Value Dissonance in Research Assessment: The Gap Between Personal Perceptions of Faculty Members and Institutional Perceptions on Promotion Policies Regarding Society-Driven Research in Iranian Public State Universities

This research aims to examine the role of faculty promotion policies and practices in directing society-driven research and identifying gaps between faculty members' personal perceptions and organizational priorities regarding research performance evaluation criteria. Using a mixed-method research approach based on a survey, data was collected from 218 faculty members across seven public state universities in Tehran. Quantitative findings using the Wilcoxon test showed a significant gap between faculty members' personal views and their perception of organizational priorities in promotion criteria. Specifically, faculty members place much greater importance on criteria such as intradisciplinary research, community engagement, and academic professional interaction compared to what they perceive in organizational policies. In contrast, universities emphasize quantitative criteria such as number of publications. Grounded qualitative analysis identified the core category of "structural contradiction between declared goals and practical mechanisms of the evaluation system," derived from 47 open codes and 12 axial categories. This contradiction manifests at three levels: goals contradiction (emphasis on problem-based research in upstream documents versus rewarding based on quantity criteria and number of articles), process contradiction (expectation of innovation versus mechanical evaluation), and resource contradiction (increased expectations versus decreased support). Findings showed that 77% of respondents have negative or neutral feelings toward the evaluation system in promotion policies and practices. Multi-layered barriers were identified, including financial-economic, structural-infrastructural, policy-legal, and cultural-social obstacles that systematically prevent society-driven research. Despite these challenges, strong internal motivations such as "sense of social responsibility" and "interest in solving real problems" persist among faculty members. The research suggests that to reduce value inconsistency and strengthen society-driven research, it is necessary to revise promotion policies by creating diverse evaluation paths, developing balanced criteria that consider both academic excellence and societal impact, and designing a multidimensional evaluation model including scientific-knowledge, societal-practical, collaborative-interactive, and developmental-educational dimensions.