Membership Cluster Report

History Committee: Mike Zickar
Committee on Ethnic and Minority Affairs (CEMA): Mickey Quinones
Membership Committee: Talya Bauer
Awards Committee: Joyce Bono
Placement Committee: Liberty Munson
Fellowship Committee: Gary Latham
Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues (LGBT): Mikki Hebl
Teaching Institute: Ron Landis

The membership cluster chairs have done a great job. Below are summaries of the activities of the Membership cluster committees.

History Committee

Mike Zickar, Chair

Mary Tenopyr's oral history was transcribed. Unfortunately given the softness of her voice there are holes in the transcription. Mary passed away before getting corrections back to me. I will follow up with Jerry Kehoe who hopefully will be able to complete the transcript.

My oral history with Pat Smith continues. I've done two sessions with her and we've reached about 1955! Per her request I am not taping her but taking notes.

I am continuing to write a TIP column. This upcoming column I am going to write about the Oral History Project with the hope to get more excitement and volunteers for it.

CEMA

Mickey Quinones, Chair

Identify accepted posters to develop a CEMA Sponsored Interactive Poster Session. This session was very successful last year and we hope to continue it in the future.
Continue publishing a regular TIP column. We did not publish one in the last issue but a column is in the works for the upcoming issue. It will be published by a student affiliate and addresses another one of CEMAs goals, which is to increase student participation.
Set up and maintained a CEMA listserv. Although the listserv has not been as active as hope, the infrastructure is there for communicating with CEMA members and other interested parties.

Membership Committee-

Talya Bauer, Chair

We are finally online for membership applications!
Did I mention that we are finally online for membership applications?
We have processed around 100 applications so far and things are running smoothly.
We did so online.

LGBT

Mikki Hebl, Chair

LGBT has developed a protocol for a Foundation award for the best LGBT-related SIOP paper. The award description is as follows.

The Best Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) SIOP Award

In recognition of a poster or symposium paper presented at SIOP that represents an outstanding example of scholarship addressing issues facing lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender individuals in the workplace.

This annual award will be given to an individual or group of individuals who have submitted a poster or symposium paper focusing on lesbian /gay /bisexual /transgender issues in the workplace. Submissions may involve empirical research, theory, or teaching-related activities and may be in any area of I-O psychology (e.g., compensation, employee relations, equal employment opportunity, human factors, job analysis, job design, organizational development, organizational behavior, leadership, position classification, safety, selection, training). However, the focus of the submission must involve some aspect of issues related to the Lesbian /Gay /Bisexual /Transgender (LGBT) experience in the workplace.

The award recipient(s) will receive a plaque commemorating the achievement and a cash prize of $400. This cash prize will be shared among individuals if there are multiple authors.

Criteria for Evaluation of Projects

Nominations will be evaluated on the extent to which they:

1. Have a sound basis in science, theory, and/or practice.
2. Increase our understanding of workplace issues faced by LGBT employees.
3. Offer practical guidance to organizations seeking to improve the workplace experiences of LGBT employees.
4. Extend and broaden our theoretical and/or empirical knowledge of sexual identity in the workplace.
5. Represent technical adequacy, including issues of internal validity, external validity, appropriate methodology, appropriate statistical analyses, comprehensiveness of review (if the publication is a literature review, and/or theoretical rigor and soundness.

Guidelines for Submission of Projects

1. The Program Chair of SIOP will add an LGBT category to the submission topic categories. Any paper submitted to this category will be considered for the award.
2. Single or multiple-authored papers are both eligible. Authors of single-authored papers must be a current member of the Society. If a multiple-authored paper is nominated, at least one of the individuals must be a current member of the Society, and each individual must have made a significant contribution to the paper.

Administrative Procedures

1. Nomination materials will be reviewed by a subcommittee of the SIOP LGBT Committee, consisting of the chair and at least three members, all of whom work primarily as I-O psychologists.
2. No active member of the LGBT committee will be eligible for an award.
3. The LGBT Committee may decide that, in any given year, no nominee is deserving of the award, in which case the award may be withheld.

Awards

Joyce Bono

All winners, and the nominators of those who didn't win have been notified.
The call is out for small grants and student scholarship, I have been getting tons of email, so I expect a good number of nominations. Sandy Wayne will chair the students scholarship committee and Deb Steele Johnson the small grant - they are forming their committees by Jan 15.
We made GREAT progress - in my humble opinion :) -- on the external awards sub committee -- Here is the report from Annette Towler, who chairs that subcommittee

External Awards Sub-committee Report: Annette Towler
January 2006

The external awards sub-committee was recently formed to increase SIOPs visibility through promotion and nomination of SIOP members for APA, APS, and APF awards. The goals of our committee are a) to provide information about awards for which SIOP members may be eligible and b) to encourage and facilitate the nomination of SIOP members for these awards.

Agenda Items

1. We request clarification from the EC on one issue. At the September EC meeting, I (Joyce Bono) received direction to go for it and get people nominated for these external awards and not worry about or obtain formal SIOP approval for the nominations. Then, I later actually read the administrative manual, which states The Awards Committee will also monitor awards issued by APA, APS, and APF for the purpose of identifying society members who are eligible and deserving of nomination by SIOP. The Awards Committee will submit recommendations to the Executive Committee for approval. The Awards Committee may organizations which may be relevant to members of the Society and recommend the nomination of one or more society members to the Executive Committee. Nominations for these awards need not be sought from the full membership, but must be approved by the Executive Committee and submitted under the designation of the Society.

I would like to change the administrative manual. My understanding is that our true objective here is to increase nominations of SIOP members for these awards not necessarily to have SIOP (as a body) nominate people. As long as we accomplish that goal (as it appears we are on our way to doing), I wonder if we should drop the SIOP approval language from the manual (which would be consistent with the verbal feedback I received at the September meeting. In the rare case (for example Decade of Behavior award), where SIOP the organization is nominating a candidate, clearly EC approval is needed. But, if the external awards committee simply solicits and facilitates nominations of SIOP members by SIOP members, it seems that the EC would need no involvement in that process.

So, how about this . . .The External Awards subcommittee of the Awards Committee will also monitor awards issued by APA, APS, and APF for the purpose of identifying society members who are eligible and deserving of nomination by SIOP.

For external awards with criteria similar to existing SIOP awards (e.g., Early Career Award), the external awards subcommittee will initiate and facilitate the nomination of SIOP members. The subcommittee will create a list of possible nominees, drawing from lists of previous SIOP award winners, will solicit a nominator, and will assist the nominator in making the nomination, including final assembly and submission of the nomination.
For awards that do not link directly to existing SIOP awards (e.g., Harry and Miriam Levinson Award for Exceptional Contributions to Consulting Organizational Psychology, the external awards subcommittee will write articles for TIP publicizing the external award and encouraging SIOP members to nominate other SIOP members for these awards.
Nominations of SIOP members for external awards will be submitted to the Executive Committee for approval only in cases where SIOP, the society, and not one of its members is the nominator. Nominations made by SIOP need not be sought from the full membership, but must be approved by the Executive Committee and submitted under the designation of the Society.

2. It is clear in the formal language of the Distinguished Teaching Award and in the verbal clarification I received at the September EC meeting that this award is intended to honor BOTH individuals who are outstanding in classroom teaching, as well as individuals who are mentors of graduate students. As you know, past committee have found it difficult to compare these two types of teaching and have, as a result, given this award based primarily on classroom teaching. When I contacted the nominators of unsuccessful candidates of this award, I had the opportunity to hear many, many concerns that graduate student mentoring was not being recognized in committee deliberations for this award. Several individuals felt strongly about this and indicated they would NOT be renominating their candidate as they had not confidence that graduate student mentoring would ever be recognized. In my view there are two ways to approach this problem: 1) Continue to remind the committee that it is incumbent upon them to recognize BOTH types of teaching, or 2) Alternate this award from year to year for recognize, alternately, undergraduate classroom teaching and graduate student mentoring.

Given that chairs change from year to year and it is hard to forward historical perspective on issues such as this, I am in favor of an alternating award. May I have permission to advertise the award as normal, but to add:

The Distinguished Teaching Award was created to recognized excellence in undergraduate, classroom teaching as well as mentoring of graduate students. In an effort to balance recognition of both types of teaching, the Distinguished Teaching Award for 2007 will emphasize graduate student mentoring. The focus of the award this year will be on recognizing a candidate who demonstrates excellence in teaching, mentoring, and training graduate students. It is anticipated that the focus of this award (graduate student mentoring vs. undergraduate teaching in the classroom) will alternate from year to year to ensure that both types of teaching excellence are recognized.

I admit to struggling a bit with how exactly this should be worded or handled. If the EC likes the alternating idea, we can change the formal award (change the admin manual) to reflect that we will alternate year to year. Or, we can try this for 1 (or 2, I guess) years by simply adding a statement like that above (I welcome wordsmithing!!) to the call this year and next and then evaluate how we are doing. Despite my uncertainty about how to solve the problem, I have no uncertainty that in the minds of at least some of our members (including those who have taken the time to nominate their colleagues) a problem does exist in that the Teaching Award appears to be recognizing only classroom teaching. I think we have to do something fairly aggressive to stop this trend. I personally like the alternating idea but am open to others. And, I believe that in the absence of some intervention, we will eventually no longer get nominations of good mentors and the award will, by default, become one that recognizes only classroom teaching excellence.

Placement

Liberty Munson

Goals:

Determine how to handle job seekers who are not registered for the Placement Center and interviewers who are not registered for the Conference (but their company is registered for Placement) that want to use the Placement Center. Officially, all users must be registered for the Conference, but in the past, we have been lenient because this has been a very small number of people. Job seekers not registered for Placement are told that they cannot use the computers and are only allowed access to the interview area; this seems the simplest solution. However, 2005 was the first year weve had interviewers not registered for the Conference request access to the Placement Center. Given the large number of these types of requests and the fact that these users do not have badges (so we have no official way of determining if they are from the company they say they are), we need a more formal process for dealing with this. I plan to do some benchmarking with other Placement Centers. It is possible, we may need to add an option for this when Employers register and add an appropriate fee for badging of these interviewers.

Status: Done. Based on feedback from the Executive Committee, the Placement Center will badge these interviewers this year. We'll include name tags with our usual supplies request and create badges when needed. This should be simpler (we won't have to change the programming for online Placement Center registration), more convenient for the interviewers ("one stop shop") and will help us keep track of how many of these interviewers we have. We can re-address this issue in 2007 if it doesn't work well in 2006 or if there are a lot of interviewers in this category.

Work with SIOP IT (Larry Nader) to resolve the JobNet/Placement Center cross-over issue. Currently, if you log into the Placement Center and JobNet during the same session, the same jobs appear in both places (while a subset will be same, they will not entirely overlap). You have to close the browser and return to www.siop.org to switch between them. There is a glitch in the programming that needs to be fixed; at a minimum, this needs to be noted in the FAQs and Help documents.

Status: Waiting to determine if this will be an issue this year.

Develop an Employer Resource on Tips for Structured Interviewing.

Status: In progress

Add JobNet advertisement to TIP. We worked out wording but have not seen it yet.

Status: Ad will appear in TIP when there is space.

Establish a process to ensure that mailbox numbers and Placement Center registration information will NOT appear on the back of badges of anonymous job seekers. (This was a significant problem for several of our anonymous job seekers this year.)

Status: Done prior to last EC meeting. Dave Nershi worked with Larry Nader to ensure that mailbox numbers will not appear on the badges for anonymous job seekers. Anonymous job seekers will need to visit the Placement Center if they cannot remember their mailbox numbers and visit the Registration desk if they want a copy of their registration information. This information will not appear on the back of their badges.

Fellowship Committee

Gary Latham

Thank you to all the committee members for their help in the review and recommendation process.

We will again have a Fellows breakfast at the SIOP 2006 conference.

The number of Fellows, including retired, is currently 228.

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