Academic incentives for enhancing faculty engagement with decision-makers—considerations and recommendations from one School of Public Health

Abstract

In academia, faculty are bound by three pillars of scholarship: Teaching, Research and Service. Academic promotion and tenure depend on metrics of assessment for these three pillars. However, what is and is not acceptable as “service” is often nebulous and left to the discretion of internal committees. With evolving requirements by funders to demonstrate wider impacts of research, we were keen to understand the financial and non-financial incentives for academic faculty to engage in knowledge translation and research utilization. Between November 2017–February 2018, 52 faculty from one School of Public Health (SPH) were interviewed. Data was analyzed using Atlas.Ti and furthermore with framework analysis. The appeal of incentives varied according to personal values, previous experiences, relevance of research to decision-making, individual capacities, and comfort ranging from instinctive support to reflexive resistance. Discussions around types of incentives elicited a plethora of ideas within 4 different categories: (a) Monetary Support, (b) Professional Recognition, (c) Academic Promotion, and (d) Capacity Enhancement. However, concerns included adverse incentives, disadvantaging suboptimally-equipped faculty, risk of existing efforts going unnoticed, vaguely defined evaluation metrics, and the impacts on promotion given that engagement activities often occur outside of the traditional grant cycle. With a shift in funder requests to demonstrate greater social return on their research investments, as well as renewed global attention to research, science and evidence for decision making, SPHs such as this one, are likely going to be concerned about the implications of an enhanced “service” pillar on the other two pillars: teaching and research. The role of incentives in enhancing academic engagement with policy and practice is therefore neither simple nor universally ideal. A tempered approach that considers the various professional aspirations of faculty, the capacities required, organisational culture of values around specific discovery sciences, funder conditions, as well as alignment with the institution’s mission is critical. Deliberations on incentives leads to a larger debate on how to we shift the culture of academia beyond incentives for individuals who are engagement-inclined to institutions that are engagement-ready, without imposing on or penalizing faculty who are choice-disengaged.

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