 80% statistical power, the minimum detectable incremental interaction effect was f² = 0.054.

The strongest path in the model was observed between academic engagement and strategy participation. As shown in Table 7, this relationship was positive and statistically significant (β = 0.376, p < 0.001), and it also showed the largest effect size in the model (f² = 0.162). This result supports H1 and suggests that higher levels of faculty engagement with external actors are associated with higher levels of strategy participation within the university. Substantively, the finding indicates that academic engagement not only expands networks, applied experience, and exposure to situated problems but may also strengthen faculty members' capacity to participate in deliberative, formulative, and institutionally consequential processes. The observed association suggests that academic engagement may connect faculty members' external experience with their internal strategic contribution, particularly when they relate learning from the external environment to institutional priorities, decisions, and organizational challenges.

The antecedents of academic engagement showed a differentiated pattern. Access to in-kind resources did not have a statistically significant effect on AE (β = −0.017, p = 0.877; f² = 0.000), and therefore H2 was not supported. This result suggests that the availability of tangible support or material resources is not, by itself, sufficient to intensify university–environment relations. By contrast, individual learning had a positive and significant effect on AE (β = 0.310, p < 0.001; f² = 0.097), supporting H3. Thus, the motivation to learn from external actors, incorporate applied knowledge, and expand professional competencies appears to be a substantive antecedent of academic engagement. This pattern suggests that engagement with the external environment depends less on isolated material incentives and more on learning processes, cognitive appropriation, and recognition of the formative value of external interaction.

Likewise, no statistically significant moderating effects were identified for the relationship between academic engagement and strategy participation (OC × AE → SP: β = 0.030, p = 0.691, f² = 0.001, 95% CI [−0.117, 0.174]) or for the relationship between individual learning and academic engagement (OC × IL → AE: β = −0.069, p = 0.350, f² = 0.005, 95% CI [−0.222, 0.073]). Accordingly, H6 and H7 did not receive empirical support. Their estimated incremental effect sizes were substantially below the approximate minimum detectable effect of f² = 0.054. These findings should therefore be interpreted as an absence of statistically detectable moderation in the sample examined rather than as conclusive evidence that the corresponding interaction effects are null. Taken together, the results suggest that organizational culture supports academic engagement, but the study did not detect evidence that it conditions the relationships examined.

With regard to organizational leadership, no statistically significant direct effects were identified on academic engagement (β = −0.068, p = 0.460, f² = 0.005, 95% CI [−0.236, 0.113]) or strategy participation (β = −0.028, p = 0.726, f² = 0.001, 95% CI [−0.174, 0.124]); therefore, H8 and H9 did not receive empirical support. The interaction between organizational leadership and individual learning was also not statistically significant (OL × IL → AE: β = 0.057, p = 0.478, f² = 0.004, 95% CI [−0.093, 0.226]); therefore, H11 did not receive empirical support. Its estimated incremental effect size was substantially below the approximate minimum detectable effect of f² = 0.054. Consequently, this result should be interpreted as an absence of statistically detectable moderation in the sample examined rather than as definitive evidence that organizational leadership does not condition the relationship between individual learning and academic engagement.

The interaction between organizational leadership and academic engagement was negative and statistically significant (OL × AE → SP: β = −0.278, p < 0.001, f² = 0.093, 95% CI [−0.414, −0.134]). The interaction term was specified a priori as part of the structural model. However, the theoretical argument underlying H10 anticipated a positive moderating effect. Because the estimated coefficient was negative, H10 was not supported. Instead, the analysis revealed a statistically significant opposite-direction interaction that was not anticipated by the original hypothesis. The negative coefficient indicates that the positive association between academic engagement and strategy participation becomes weaker as perceived organizational leadership increases. However, because conditional effects and simple slopes were not estimated, the study cannot determine the magnitude or statistical significance of the AE–SP association at specific levels of organizational leadership. Although the estimated effect size exceeded the approximate minimum detectable effect of f² = 0.054 and the confidence interval excluded zero, these results establish statistical detectability in the present sample rather than precision, stability, or generalizability. Accordingly, the negative interaction should be treated as an unexpected finding whose theoretical interpretation is exploratory and requires independent replication in larger and more heterogeneous institutional samples.

6 Discussion

The results support the central proposition of the study by showing a positive and statistically significant association between academic engagement and faculty strategy participation. This finding extends the academic engagement literature beyond its dominant emphasis on knowledge transfer, commercialization, scientific productivity, and external impact, suggesting that interaction with external actors may also be associated with greater faculty capacity for internal strategic deliberation (Perkmann et al., 2013, 2021). In this sense, the study does not contradict the established literature on university–industry collaboration but expands its explanatory scope. Although Perkmann et al. (2013, 2021) conceptualize academic engagement as a relational form of interaction through which academics collaborate with external users, the present results suggest that this relational activity may also reshape how faculty members participate in internal university processes. Engagement is therefore not only a mechanism for moving knowledge outward but also a pathway through which situated knowledge, practical judgment, and boundary experience can be brought back into the university.

This interpretation is particularly consistent with Rossi et al. (2017), who argue that academic engagement should be understood as knowledge coproduction rather than as a one-directional transfer of academic outputs to external users. Faculty members who participate in consulting activities, collaborative projects, specialized training, applied research, or professional networks do not simply mobilize expertise already produced within the university. They also encounter demands, constraints, languages, evaluation criteria, and implementation problems that may modify how they understand the relevance and limits of academic knowledge. The present study adds that these forms of external learning may become strategically valuable inside the university when they inform faculty members’ participation in institutional deliberation. In this sense, academic engagement contributes to strategy-making because it exposes faculty members to problems that are not always visible from within internal academic routines but that are relevant for defining institutional priorities, academic programs, research agendas, and forms of social contribution.

The strength of the AE → SP relationship is the most important empirical result of the model. The positive and significant path between academic engagement and strategy participation indicates that faculty members who report higher levels of external engagement also report higher levels of involvement in university strategy-making. This result is aligned with Gudissa et al. (2025), who found that faculty members' academic engagement with industry is associated with their participation in strategy formulation processes in higher education. However, the present study moves beyond a simple confirmation of that relationship. It explains why this association is theoretically meaningful: academic engagement may provide faculty members with situated knowledge, relational experience, and interpretive capacity that make their participation in strategy more substantive. From an open strategy perspective, this is relevant because strategy-making requires distributed knowledge and the inclusion of actors who understand both internal capacities and external demands (Seidl et al., 2019; Whittington et al., 2011). Faculty members engaged with external actors are therefore not merely participants in formal planning spaces; they may become carriers of boundary knowledge that can improve the quality of strategic deliberation.

This finding also clarifies the contribution of the article in relation to the authors' previous study. In that work, academic engagement appeared as a robust mechanism linking individual and institutional determinants with knowledge transfer and scientific productivity (Ballesteros-Ballesteros and Zárate-Torres, 2026a). The present study extends that argument toward an internal outcome of university governance: faculty participation in strategy-making. This extension is conceptually relevant because it suggests that engagement does not only produce outward-facing effects but may also strengthen the university's capacity to interpret its environment, reconsider its priorities, and deliberate about institutional decisions. This interpretation is consistent with Cohen et al. (2025), who emphasize that the impacts of university–industry collaboration are multidimensional and cannot be adequately captured through a single indicator. The present study therefore proposes strategy participation as a relevant, assessable, and theoretically distinct organizational consequence of academic engagement. In doing so, it broadens the way in which the value of academic engagement can be understood in higher education research.

The positive effect of individual learning on academic engagement is also theoretically significant. It shows that external interaction becomes more intense when faculty members perceive collaboration as a real source of learning. This result supports Franco and Haase (2015), who argue that cooperation with non-academic actors expands researchers' cognitive frameworks by exposing them to problems, languages, and constraints that differ from those of the university. It also resonates with Miron-Spektor et al. (2022), because the motivation to understand complex problems can foster more flexible, integrative, and context-sensitive forms of reasoning. In the present model, however, individual learning is not treated only as an outcome of engagement. It operates as an antecedent that activates engagement. Faculty members appear to become more involved with external actors when such interaction enriches their research, teaching, project management capacities, and understanding of social, organizational, or productive problems.

This result helps qualify an excessively instrumental interpretation of academic engagement. The literature recognizes that faculty members may collaborate with external actors to obtain funding, data, infrastructure, visibility, or professional opportunities (D'Este and Perkmann, 2011; Perkmann et al., 2021). The present findings do not deny the importance of those motivations but suggest that learning may carry more explanatory weight than material access as a condition of involvement. This distinction is important because it shifts attention from transactional incentives toward cognitive, epistemic, and formative processes. When faculty members perceive that collaboration allows them to revise assumptions, formulate better questions, understand implementation constraints, or enrich their academic practice, engagement acquires academic meaning rather than only operational value. This interpretation is consistent with Lunn Brownlee et al. (2017), who emphasize epistemic reflexivity, and with Woroniecki et al. (2020), who show that interaction with heterogeneous actors can transform the ways in which knowledge is produced and justified. Learning from the external environment therefore becomes a condition for sustained and strategically meaningful academic participation.

The non-significant effect of access to in-kind resources on academic engagement is one of the most useful and theoretically productive results of the study. At first glance, this finding may appear counterintuitive, because previous research has shown that data, laboratories, infrastructure, technical expertise, application settings, and professional networks may expand the possibilities for collaboration (Marullo et al., 2021; Romero-Sánchez et al., 2024). However, the result does not necessarily contradict that literature. Rather, it qualifies it. The availability of in-kind resources may create opportunities for collaboration, but it does not automatically mobilize faculty engagement. In the context analyzed, faculty members do not appear to intensify their external interaction simply because tangible resources or material support are available. This suggests that resources are enabling conditions and not sufficient causes of engagement.

This finding is important for university management because it challenges approaches that reduce university–environment relations to the provision of inputs, infrastructure, or external support. In-kind resources acquire academic value only when they are connected to faculty members' research trajectories, teaching interests, protected time, recognition systems, and institutional purposes. Without those connections, resources may remain available but underused or may be perceived as operational burdens rather than as opportunities for academic development. This interpretation is consistent with Trouwborst et al. (2024), who argue that the uptake and use of research depend on strategies adjusted to specific contexts. It is also compatible with Nast et al. (2025), insofar as external interaction strengthens scientific impact only when it is meaningfully integrated into research agendas. The present study therefore suggests that universities should not assume that resource access will automatically generate engagement. Resources may enable collaboration, but they do not replace learning, legitimacy, academic purpose, and institutional recognition.

Organizational culture was positively and significantly associated with academic engagement. This finding is consistent with the proposition that institutional legitimacy is relevant to the consolidation of external collaboration. This result is consistent with Zhao et al. (2020), who show that the university context influences academics' willingness to interact with external actors. It also aligns with Bogale and Debela (2024), who emphasize that organizational culture shapes shared expectations, recognition criteria, and acceptable forms of behavior. In the case analyzed, a favorable organizational culture appears to reduce the perceived risk associated with engagement and allows collaboration to be understood as a legitimate extension of teaching, research, and social contribution. From the institutional logics perspective, this finding suggests that culture translates academic, professional, social, and market logics into practical rules about what counts as valuable academic work (Cai and Mountford, 2022). This is especially relevant in universities with multiple missions, simultaneous external pressures, and contested criteria for evaluating academic work.

However, organizational culture did not directly predict strategy participation, and no statistically detectable moderating effects were identified for the IL → AE or AE → SP relationships. The corresponding interaction effect sizes were substantially below the approximate minimum detectable effect of f² = 0.054. These findings should therefore not be interpreted as definitive evidence that organizational culture cannot condition either relationship. Within the limits of the available sample, the evidence more clearly supports culture as a direct antecedent of academic engagement than as a moderator of the structural relationships included in the model. This pattern is theoretically important because it prevents an overly broad interpretation of culture as a universal explanatory factor. An open and collaborative culture may legitimize external interaction, but additional institutional mechanisms are required for engagement-derived learning to enter strategic decision-making. Culture therefore appears to support academic engagement, although the present study could not establish that it conditions the translation of individual learning into academic engagement or of academic engagement into strategy participation.

This distinction also refines the connection between academic engagement and open strategy. The open strategy literature emphasizes that participation becomes strategic only when inclusion and transparency are connected to influence, decision-making capacity, and accountability (Raaijmakers et al., 2025; Seidl et al., 2019; Whittington et al., 2011). The results suggest that organizational culture may create a favorable environment for collaboration, but additional organizational arrangements are required to convert faculty members’ situated knowledge into strategic influence. A university may value openness, interdisciplinarity, and external engagement, while still lacking channels through which faculty learning from external actors is systematically collected, discussed, prioritized, and incorporated into strategy-making. This distinction helps explain why organizational culture was significantly associated with academic engagement but did not directly predict strategy participation. Culture legitimizes engagement, but strategy participation requires institutional mechanisms capable of processing engagement-derived knowledge.

The results concerning organizational leadership are more ambivalent and, for that reason, more theoretically interesting. Organizational leadership did not show significant direct effects on academic engagement or strategy participation. This finding challenges a linear reading of leadership as an automatic facilitator of faculty engagement and participation. It is consistent with Macfarlane et al. (2024), who argue that leadership in higher education combines traditionalist, reformist, and pragmatic perspectives, each of which carries different assumptions about authority, self-governance, inclusion, and managerial effectiveness. It also relates to Alvesson and Sveningsson (2025), who show that strategic plans and strategic discourses may function as identity artifacts without necessarily transforming substantive practices. In universities, opening spaces for participation, using participatory language, or formally recognizing engagement does not necessarily produce real influence. Leadership becomes relevant only when its concrete practices reduce barriers, protect time, recognize contributions, process distributed knowledge, and connect faculty members' external experience with institutional decisions that are visible, verifiable, and appropriable by academic communities.

The most theoretically consequential finding concerns the interaction between organizational leadership and academic engagement. Although the broader framework acknowledged that leadership may play an ambivalent role in university strategy-making, H10 formally predicted a positive moderating effect. The OL × AE interaction was specified a priori; therefore, the moderation test itself was not post hoc. However, the estimated interaction was negative and statistically significant, contrary to the direction hypothesized. H10 was therefore not supported. The negative coefficient should be treated as an unexpected opposite-direction result relative to the formal prediction. Accordingly, the interpretation developed below is abductive and post hoc: it proposes theoretically plausible explanations for an empirical pattern rather than implying prior confirmation. The finding neither demonstrates that organizational leadership is inherently detrimental to strategy participation nor identifies the mechanism producing the interaction. Instead, it suggests that leadership may both enable participation and channel, filter, formalize, or selectively validate faculty knowledge. Because these mechanisms were not directly measured, they require independent examination and replication in larger, heterogeneous, multi-institutional samples.

This interpretation is consistent with recent open strategy research. Langenmayr et al. (2024a) show that openness does not automatically eliminate conventional forms of authority, control, confidentiality, and managerial legitimacy. Open strategy may coexist with mechanisms that select which voices are heard, which contributions are translated into decisions, and which forms of knowledge are considered strategically relevant. Similarly, Raaijmakers et al. (2025) argue that participation becomes strategic only when methods exist to convert contributions into influence. The negative moderation observed in the present study is consistent with the possibility that, under some leadership configurations, the association between academic engagement and strategy participation becomes weaker. Faculty members may be externally engaged and may possess valuable situated knowledge, but that knowledge may lose influence if strategic processes are overly centralized, excessively formalized, or filtered through leadership arrangements that privilege managerial coherence over distributed academic judgment.

From the institutional logics perspective, this result is especially meaningful because university leadership can function as a translation mechanism among academic, administrative, regulatory, professional, and market logics (Mountford and Cai, 2023; Thornton et al., 2012). Although such translation is necessary in institutions shaped by multiple and sometimes conflicting rationalities, it does not necessarily amplify faculty voice. Leadership may also order, hierarchize, or neutralize contributions when they conflict with institutional priorities, financial constraints, regulatory requirements, reputational concerns, or established governance criteria. The negative interaction therefore suggests that leadership should be understood not only as support, coordination, or facilitation but also as an organizational conditioning mechanism that shapes how situated knowledge enters strategic deliberation. Nevertheless, this interpretation requires caution. Although the interaction effect was statistically detectable, with f² = 0.093 exceeding the approximate sensitivity threshold of f² = 0.054, the study did not directly measure centralization, managerial filtering, excessive formalization, or symbolic participation. These mechanisms should therefore be treated as theoretically grounded interpretations rather than empirically established explanations.

Taken together, the results reposition academic engagement as a relational and institutionally conditioned mechanism. The literature on university–industry collaboration has shown that engagement contributes to knowledge transfer, scientific productivity, impact, commercialization, and network building (Nast et al., 2025; Perkmann et al., 2021). This study adds that engagement may also contribute to strategy-making, but only under specific conditions. The findings are consistent with the view that external experience becomes strategically consequential when it supports individual learning, organizational culture legitimizes collaboration, and leadership arrangements preserve rather than restrict the influence of situated faculty knowledge. At the same time, the findings show that neither material resources nor declared leadership are sufficient to ensure the conversion of engagement into strategic participation. This makes the study's contribution more precise: academic engagement is not automatically strategic. It becomes strategic when universities develop the institutional capacity to recognize, process, and incorporate the learning generated through external interaction.

This argument is especially relevant for Colombian higher education. Colombian universities operate in a context marked by institutional heterogeneity, territorial asymmetries in science, technology, and innovation, and uneven capacities for knowledge production and mobilization (Barra et al., 2024; Pinedo-López et al., 2025a). In such contexts, faculty members who interact with external actors may become important sources of situated knowledge about regional needs, productive constraints, public problems, and institutional opportunities. However, the results suggest that this potential is not realized simply by promoting external links or accumulating collaborative activities. Universities must build internal mechanisms that transform external engagement into institutional learning and strategic orientation. Academic engagement therefore appears as a bridge among external interaction, situated learning, cultural legitimacy, and university strategy-making within a situated and organizationally complex institutional context.

The practical implications are also clear. Universities should not limit themselves to promoting external relations, creating consultative committees, or formulating participation discourses. First, they should turn academic engagement into an explicit source of institutional learning by creating routines that collect, discuss, and translate faculty members' external experience. Second, they should strengthen organizational cultures that recognize collaboration as a legitimate part of academic work, rather than as an additional, peripheral, or risky activity (Zhao et al., 2020). Third, universities should critically examine how leadership practices structure faculty participation. The negative interaction observed suggests that, under certain conditions, leadership arrangements may weaken the translation of academic engagement into strategic influence. Because the study did not directly measure specific leadership configurations or underlying mechanisms, this finding should not be interpreted as evidence that leadership is inherently detrimental. Universities should instead assess whether their participation mechanisms provide substantive feedback, decision traceability, and visible pathways through which faculty members' externally derived knowledge can inform strategic deliberation. The challenge is to transform external engagement into shared priorities, strategic judgment, and academically meaningful institutional decisions.

Overall, the discussion shows that academic engagement should be understood neither as a purely individual faculty behavior nor as a simple institutional mandate for external collaboration. It is a relational process whose strategic value depends on the way universities connect external experience with internal learning, cultural legitimacy, and governance mechanisms. The study therefore contributes to higher education research by showing that the university does not only transfer knowledge to its environment; it can also learn strategically from the interactions that its faculty members build with that environment. This contribution is relevant for research on academic engagement, open strategy, and institutional logics because it suggests that external interactions commonly examined in terms of transfer, impact, or collaboration may also be associated with internal learning and faculty participation in strategy-making.

7 Conclusion and limitations

This study examined academic engagement as a relational pathway through which faculty members' interaction with external actors may become situated learning, institutional interpretation, and participation in university strategy-making. Its central contribution is to show that academic engagement should not be understood only as an outward-facing activity associated with knowledge transfer, collaboration, innovation, scientific productivity, or third mission performance. The findings suggest that engagement may also have an inward-facing effect: it can strengthen the university's internal capacity to read its environment, deliberate on institutional priorities, and incorporate faculty members' situated knowledge into strategy-making. In this sense, the article advances a more organizational and educational understanding of academic engagement. Universities do not only project knowledge toward society through their faculty members; they may also learn from the relationships that faculty members build beyond institutional boundaries.

The study therefore contributes to higher education research by repositioning academic engagement as a potential source of strategic capacity. Faculty members who interact with firms, public agencies, professional communities, social organizations, or other external actors may acquire forms of knowledge that are difficult to generate through internal academic routines alone. They are exposed to practical constraints, emerging demands, implementation problems, organizational languages, technological needs, and criteria of usefulness that can enrich the way they understand the university's capacities and responsibilities. This does not mean that external engagement automatically produces strategic influence. Rather, the findings indicate that academic engagement can become strategically relevant when the experience accumulated outside the university is translated into learning, judgment, and participation inside the university. The main contribution of the article is therefore not simply to show that engaged faculty members participate more in strategy-making but to explain why such participation matters for universities seeking to become more responsive, situated, and academically meaningful organizations.

The empirical results support this argument in a differentiated way. The positive association between academic engagement and strategy participation indicates that faculty members' external interaction may strengthen their capacity to contribute to institutional deliberation. This is important because strategy-making in higher education cannot be reduced to the production of formal plans, managerial indicators, or consultative exercises. Strategy-making involves interpreting environmental pressures, defining academic priorities, recognizing institutional capacities, and deciding how the university should respond to complex social, productive, and territorial demands. Faculty members engaged with external actors are particularly relevant in this process because they occupy a boundary position between scientific knowledge, academic programs, external problems, and institutional possibilities. Their experience may therefore enrich strategic conversations with forms of situated knowledge that are not always available to senior management, administrative units, or formal planning systems.

The study also shows that academic engagement is not an isolated faculty behavior. It depends on the way faculty members experience external interaction as a source of learning and on the way the university legitimizes such interaction as part of academic work. Individual learning was positively associated with academic engagement, suggesting that faculty members become more involved with external actors when collaboration helps them understand problems, refine questions, revise assumptions, improve teaching, strengthen research, or develop professional capacities. This finding gives the study an explicitly educational dimension: engagement is not only a channel for applying knowledge but also a process through which faculty members learn. Academic engagement thus becomes a form of double circulation. It takes knowledge outward, but it also brings back experiences, questions, and interpretations that may transform how faculty members understand their own academic practice and how the institution understands its role.

Organizational culture also plays a central role in this process. The results suggest that academic engagement becomes more likely when the institutional environment recognizes external collaboration as a legitimate and valuable part of university work. This conclusion is important because faculty members do not engage with external actors in a vacuum. Their willingness to collaborate depends on whether such activity is recognized, protected, and valued by the institution. A favorable culture can reduce the reputational risk associated with applied work, validate diverse outputs, and make external collaboration compatible with teaching, research, and social contribution. However, the study also shows that culture is not enough. Organizational culture was associated with academic engagement, but it did not directly predict strategy participation or moderate the translation of engagement into strategic participation. This distinction is one of the most relevant conclusions of the article: a university may legitimize engagement without necessarily having the mechanisms required to convert engagement-derived learning into strategic influence.

This distinction has important implications for university governance. It suggests that engagement requires at least two different institutional conditions. The first is cultural legitimacy: faculty members need to know that external collaboration is not marginal, risky, or secondary to academic work. The second is strategic conversion: the university needs mechanisms through which the knowledge generated through engagement can enter decision-making processes. Many universities may succeed in the first condition but fail in the second. They may celebrate engagement, promote partnerships, and value interaction with external actors, while still lacking routines to collect, discuss, prioritize, and use the learning produced through those interactions. The findings therefore show that the strategic value of academic engagement depends not only on whether faculty members collaborate externally but also on whether the institution can transform that collaboration into collective learning and organizational action.

The non-significant effect of access to in-kind resources provides another important conclusion. The study suggests that material or tangible resources do not, by themselves, explain the intensification of academic engagement. Access to data, laboratories, networks, infrastructure, equipment, expert knowledge, or application settings may facilitate collaboration, but these resources do not appear to be sufficient when they are disconnected from academic trajectories, research questions, protected time, institutional recognition, and opportunities for learning. This finding challenges a managerial view that assumes university–environment relations can be strengthened mainly by providing inputs, resources, or external support. Resources matter, but they become meaningful only when they are embedded in academic conditions that give them purpose, continuity, and value. A resource may be available but irrelevant, accessible but disconnected from incentives, useful but poorly integrated into research agendas, or valuable for external actors but invisible in faculty evaluation. For this reason, universities should not ask only what resources are available for collaboration, but under what academic and organizational conditions those resources become meaningful engagement.

The most theoretically significant conclusion concerns organizational leadership. A statistically significant negative interaction was observed between organizational leadership and academic engagement in predicting strategy participation. The estimated effect size of f² = 0.093 exceeded the approximate sensitivity threshold of f² = 0.054, and its confidence interval excluded zero. This finding provides evidence of a negative interaction in the institution examined, but its magnitude and generalizability should be treated as provisional until replicated in larger, multi-institutional samples. The result also prevents an overly optimistic understanding of leadership as an automatic facilitator of participation. Leadership may open spaces, coordinate processes, recognize faculty experience, and create formal channels for involvement, but it may also shape how externally derived knowledge is selected, translated, or incorporated into strategic deliberation. These mechanisms were not directly measured and should therefore be understood as theoretically grounded interpretations rather than empirically established explanations.

The negative OL × AE interaction was contrary to the positive moderating relationship anticipated in H10. Accordingly, H10 was not supported in its predicted direction, even though the interaction term was statistically significant. Because the interaction was specified a priori but its negative sign was not anticipated, the result should be treated as an unexpected opposite-direction finding. The interpretation that leadership may channel, formalize, centralize, or selectively filter faculty members' situated knowledge is therefore abductive and post hoc rather than confirmatory. The evidence supports the presence of a negative interaction in the institution examined, but it does not establish the organizational mechanisms responsible for that pattern. The finding nevertheless motivates a refinement of the theoretical argument by suggesting that leadership should not be assumed to facilitate faculty participation uniformly. Future research should directly examine how different leadership configurations process faculty voice and externally derived knowledge and should replicate the interaction in larger, multi-institutional samples before its magnitude and theoretical implications are treated as stable.

Taken together, the findings suggest that the strategic relevance of academic engagement varies according to specific institutional conditions. External interaction appears more likely to be associated with strategy participation when faculty members report individual learning, perceive an organizational culture that legitimizes collaboration, have access to resources aligned with academic purposes, and experience leadership arrangements that preserve rather than restrict the influence of situated faculty knowledge. This means that academic engagement is not automatically strategic. Its strategic value depends on the university's capacity to recognize, process, and incorporate the learning generated through external interaction. The article therefore offers a more precise understanding of engagement: it is neither simply an individual disposition nor merely an institutional mandate for external collaboration. It is a relational process whose contribution depends on the way the university connects external experience with internal deliberation, academic legitimacy, and governance mechanisms.

The institutional implications are substantial. Universities seeking to strengthen their strategy should not limit themselves to increasing the number of external agreements, promoting more partnerships, creating consultative committees, or multiplying formal spaces for participation. They need organizational routines that make faculty members' external learning visible, discussable, and usable. This may involve mechanisms for documenting learning from applied projects, incorporating external insights into curricular reform, connecting consulting and research collaborations with institutional planning, using engagement-derived evidence in quality assurance processes, and creating feedback loops between faculties, research groups, outreach units, and strategic teams. Academic engagement can become an organized source of institutional intelligence only when universities ask not merely how many faculty members interact with external actors but what the university learns from those interactions, how that learning is interpreted, and which decisions are changed as a result.

These implications are particularly relevant for higher education institutions operating in contexts marked by institutional heterogeneity, territorial asymmetries, and uneven capacities for knowledge production and mobilization. In such settings, faculty members who interact with external actors may become key interpreters of regional needs, public problems, productive constraints, technological gaps, and opportunities for social contribution. However, this potential is not realized simply by intensifying university–environment relations. Universities need internal capacities to translate engagement into institutional learning. Otherwise, external collaboration may remain dispersed across individual projects, informal networks, or isolated initiatives, without becoming part of the university's strategic memory. Academic engagement should therefore be treated not only as outreach, transfer, or collaboration but as a strategic resource for institutional adaptation, academic relevance, and public value.

These conclusions should be interpreted within the limits of the research design. First, the study was conducted in a single Colombian higher education institution. This institutional focus made it possible to analyze the phenomenon with contextual depth and to examine academic engagement within a concrete organizational setting. At the same time, it limits the statistical generalization of the findings. The observed relationships may be influenced by the institution's governance structure, organizational culture, research trajectory, faculty composition, strategic orientation, and specific forms of engagement with external actors. The findings should therefore be read as situated evidence that may be analytically transferable to institutions with comparable characteristics, rather than as a general regularity applicable to all higher education systems. Future research should test the model in different institutional contexts, including public and private universities, research-intensive institutions, teaching-oriented universities, regional institutions, and organizations with different levels of consolidation in their relationships with external actors.

Second, the sample size of 147 limited the statistical sensitivity of the moderation analyses. An approximate fixed-model R²-increase sensitivity analysis indicated that, with α = 0.05% and 80% statistical power, the minimum detectable incremental interaction effect was approximately f² = 0.054. Because this regression-based benchmark does not fully incorporate the measurement uncertainty associated with latent-variable interactions, it may be somewhat optimistic. Accordingly, the non-significant results for H6, H7, and H11 should be interpreted as an absence of statistically detectable moderation rather than as conclusive evidence that the corresponding interaction effects are null. The design had limited sensitivity to interaction effects of the magnitude observed for these hypotheses. By contrast, H10 showed an estimated effect size of f² = 0.093 and a confidence interval that excluded zero, indicating that this interaction was statistically detectable in the present sample. Nevertheless, its magnitude and stability should be examined in larger, multi-institutional samples before it is interpreted as a stable population effect.

Third, the cross-sectional design limits the capacity to examine the temporal processes through which learning derived from external interaction and perceived organizational conditions become associated with academic engagement, and through which academic engagement subsequently becomes associated with strategy participation. The model identifies relationships among constructs at a single point in time, but it does not capture how experience gained through collaboration with external actors is gradually translated into strategic influence within the university. This limitation is important because academic engagement develops cumulatively through repeated interactions, trust-building, reputational effects, coordination routines, recognition mechanisms, and institutional learning. Longitudinal research could therefore follow specific collaboration projects over time and examine whether, how, and under what conditions their outcomes are incorporated into curricular decisions, research agendas, accreditation processes, academic committees, strategic planning exercises, or governance bodies. Such studies would help clarify the temporal sequence through which external interaction becomes institutional memory, organizational learning, and strategic capacity.

Fourth, the study relies on faculty members' self-reported perceptions. This approach is appropriate for analyzing perceived learning, engagement, organizational culture, leadership, and strategy participation, because these constructs involve subjective assessments of academic and institutional experience. Nevertheless, self-reported data do not capture the full complexity of strategy participation. Faculty participation may involve formal membership in decision-making bodies, informal influence, proposal formulation, leadership of initiatives, translation of external demands, or effective impact on institutional priorities. Future research should complement survey data with interviews, document analysis, observation of deliberative spaces, process tracing, and analysis of actual strategic decisions. This would make it possible to distinguish more precisely among perceived participation, formal participation, and effective influence. It would also help explain how engagement-derived knowledge is incorporated, reinterpreted, postponed, filtered, or neutralized within university governance. In addition, although SP1 was retained to preserve the foundational deliberative dimension of strategy participation, its comparatively modest psychometric performance indicates the need to refine its wording and reassess its validity across different institutional contexts and larger samples.

Fifth, the study analyzes faculty members as a general analytical group but does not fully examine how disciplinary differences, academic rank, career stage, gender, type of contract, research experience, or faculty affiliation may shape the relationship between engagement and strategy participation. These differences may be important. Some disciplines have stronger traditions of applied collaboration, while others contribute to the external environment through less visible public, social, cultural, or professional forms of engagement. Senior faculty members may have greater access to strategic spaces, while early-career academics may interact intensely with external actors without having comparable influence on institutional decisions. Future research should therefore examine whose engagement is recognized strategically, under what conditions, and through which organizational channels. This would allow for a more differentiated understanding of how engagement becomes visible, legitimate, and influential within universities.

Sixth, the leadership construct requires further theoretical and empirical refinement. The negative moderation identified in this study suggests that organizational leadership should not be treated as a homogeneous or uniformly positive condition. Future research should distinguish among academic, administrative, participatory, and strategic leadership, as well as managerial steering, because these configurations may have different or even contradictory implications for faculty participation. Qualitative research would be especially valuable for examining how leadership practices amplify, translate, select, or restrict faculty members' situated knowledge. Such research could clarify whether the observed negative interaction is associated with excessive formalization, centralized strategic decision-making, symbolic participation, weak feedback mechanisms, managerial filtering, or tensions among academic, administrative, regulatory, professional, and market logics. Because these mechanisms were not directly measured in the present study, they should be treated as theoretically grounded possibilities rather than as empirically established explanations of the observed interaction.

Seventh, the operationalization of access to in-kind resources requires further development. IA was specified a priori as a two-item reflective construct and both original indicators were retained, showing strong loadings and satisfactory convergent validity and internal consistency. Nevertheless, a two-item measure restricts the breadth with which the resource domain can be represented and does not permit a detailed assessment of its possible multidimensionality. Consequently, the non-significant result for H2 should be interpreted as applying to the focused operationalization used in this study rather than to all forms of resource support. Future research should develop broader scales that distinguish among informational and empirical access, infrastructure and equipment, technical expertise, practical support, professional networks, resource quality, effective usability, continuity, and alignment with academic objectives. It should also examine whether these dimensions are more appropriately modeled as distinct constructs, components of a formative specification, or dimensions of a higher-order resource construct.

Finally, the study opens a broader research agenda on the strategic role of faculty members in Latin American higher education. Future work should examine academic engagement not only as a mechanism of knowledge transfer or external collaboration but also as a source of institutional learning, academic legitimation, and strategic influence. This agenda is relevant for universities that need to relate more effectively to their environments without losing academic depth, critical capacity, and institutional autonomy. The challenge is not simply to become more externally connected but to learn from those connections in ways that strengthen academic judgment, collective deliberation, and institutional decision-making. In this sense, academic engagement can become a key mechanism through which universities respond to external demands, while also rethinking themselves from within.

Overall, the study argues that the strategic value of academic engagement lies in its capacity to connect external experience with internal transformation. Faculty members' relationships with external actors may generate knowledge that matters not only for firms, communities, public agencies, or professional sectors but also for the university itself. When such knowledge is recognized, processed, and incorporated into institutional deliberation, academic engagement becomes more than collaboration: it becomes a relational infrastructure for university learning and strategy-making.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Segundo Ramos León Sandoval, San Juan Bautista Private University, Peru

Reviewed by: Makna Ani Marlia, Politeknik Negeri Padang, Indonesia

Asra Jabbar, University of the Punjab, Pakistan

Abbreviations AE, academic engagement; IA, access to in-kind resources; IL, individual learning; OC, organizational culture; OL, organizational leadership; SP, strategy participation; PLS-SEM, partial least squares structural equation modeling; AVE, average variance extracted; HTMT, heterotrait–monotrait ratio; VIF, variance inflation factor; CI, confidence interval.