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

Introduction Higher education institutions are increasingly expected to connect knowledge production with social, organizational, and productive demands while making their strategic processes more open, participatory, and responsive to external environments. Although academic engagement has been widely examined as a mechanism for knowledge transfer and university–industry collaboration, less is known about whether externally engaged faculty members become more able to participate in university strategy. This study addresses this gap by examining academic engagement as a relational pathway through which faculty members’ interaction with external actors may strengthen strategy participation in higher education. Methods Drawing on open strategy and institutional logics perspectives, this study developed and tested a conceptual model linking access to in-kind resources, individual learning, organizational culture, organizational leadership, academic engagement, and strategy participation. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 147 full-time faculty members at a Colombian higher education institution. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling to estimate the direct and moderating relationships among the constructs. Results Academic engagement was positively associated with faculty strategy participation, suggesting that externally engaged faculty may bring situated knowledge, relational experience, and interpretive resources into university strategy-making. Individual learning and organizational culture were also positively associated with academic engagement. By contrast, access to in-kind resources showed no statistically significant direct association with academic engagement, and organizational leadership showed no statistically significant direct association with either academic engagement or strategy participation. A statistically significant negative interaction emerged between organizational leadership and academic engagement in predicting strategy participation. Because H10 anticipated a positive moderating effect, the hypothesis was not supported. Instead, the analysis revealed an unexpected opposite-direction interaction, whereby the positive association between academic engagement and strategy participation became weaker as perceived organizational leadership increased. Because conditional effects and simple slopes were not estimated, the magnitude and statistical significance of this association at specific levels of organizational leadership could not be determined. The negative interaction should therefore be interpreted as an exploratory finding and examined through independent replication in larger, more heterogeneous, and multi-institutional samples. Discussion The study contributes to higher education research by reframing academic engagement not only as a channel for knowledge transfer or external collaboration, but also as an institutionally conditioned mechanism through which faculty members may develop strategic awareness and participate more meaningfully in university decision-making.