When we began our journey to this month’s I-Opener, we immediately thought of a newspaper article that we had come across just days earlier. The article described an experiment in the works that began in 2014 when the middle-left government coalition in Gothenburg, Sweden decided to reduce the working hours in at least one public department from forty to thirty hours per week without reduced compensation. It was after a conversation that the first author had with Dr. Jürgen Deller from the University of Lüneburg, Germany, speaker for the Institute for Strategic HR Management Research and Development, an interdisciplinary panel designed to find innovative solutions to strategic HR questions, that we realized that this article should rather cover a much bigger picture than just an insular experiment in a Scandinavian country[i]. Instead we decided to focus on the fundamental question of how we organize work, labor, and whether we should re-evaluate a philosophy that served us well for way more than a century. Opening this Pandora’s box shows to have all sorts of implications for I-O practitioners as well as organizations. But one [thing] after another…

SIOP has been working to determine members’ needs and the best path forward in the licensing of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists by state boards of psychology. The topic has received much discussion over the years. A key point in  this discussion is that according to the laws in the majority of states, as well as in SIOP and APA licensing policy, individuals who want to use the title “psychologist” must be licensed, although state licensing generally includes eligibility requirements that are often difficult if not inappropriate for I-O psychology. The result has been that most SIOP members are not licensed, and are unable to officially label themselves “psychologist,” even though they are trained in psychology and apply psychological principles in their work. Currently, there is no established and relevant standard for I-O practitioners to demonstrate that they possess a requisite level of knowledge in behavioral science.

Gender identity and expression have become a trending topic in the public sphere, as well as within organizations. While the transgender community has not historically been prominently featured within the media, there has been a recent surge in the extent to which the transgender community has been highlighted within the popular press. This increased focus on transgender populations has improved societal awareness of transgender individuals’ rights (or lack thereof). Activism towards achieving equality for those with minority gender identities has increased as people become more aware of the plight of transgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary individuals, all of who express their gender differently than expected for someone of their biological sex. However, anti-transgender legislation and sentiments have also surfaced as part of the societal dialogue surrounding freedom of gender expression. We will briefly outline the legalities surrounding gender identity within the US today below. We will only cover US laws for the purposes of this article, because culture and laws surrounding gender expression vary widely across countries. For this reason, it is always a best practice to become familiar with laws surrounding gender expression in the countries in which you are operating or plan to operate within.

Note.  The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of U.S. Customs and Border Protection or the U.S. Federal Government. 

An important aspect of the history of I-O psychology is our academic lineage.  Much of our field’s knowledge and training is transferred through teaching and academic mentorship.  Most SIOP members entered the field of I-O psychology by studying under another I-O psychologist during graduate school.  Nearly 20 years ago, Frank Landy(1997) published his final version of the I-O family tree (previous versions were published in 1991 and 1992).  Landy (1997) focused his tree on the lineage of SIOP past presidents and his tree traces their lineage all the way back to William Wundt who established the first laboratory for psychology and is known as the father of psychology.

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists should embody the scientist–practitioner model. Too often, however, we see that new graduates lack critical practitioner skills (Steiner & Yancey, 2013). Courses on consulting and business skills are, on average, only offered once every five years in I-O programs (Tett, Brown, Walser, Tonidandel, & Simonet, 2013). Furthermore, SIOP’s Guidelines for Education and Training do not adequately address these key areas; no competency area addresses the importance of developing new client solutions (Byrne et al., 2014). Employers of I-O psychologists, however, want new hires to be skilled in making presentations, project management, report writing, and business development (Steiner & Yancey, 2013). Many argue that these are critical I-O skills and suggest that I-O students seek out ways to learn these skills while in school (Byrne et al., 2014; Steiner & Yancey, 2013).