Organizations face increasing demand to make meaningful, sustainable changes based on shifts in their external environments. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for insightful, useful research in the field of organizational change. As in other management science disciplines, the field suffers from a gap between research-favoring rigor and practice-favoring relevance. Through the framework of engaged scholarship—a collaborative approach to knowledge production—we present organizational change research as particularly well-positioned to utilize existing gap-related tensions to advance the field in terms of effective academic- and practice-based outcomes. We highlight empirical efforts in organizational change applied research that have contributed to theory building, method development, and practice knowledge. We include interview data collected from scholar-practitioners in the field and focus on the work of W. Warner Burke, in particular, for this special issue honoring the legacy of his rigorous and relevant contributions to the science and practice of organizational change.

Rotolo et al. (2018) identify a number of reasons why the field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology is losing relevancy, including a lack of focus on frontier topics, which may be most relevant to talent management practitioners. As someone who subscribes to the benefits of the scientist–practitioner approach to talent management, there is nothing I hold more precious than a healthy partnership between the I-O psychology academic community and talent management practitioners.