What I Learned Along the Way

Frank Landy
Landy Litigation Support Group

In this edition of What I Learned Along the Way, two science–practitioners describe their respective paths from grad school to career. They both happen to be women, and they both reflect on the issues of women in science and, specifically, in I-O psychology. Both have been very successful as both scientists and as wives and mothers. So it CAN be done, but it ain’t easy. I did not have a “theme” for this issue. I had no idea what they would write when I asked them for a submission. It just turned out that they identified some similar life experiences. Makes me look like a genius. I like that.

This is my last column as editor of this series. I have very much enjoyed reading how my colleagues tackled their way from adolescence to profession. It reinforced what I had imagined when I began this column. Just like there is no best way to do a job analysis, there is no best way from there to here.

Seven Plus or Minus Two

Jeanette Cleveland
The Pennsylvania State University

In 1956, George Miller published the article, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:  Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information” in the Psychological Review.  In this article he reviewed a number of studies that described the ability to make absolute judgments.  Miller proposed that we can reliably identify roughly seven signals that vary along a single dimension such as frequency or intensity, give or take a couple of signals.  When Frank Landy asked me to contribute to this column, I wondered how I was going to narrow down what I have learned to a manageable number.  I relied on Miller, and hope that you remember my seven plus or minus two bits.

Why Do You Want to Go to Graduate School, Dear?
Don’t You Really Want to Find a Husband?

I was asked these two questions in 1976 when I was applying to graduate school and collecting information about I-O psychology.  As a serious undergraduate student with excellent grades, I was highly indignant that this individual thought I was NOT serious about a PhD.  Further, implicit in these questions were at least two assumptions that greatly annoyed me: (a) that a woman seeking an advanced degree was only interested in getting married and (b) that BEING a woman seeking an advanced degree was inconsistent with being married/partnered.  What did I learn?  First, I do not like being told what I cannot do.  Second, it is ok; no, it is wonderful to achieve things that some folks may think you cannot do.  Surround yourself with people who are encouraging and supportive.  You will encounter adversity and obstacles along the way, so having a deep reservoir of support—either parents, other family members, friends or professional colleagues—keeps you on track with a sense of balance. By the way, not only did I complete grad school with a PhD, I found a husband too!

“There Are Two Types of Workers: Those who Work to Live;
Others who Live to Work”…Ray Terwilliger (Newburgh, NY)

Actually this is really a variation of a phrase often said by my Uncle Ray who loved to eat.  However, I am reminded that within I-O psychology, we frequently assume that employees ought to love their work, their jobs, and their organization.  We study job satisfaction, work motivation, and organizational commitment.  We imply that the good worker is one who works long hours, takes work home, and spends weekends in the office.   We also assume that one’s work is a significant part of his or her “core identity.”  Certainly we as I-O psychologists love our work and most of us live to work.  (I plead guilty to this.)  However, too often we impose this perspective on all employees.  It is equally true that good workers are those who work to live—to provide for their families, for community service, and yep, for leisure activities.   (Now, back to my gardening and wood refinishing.)

Study What You Love—There Is Passion in Scientific Objectivity

I realize that we are supposed to be objective and dispassionate as scientists.  However, have your ever known a scientist who is excellent in his/her research and not excited about it?  I love research and try to develop research questions to address organizational problems that are also meaningful to me.  This is perhaps the best aspect of academic life.  I certainly would be disappointed to have my freedom to choose meaningful research questions infringed upon by pressures to secure grant monies in order to address issues that have little relevance to organizations or that are not truly interesting to me. 

It is hard to be a good citizen in your college or department and only do what you love; sometimes you need to take on projects that are good for the group but not necessarily good for you individually.  Still, you should find out what you love and do it as often as possible.

Think Outside of Your Discipline, Biases, and Seek Perspectives
Dissimilar to Your Own

We should be proud of being I-O psychologists, but it is naive to believe that I-O provides the one and only perspective for solving most meaningful problems.  The best part about working at a university is the opportunity to interact with people who can enrich and expand your thinking.

While in graduate school, faculty members urged me to read and incorporate disciplines outside of I-O into my research. That’s how I became interested in industrial gerontology and aging workers (and found out that some disciplines are not wild about nonexperimental, survey research methods).  On my first sabbatical at U. of Berkeley, I joined a feminist discussion group with all non-I-O scholars and found out that at times, as academics, we might forget or assume that “everyone already knows that,” when, in fact, everyone does not know.  During my second sabbatical, my family and I lived in Ireland and were affiliated with the Personnel and Employment (Labor) Relations program where Kevin and I were wonderfully taken to task about our beliefs regarding merit-based performance appraisal!  All of these experiences developed and expanded my views on aging and work, gender, work and family and organizational decisions.

However, as my close friends know, I believe that thinking outside our discipline also includes seeking input and information from multiple sources, including nonacademics and family members.  If my family and nonacademics are bored with my ideas or do not understand my research, I am on the wrong track or must rethink what I am doing.

For example, my interests in older employees began with my father and his solution to keeping up to date (he is a retired pediatrician; this was in the late 1970s).  At the time, I suggested that he get up earlier in the morning to read (Real creative, right?). Instead, he rotated joining the “newest, brightest, and most cocky” interns on hospital rounds to learn the most recent medical techniques, drugs, and equipment.  In return, the interns welcomed his questions reflecting extensive years of clinical experience.  (Aha, intergenerational learning….)

I am still grappling with input from other nonacademics about a number of interesting issues; for example, the emerging and popular construct of work–family facilitation in jobs. Is it an upper class, professional occupation construct?  One position is that many low-level jobs simply do not have positive characteristics that would facilitate home life.  Further, even great jobs may not have started out that way.  There may be a notion of a “facilitation curve” of a job over time, where a job is highly demanding initially but over time evolves into a highly facilitating position; other jobs may not evolve…What do you think?

Listen and Learn From Your Critics

If nobody criticizes your work, this probably means that nobody reads it or listens to you.  Take it as a compliment when someone thinks that something you wrote or said is so important that it deserves to be criticized or rebutted.  More important, read or hear the criticisms with the assumption that they were probably written by a smart person who could teach you something.  Sometimes your friends and close colleagues hesitate to identify weaknesses or flaws in your thinking, research or writing.  These are the times when your critics provide the most developmental information.  Oh yes, these constructive critics may include your own children.

Use a Within- Not a Between-Subjects Design
When You Take a Look at Your Achievements

I have been teaching and conducting research for over 24 years; I have been one-half of a dual-career marriage for over 26 years.  My better half is very successful in I-O psychology, and often students ask how we handle comparing our relative career achievements.  My response is always “I use a within person, repeated measures design for comparisons….not a between person design.”  If I compared myself with my husband Kevin Murphy in terms of the number of journal articles published or number of awards or offices held, I would certainly come up short.  But this is the wrong comparison.  I compare myself today with how I was doing a year ago, 5 years ago or 10 years ago, and with where I want to go or what I want to achieve.  It is a more accurate design/comparison, and believe me, it will keep you sane.

Personal Success in NOT Only an Individual Level Construct

I believe that success is more than our KSAs and effort and includes good luck and many resources or privileges that we take for granted or cannot control (like a good family, influential colleagues, etc.).  However, this said, not all of ‘good luck’ is beyond our control.  We can guide or create our own good luck to encourage or facilitate good things to happen. For example, I am lucky and have a husband and family who are supportive in career decisions and in childcare (now teenage) and homecare,  If you lack this ‘luck,’  seek out and surround yourself with supportive extended family, friends or colleagues and share some of these activities with them or hire out (especially the housework).  As I indicated in point 1 above, surround yourself with positive people.

Take Nothing (and No One) for Granted and Count Your Blessings—

Now I am likely showing my age with this one.  With two teenagers in the house, I realize how quickly things can change.  By the time this is published, my daughter will be 17 years old and my son, 13 1/2 years.  Many of you first saw Kathleen in Miami Beach as a 3-month old infant.  My 80+ year-old parents, husband, kids, and I all have our health, are happy, have a roof over our heads, food on the table, and can work to keep it that way. What else is there?  There is more to I-O psychology than the psychology of work behavior.  What happens inside the organization is influenced by what happens to individuals outside the organization as well.  Nurture you own well-being and work to develop the goodness of others.  Abe and Rhoda Korman wrote a book entitled Career Success, Personal Failure that described how individuals could rise to the top of organizations and were “successful” yet also feel personally isolated and abandoned by their families. To me, Abe highlighted the deficiency in the measures of success we use in I-O psychology.

I leave you with 2 questions: (a) Do you live to work or do you work to live?  and (b) What are your measures of success?  Enough now.  I have run up against the infamous “seven plus or minus two”.  I have some I-O work to do before I head out to my garden.

Significant Career Steps

Cristina G. Banks
University of California at Berkeley and Lamorinda Consulting

It was only my third day on the teller window, and I just made a $999,000 mistake.  Not a good start.  Luckily, the mistake was easy to identify and correct; the customer who was just shorted that amount in her deposit wasn’t as easy to fix.  They didn’t fire me.  The bank manager knew he made a mistake not sending me to teller school.  My career as a bank teller at Bank of America during my college days at UC Berkeley convinced me I had to get a doctorate in I-O psychology—there had to be a better way of running an organization, I thought.

I was also convinced I needed to go to the University of Minnesota for grad school to work with Marv Dunnette because I read his book, Personnel Selection and Placement, in my personality assessment class—I thought it was the best book I ever read!  It was so logical, practical, and solved a critical problem I saw occurring at the bank: how to select the right people into the right jobs.  I decided that I had to go to Minnesota to work with Marv.  Fortunately, I was accepted into the program, and Marv was my advisor.  Everything was going my way.  However, going into a career associated with “management” was not received well by my friends at Berkeley—they thought I had sold out to the establishment and joined the wrong side.  Remember, this was Berkeley in 1974.

Having arrived at Minnesota, I struggled to get used to the weather, relatively conservative culture, and accents.  Marv was as brilliant as I had hoped he would be, and John Campbell quickly became one of my most respected professors.  I drifted a bit during the program because I became attracted to the field of behavior genetics under the guidance of David Lykken and Irv Gottesman.  I was fascinated by twin studies, being an identical twin myself and having conducted a twin study for my honors thesis at Berkeley.  But that distraction passed, and I became Employee #3 at Personnel Decisions Research Institute (PDRI) assisting in job analyses and various selection projects.  My experience at PDRI injected me with the “consulting bug,” and I have been consulting ever since. 

For some reason, I was in a hurry to get married in my early twenties (my mother kept referring to me as “no spring chicken”), and in my second year of grad school I found my husband, who was a fifth year student in the developmental psych program.  He had already accepted an academic job in the psych department at UT Austin by the time the relationship got serious.  That meant I had to go to Texas, too.  I finished up my coursework and preliminary exams and moved to UT serving as an instructor for 2 years in the Business School while I worked with Marv long distance on a dissertation.  Two important things happened to me at Texas: (a) teaching in a business school made me focus on how to translate theory and academic studies into concrete principles and practice and (b) being a faculty member at Texas gave me the opportunity to explore the use of technology (computers) in research studies.  Texas was one of the leading universities in the adoption of microcomputers and computer technology in teaching and research.  With these resources, I was able to pursue a series of research studies on cognitive processing in performance appraisal in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I and many of my colleagues such as Kevin Murphy, Jan Cleveland, Janet Barnes-Farrell, Frank Landy, Jim Farr, Bob MacFarland, Wally Borman, Elaine Pulakos, Shelly Zedeck, and Jack Feldman among others enjoyed many discussions about our respective research programs in this area.  Once I finished my dissertation, I became an assistant professor in the Management Department in the Graduate School of Business.  I also started my own consulting business on the side to help ends meet.  In 1979, the 9-month salary for an assistant professor was $18,000—and that was in the business school!

My days at UT Austin were pretty challenging.  I was the only woman faculty member in a department of 32 men and only one of three women professors in the entire school (N = 140).  However, half of the student body was female, and they wanted guidance!  I was swamped and overwhelmed.  To increase my workload, I managed to have two children during my 6-year stay.  UT didn’t have a maternity leave policy then, but I was fortunate to be able to take a semester off for the birth of each child.

My husband’s career took off during our Texas years, and consequently he was offered a tenured position at Berkeley.  In 1985, we left our jobs in Texas and moved to Berkeley, and I was offered a visiting position in the business school.  I decided to convert to a lecture position in order to raise my children and to invest more time developing my consulting business.  In 1989, a divorce became the catalyst for me to seriously invest in creating a financially viable and stable consulting firm.  While juggling day care, teaching courses in the business school, founding a nonprofit for women leaders, and hosting local conferences on HR topics, I learned how to start a business from the ground up and turn a profit.  Terranova Consulting Group LLC grew to 27 people by 2000.

Early in 1992, I consulted to Whole Foods Market, now the largest natural foods retailer in the world.  At that time, there were only 13 stores, and the company barely had any brand recognition.  The president asked me one day if I would like to be considered for a position on their board of directors—they were in the process of conducting a national search for a woman to sit on the board.  Not skipping a beat I said “sure” and proceeded with a series of interviews with board members and the CEO.  I was selected along with another woman, Linda Mason (co-CEO of Bright Horizons Family Centers).  Participating on a board of a publicly traded company taught me two things: (a) what it really takes to run a successful company and (b) how little relevance I-O psychology has in the boardroom.  I was humbled by this experience, yet I received an education about business that would be the envy of anyone.  After 7 years on the board and 100 stores later, I moved on to another board of directors closer to home, the Napa Valley, for Chalone Wine Group.  I was humbled again by my lack of experience in business strategy, finance, company politics, and accounting.  After 4 years sipping some of the finest wines made (including Chateau Lafit) and learning from some of the highest “high-rollers” in the industry (e.g., the Baron Rothschild), I resigned from the board.  Although I brought little to the table from my chosen field of study, I could see how our field can greatly impact the success of such companies, and I am emboldened to take steps that will result in our field playing a larger role in the design and execution of effective business processes.

In 1997, I had a life-changing meeting with a couple of attorneys from the law firm, Skadden Arps.  These attorneys represented a Fortune 100 company in a wage and hour lawsuit, and they were looking for an expert who could help them defend their client in this class action.  The issue was overtime: the job was classified as exempt from overtime but the lawsuit alleged that it was misclassified, and therefore, job incumbents were due overtime pay going back 5 years.  There was no established methodology for defending these types of lawsuits because there was no obvious way to determine how much time an individual incumbent spent on managerial work in a typical week.  In California, the amount of time spent on managerial (exempt) work had to exceed 50% of a person’s total work time.  I was asked whether I knew how to conduct a study which would provide the data they needed.  I couldn’t think of any approach at the time, but shortly thereafter, I created a methodology for collecting self-reports of time spent in exempt and nonexempt work at the individual level; this approach was adapted from well-established job analysis methods.  I got the project, and as they say, the rest is history.  That initial project led to many years of highly lucrative and satisfying expert work.  To date, I have conducted at least 40 job studies examining the amount of time spent on exempt and nonexempt work and have served as a testifying expert for almost all of those studies. 

The life-changing part was having such a financially successful business that Terranova became a target for acquisition.  The wage and hour litigation work along with other human resource consulting work produced very stable and predictable income—a very attractive feature to acquiring companies.  One day in 2000 I was invited to dinner by the head of a New York consulting firm to discuss ways we could “work together.”  Half way through the dinner I realized these guys were not talking about “collaboration” and instead were talking “acquisition.”  I was floored.  I never imagined that anyone would buy my firm, but it happened.  The New York firm was actually recently acquired by Manpower Inc., the global temporary staffing company that wanted to develop a new global consulting division by buying successful consulting boutiques around the world and networking them together.  The New York firm was hunting for other consulting firms for Manpower.  We were officially acquired in July 2001.

What did it mean to sell the business?  I wasn’t an owner anymore—I was an employee, a role that really doesn’t suit me.  Four years after the acquisition, I left to start another company, Lamorinda Consulting, which focuses primarily on wage and hour litigation.  It also meant that I had the financial resources to go any direction.  I believe this freedom comes with significant responsibility, a responsibility to do things that make a difference.  Today, I am thinking about what that responsibility will turn into. 

Right now, I am thinking about the workforce of the future and how workforces will change fundamentally as businesses become more fluid and “on demand.”  I am also thinking about the integration of HR management and I-O psychology: how our field can inform the development and execution of an effective HR infrastructure.  I look forward to the day when I-O psychologists are called upon to shape the organizations of the future by applying our best knowledge of effective people strategies and rewarding workplaces.