The persistent gap between research evidence and everyday decision making in health care, public health, and social service organizations remains one of the most widely acknowledged and theoretically challenging problems in contemporary implementation science. Although large bodies of research knowledge are continuously produced, their translation into professional practice, policy formulation, and organizational routines is often fragmented, delayed, or selectively adopted. The references that inform this study converge on a central insight: evidence informed practice is not simply a technical matter of disseminating guidelines or research summaries, but a deeply social, organizational, and political process shaped by leadership, culture, knowledge brokering, professional identity, and contextual constraints. Drawing exclusively on the provided reference corpus, this article develops a comprehensive and integrated analysis of how organizations build and sustain the capacity to use evidence in decision making.

Using an interpretive and theoretically driven synthesis methodology, the article brings together findings from nursing, public health, social work, nutrition, occupational therapy, and health policy research. The analysis is organized around three interlocking levels. At the individual level, professional capability, motivation, and opportunity are explored through the lens of behavior change models such as COM B and the Theoretical Domains Framework (Alexander et al., 2014; De Leo et al., 2021; Moffat et al., 2022). At the interpersonal and professional level, the role of mentoring, knowledge brokers, and researcher decision maker partnerships is examined as a mechanism for bridging the worlds of research and practice (Hooge et al., 2022; Russell et al., 2010; Golden Biddle et al., 2003). At the organizational level, leadership, climate, culture, and structural supports are analyzed as the primary drivers of sustained evidence based practice adoption (Melnyk et al., 2017; Williams et al., 2017; Kaplan et al., 2014).

The results of this synthesis demonstrate that organizations that successfully embed evidence into routine practice do so by combining formal strategies such as training, frameworks, and performance management with informal processes such as storytelling, peer influence, and leadership modeling. Interventions such as the ARCC model, knowledge brokering, scholar in residence programs, and integrated knowledge translation are shown to be effective because they align professional values with organizational priorities and provide continuous relational support (Melnyk et al., 2017; Parke et al., 2015; Mendell and Richardson, 2021). However, the findings also reveal persistent challenges, including power imbalances between researchers and practitioners, resource constraints, and competing institutional logics that can undermine evidence use (Rynes et al., 2007; Nutley and Davies, 2000; Kimber et al., 2012).