What is I-O?

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is the scientific study of the workplace. Rigor and methods of psychology are applied to issues of critical relevance to business, including talent management, coaching, assessment, selection, training, organizational development, performance, and work-life balance.

Wade Gibson
Psychological Services, Inc. (PSI)

This Workshop will explore the problems and issues associated with transporting validity in real world situations. There is little guidance from legal and professional documents and apparently no one "right" way to conduct a transportability study. The Workshop leader will review the information contained in documents such as the Uniform Guidelines, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, the Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures, relevant court cases, and relevant I-O literature.

The Workshop will then highlight issues that practitioners must confront such as:

• Units of comparisons (e.g., tasks to tasks, KSAOs to KSAOs).
• Limits of transportability (e.g., same job to same job in different locations, similar job to similar job, job component to job component, KSAO to KSAO).
• Circumstances requiring a transportability study (e.g., same job at a different location?).
• Transportability in situations where the concept of job is non-existent.
• Appropriate measures of similarity.
• Degree of similarity required.
• Comparison of pros and cons for a transportability study, local validity study, validity generalization study, no study.
• Alternatives to transportability (e.g., validity generalization, synthetic validity, component validity).

Three experienced practitioners will present examples of their work transporting validity from one situation to another and discuss how they have answered these kinds of questions in specific, real world situations. The Workshop will close with a group discussion of the questions on transportability that are posed.

Nancy T. Tippins is the Director of Employee Capability and Competency Design at GTE Telephone Operations in Irving, Texas where she is responsible for Selection Methods, Staffing Policies and Procedures, Career Planning, and Leadership Development. Nancy is a Fellow of SIOP and APA, and is currently Member at Large for SIOP and serves on APA’s Board of Professional Affairs. She is a member of several private industry groups including the Dearborn Group, the National Staffing Forum, and the Equal Employment Advisory Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Employee Selection. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in I-O psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

S. Morton McPhail received his doctorate from Colorado State University and is a Principal and Vice-President of Jeanneret & Associates where he has served as Project Manager and Principal-in-Charge for dozens of test validation projects in both the public and private sectors. His work has included development and implementation of procedures for transporting validity evidence within and across organizations and job families. Mort has served as expert counsel and provided testimony in numerous matters of litigation during his 20-year consulting career and also serves on the SIOP State Affairs Committee.

Calvin C. Hoffman is Operations Quality Consultant with Southern California Gas Company, the country’s largest distributor of natural gas. He is responsible for the measurement and improvement of customer satisfaction metrics and for internal process improvement consulting. He holds a B.S. degree in psychology from Kansas State University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in I-O psychology from the University of Nebraska. Cal is on the editorial board of Personnel Psychology, and is a member of the Personnel Testing Council of Southern California, SIOP, and the American Society for Training and Development.

Wade Gibson received his Ph.D. in industrial psychology from Bowling Green State University and is Director of Test Publications for PSI where he has managed dozens of research projects involving procedures used to transport validity for PSI-published tests. In consulting activities at PSI, he has developed and implemented similar procedures used to transport validity for client proprietary tests and has provided litigation support and expert witness testimony in matters involving validation and employment statistics. Wade has published numerous scholarly and professional papers on various testing issues.

Coordinator: Wade Gibson, Psychological Services, Inc. (PSI)

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