A Message From Your President
Kurt Kraiger
As I write this, I am just past the halfway mark in my presidency year. I have loved every day of it. I’m fortunate to have an outstanding Executive Board and dedicated committee chairs who have done much of the heavy lifting and kept things moving.
I thought I would take this opportunity to let you know what SIOP has been up to, particularly with respect to my presidential initiatives. Please read on!
Name Change?
Of course, SIOP may or may not be SIOP by the time you read this. The calls for another name change vote actually began in August of 2008, under Gary Latham’s presidency. Whether you prefer the “Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology” or “The Society for Organizational Psychology,” hopefully you can appreciate the following: (a) There is a sizable number of Society members who prefer a moniker other than “industrial-organizational psychologist”; (b) past efforts to change our Society name have not been perceived as “fair” votes; (c) we went through a very open process of sifting through alternatives to SIOP; and (d) a vote between two alternatives—SIOP and TSOP—should put to rest questions about the Society name that most members prefer. The key moving forward is for our leadership to build upon successful efforts the past few years to increase our visibility and build a stronger brand in the minds of business, the media, the government, and the public. I take pride in moving the name change to a vote (although I am still not certainat this writing of how I am voting!).
Practitioner Initiatives
Again, the roots of much of this work extend back to Gary Latham’s term. In 2008, SIOP members Rob Silzer¸ Anna Erickson, Rich Cober, and Greg Robinson conducted a Practitioner Needs Survey, the results of which were published in a series of TIP articles. That same year, a branding study by a marketing consulting firm identified areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among member segments, including practitioners. In late 2008, Gary formed a task force headed by Ken Pearlman to review both studies and provide recommendations to the Executive Committee. From those recommendations, a number of actions were taken to improve services to practitioner members. Several of those have taken shape in the past year. One that hasn’t is an Early Career Contribution Award for Practitioners, to be awarded annually in conjunction with the existing Early Career Contribution Award (which almost always goes to an academic). In consultation with Awards Committee Chair Anna Erickson, we decided to forego making the first award at the 2010 conference, instead taking the time to be clear on what the criteria should be for this important award. One initiative that is moving forward is a mentoring program for practitioners, under the stewardship of a small committee led by Mark Poteet. Details of the program should be announced at the spring conference. Another initiative is the development of a “practice Wiki,” which I describe below.
Alliance for Organizational Psychology
At the 2009 Closing Plenary, I announced three personal goals for this year. The first was to continue to support the newly formed Alliance for Organizational Psychology (consisting of SIOP, EAWOP, and IAAP-Division 1). Executive Board Officer Donald Truxillo, International Affairs Committee Chair Alex Alonso, and others proposed two “research incubators” to be unveiled at this spring’s conference. The research incubators are much like roundtables held at past conferences but have the specific goal of bringing together researchers interested in the same topic from around the globe. This year’s topics are applicant reactions and strategic performance management. Thus, for example, if you were working on a scale of applicant reactions and wanted to validate it cross culturally, this would be an opportunity to find collaborators to help you do just that. I am currently working with organizers of the International Congress of Applied Psychology to have one or two of these or similar sessions placed on the program for next summer’s program in Melbourne.
SIOP Advocacy
A second major goal was to make SIOP “louder.” One of SIOP’s four strategic initiatives is to become the advocate and champion of I-O psychology to policy makers. This includes ongoing efforts to monitor and influence policy and legislation affecting human behavior at work. So far this year, I’ve written letters to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (arguing against the elimination of the California Board of Psychology, which would put state I-O psychology practitioners under the oversight of a generic mental health board), the National Security Personnel System Task Force (arguing for the inclusion of
I-O research on pay-for-performance in deliberations of suspending/continuing the Department of Defense’s pay-for-performance system), the chair and ranking member of the key congressional committee putting forth a controversial bill that would revamp federal hiring programs (and potentially discard hundreds of validated selection tests), and a letter to President Obama offering to meet with him on one of my DC trips. When my wife asked, “Why would he want to meet with you?,” I responded, “Why wouldn’t he?” As I noted in my letter, as I-O psychologists we hold expertise in a number of areas extremely relevant to everyday work life, as well as many initiatives for national and government reform. Among these areas are job satisfaction and engagement of workers, leadership and leadership development, worker productivity, training, corporate ethics, and workplace diversity. Unfortunately, tossing back a few brewskis with the president never materialized as he was busy accepting a Nobel Peace Prize. However, I did make an eventful trip to Washington in December where I met with the APA President-Elect Carol Goodheart, Federation of Associations for Brain & Behavioral Sciences (FABBS) Executive Director Paula Skedsvold, and several SHRM executives. FABBS played a key role in connecting us with key stakeholders in the pay-for-performance and hiring reform issues, and will play an increasingly important role in our future advocacy efforts.
Effective advocacy cannot be a one person job, and I’ve also learned that things happen fast in Washington, and we need to be prepared with answers before the questions are asked. I’m currently reviewing final recommendations from a task force led by Janet Barnes-Farrell and including board member Doug Reynolds and APA Council Representive Deirdre Knapp on ways of institutionalizing advocacy into the business of SIOP and making us even more effective moving forward.
I-O Psychology at Your Fingertips
My third and final goal is to create an online resource, the aforementioned practice wiki, that helps members in their everyday jobs. Initial efforts have been directed towards practitioners, but later efforts will focus on academics. What I envision is an online wiki format that contains resources populated for practitioners for practitioners. These could include tagged and easily-accessed material from past conferences and leading edge consortiums, as well as other useful nonproprietary information such as business plans, business proposals, ice breakers, surveys, evaluation forms, and so on. There may also be interactive platforms for members to pose questions and get information, or search for collaborators (from practice, academic, and student settings). We are also working on several plans to provide access to updated short journal article reviews, as access to professional journals are becoming increasingly difficult for individuals without a university affiliation. The Electronic Communication Committee, led by Ted Hayes, has been working on a prototype, and we hope to role this out by the spring conference.
Spring Conference
Have I mentioned the spring conference? Repeatedly? Are you going to the spring conference? This will be an exciting year for SIOP, our 25th anniversary! There are a lot of special events and presentations planned, another incredible program. Consider registering for the preconference workshops. Hotel room rates are low, making it easy to stay an extra night, and the workshops are also competitively priced. Many of the topics are very timely: global HR, integrating social networks into HR, Internet testing, and learning agility in an uncertain environment. And, if all of that is not enough to entice you, if you were at last year’s closing plenary, you know I joked about instituting SIOP bobblehead night. Well, guess what? I’m working on that right now. See you in Atlanta!