Life’s Work: An Interview With Dr. Edwin Fleishman

Richard Hermida
George Mason University

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Dr. Edwin Fleishman, who is currently Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of psychology at George Mason University. Dr. Fleishman has been a professor at Yale, and a Visiting Professor at the University of California, the Israel Institute of Technology, and the University of Hong Kong. He has also directed large research organizations and has had many professional roles, including editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, president of three divisions of APA including SIOP (1973–1974), chair of APA’s Committee on Psychological Test and Assessment, and president of the International Association of Applied Psychology. For his research, many publications, and books he has received many awards including APA’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Applications of Psychology, the James McKeen Cattell Award from the American Psychological Society, SIOP’s Distinguished Professional Contributions Award, SlOP’s first annual M. Scott Myers Award “for the outstanding example of research having impact on the workplace,” and most recently, the Academy of Management’s inaugural Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Leadership

Many of us are interested in what you have been up to since you left George Mason University on a day to day basis. What sorts of activities, jobs, and services have you been involved in since then?
First of all, I finished up as graduate advisor to several of my graduate students who got their PhDs. I have continued as editor of the “Series in Applied Psychology,” that I founded with Lawrence Erlbaum Associates publishers, which has now produced 45 books, including most recently, Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organizational Psychology edited by Laura Koppes. The book is a description of I-O psychology from its original roots to the present and serves as a comprehensive survey of I-O psychology. It is a great book, and naturally I think every I-O student and psychologist should have a copy.

For 3 years I was a consultant to the Social Security Administration, assisting the agency in broadening the concept of disability beyond purely medical determinations. The goal was to develop a methodology that linked the ability requirements of jobs to the medical diagnoses of individuals with different impairments.

I have also continued my interests in identification and assessment of skills required by high-level leaders in complex organizations, and have extended the use of computer-interactive programs to assess those skills. Most recently my colleagues and I have extended the original military scenarios and measures to the assessment of leadership in civilian organizations.

You have obviously been an important figure at George Mason University and in the I-O program. As you look back, what do you feel are some of the more significant events in the department with which you were involved during your tenure here?
I was pleased to be part of the enormous development since 1986 when I joined the GMU faculty. I am indebted to Jane Flinn who was then department chair, to Lou Buffardi, and to the GMU President George Johnson, who persuaded me to come. I was pleased to have played a part in the development and approval of the PhD degree in the department. Originally, the degree for the department was a PsyD, which emphasized a practitioner model rather than a science–practitioner model. The process for becoming accredited was quite complex involving careful preparation and justification regarding faculty credentials, program development, and approval of the university, state agencies, APA, etc. During that time I founded and was the first director of the Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies that led to cooperative efforts among the faculty and some sizeable research funds from major organizations (e.g., Army Research Institute, General Electric, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and The Center for Innovation Management). I was pleased that in 1991 the President of George Mason University selected the Center for the university’s first annual Award of Excellence.

By and large, the personal and professional relationships that I had in the Psychology Department have given me enormous satisfaction. I am especially pleased to have co-authored several journal articles and book chapters with just about all the faculty members involved in our I-O program (Lou Buffardi, Lee Friedman, Michael Mumford, and Steve Zaccaro). I have been disappointed however that more of our graduate students have not published their fine dissertations, but I still have hope!

One thing that I have been proud of is my assistance in recruiting faculty members, although I obviously cannot claim all the credit. Some of the members that I had a direct hand in recruiting for the I-O program were Richard Klimoski, Steve Zaccaro, and Michael Mumford.

What aspects of your career have given you the greatest satisfaction?
This is almost impossible to answer since the field has been so full of personal and professional satisfaction for me. Let me start with my research. I am pleased that my work on leadership, starting with the early identification and measurement of “consideration” and “initiating structure” as important and relatively orthogonal dimensions of leadership and their relations over many years to various criteria of leader effectiveness, had an early impact on the field. (The journal Personnel Psychology identified my 1962 article with Ed Harris as the most frequently cited article published in the journal during the decade of the 1960s.) I was able to carry out large-scale research combining experimental and factor analytical methodologies to identify underlying abilities in the areas of perceptual/motor and physical performance. Extending this line of research to cognitive ability, my colleagues and I were able to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of human abilities, which is now in common use. These became the basis for much of the O*NET. We have been able to translate this work into methods of analyzing job requirements and linking these to assessment measures.

I am also very proud of some of my professional service activities. One of the most demanding but satisfying experience in my career was my 6-year term (1970–1976) as editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology. As the sixth editor in the long history of the journal, I felt a tremendous responsibility and with the collective efforts of the distinguished editorial board, I felt I was able to set a course for this journal. The journal has gotten bigger and better since then. Additionally, my service on various APA, APS, SIOP, and IAAP committees have always been interesting as well as challenging, and my various elected offices working with great colleagues have often been good fun as well.

Finally, with respect to the practice side I have had some fascinating consulting experiences that have gotten me into all sorts of new situations. I have consulted with such varied organizations as EEOC, The President’s Council on Physical Fitness, The Office of Secretary of Defense, NASA, the State Department, and a number of large and small companies. For GE, for example, I got into writing the proposal for the design of the human performance module for the first manned space flight. Unfortunately for that effort, the prime contract went to the McDonald-Douglas Company, which had no prevision for any such measures in their proposal.

I have received a number of awards, but one that I am particularly proud of is the inaugural IOOB Career Achievement Award from graduate students at the 2003 IOOB Conference. Knowing that I had an impact on students in our field was very fulfilling and I was honored to be chosen for their first award. Likewise, I was very moved by George Mason University’s establishment, upon my retirement in 1996, of the annual Edwin A. Fleishman Dissertation Award for the GMU doctoral student whose dissertation is judged the best in the area of applied experimental psychology.

You are a widely traveled and internationally relevant psychologist. Do you have any advice for the current students that are interested in cross-cultural and international issues? What are the more important international experiences you have been involved in?
One of the most basic pieces of advice I can give is to join IAAP, the International Association of Applied Psychology. It is the largest society of international psychologists, and includes a Division of Organizational Psychology. Membership is free to students, and full members’ fees are quite cheap. Members receive one of the most prominent journals in the field, Applied Psychology: An International Review. Members also receive a quarterly newsletter, which provides a current and insightful look into the international issues in applied psychology. IAAP provides a good base for networking with psychologists in other countries, especially for younger students. There are travel grants available from APA and the American Psychological Foundation for travel to IAAP’s International Congresses.

It is difficult for me to answer the second part of your question in a short interview, since there have been so many challenging, wonderful, and unforgettable international experiences over the years. I can mention only a few.

Early in my career I was given the opportunity by our Air Force to open up contacts with psychologists in military selection units and in research centers in six countries in Europe, and I was able to visit colleagues in France, England, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden. In 1960 I was asked by APA to look into industrial psychology in the Soviet Union. (I arrived a couple weeks after our U2 spy plane had been shot down by the Russians and was taken to see it in a public park!). In 1963 I received a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent that academic year in Israel at the Israel Institute of Technology. In the mid 70s I returned to Russia with a group of eight psychologists (including Neal Miller, Leon Festinger, Donald Campbell, William Estes, and others) invited by our National Academy of Sciences to negotiate the first series of joint seminars in psychology to be held alternately in each country. In 1981, I was one of two U.S. psychologists invited to represent the U.S. in Beijing, China at the first Congress of Chinese Psychology after the Cultural Revolution there. In 1985, I was invited by the Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Science to spend a month lecturing in Japan.

After I was elected president of the International Association of Applied Psychology (for an 8-year term) I presided over Congresses in Munich and in Edinburgh. As an officer I was also involved in organizing Congresses in Madrid and Kyoto, as well. These periods involved periodic planning trips with colleagues in these host countries.

These are just a few memorable examples of my international involvements. In between there have been many meetings, consultations, Congresses, etc. over a long career in many fascinating and exotic places. Psychology is now a global discipline and I feel good that I have been part of this evolving professional and scientific effort. There are even more opportunities for I-O psychologists today. For students particularly interested, there are many more details in my article “Applied Psychology: An International Journey,” in the November 1999 issue of the American Psychologist.

Announcements of forthcoming international congresses are published years ahead in the American Psychologist. The organizers would like to get a submission from you! If you want to go, you can submit a paper, poster session, or put together a symposium. The organizers would like to hear from you. My first submission was to the Rome Congress in 1958. Morris Vitelis put me on his symposium.

Obviously someone of your stature has seen a lot of I-O and its development over the years. What do you think we have done well and what do you think we might be able to do better?
The field has done many things well. A look at our journals, meetings, job opportunities all attest to the vitality of the field. Our field has been the exemplar of the scientist–practitioner model, which has worked very well for us and could be a prototype for other disciplines. However, with respect to our science, we have become more insular and ingrown in our associations and our insights. We have become more isolated from our colleagues in other fields. SIOP has been a boon to our development and enthusiasm and sense of identity, but we are missing associations with colleagues and research in other aspects of psychology. We are less likely to read other journals or go to other professional meetings of psychologists with the exception of the Academy of Management. I-O psychology does not occupy much space on the APA convention program.

These concerns are probably beyond the scope of this interview but I can recall the personal and professional impact that colleagues like J.P. Guilford, Lee Cronbach, Neil Miller, Robert Gagne, Kurt Lewin, and Donald Campbell had on my thinking and that of my colleagues’. I understand SIOP has turned down membership for outstanding psychologists in closely aligned fields who do not fit the ever narrowing mold. We need to think about the limitation of this trend.

Cognitive and social psychology for example have much to tell us. Another direction that the field could take in would be a better appreciation of the history of our field, as it remains highly relevant today and would help us not “reinvent the wheel,” so to speak. As I mentioned earlier, a recent book to check out on the history and context of our field is Koppes’s recent book Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

As far as advice that people can personalize more, my advice would probably be centered on research. Specifically, I would hope that practitioners would publish more often. This is for many reasons. First, practitioners obviously have a lot to say about what goes on in our field. Second, if one wishes to return at any time to academia, a publication record is essential. Many excellent technical reports to sponsors remain unpublished and not shared through journal publications. Also, I find that many times people do not attempt to publish because they have some sort of fear about having their work rejected. I advise my younger colleagues that a rejected manuscript is the first step in getting that manuscript published. Reviewers put a lot of work into their comments. Take advantage of these!

In the area of practice, I see a healthy development in the recent interest in evidence-based management (EBM). The goal here is developing ways to have our research better inform decisions made by management that are now “uninformed” by our present data. I believe that Gary Latham, SIOP’s current president-elect, will be spearheading some attention to this issue.

Any last comments?
Industrial-organizational psychology is a wonderful field and has allowed for a career that contains so many facets and outlets for personal satisfaction. I am really proud to have shared in the department’s development, and I look forward to continuing relationships with students and faculty.