Our record-setting SIOP 2017 conference is just around the corner. Many new opportunities for learning and networking are featured at SIOP 2017, and here’s your guide to the highlights in Orlando! For additional detail on sessions and speakers, see the Conference Program article in the January 2017 TIP, or use SIOP’s searchable program.

 “The Bridge: Connecting Science and Practice” is a TIP column that seeks to help facilitate additional learning and knowledge transfer in order to encourage sound, evidence-based practice. It can provide academics with an opportunity to discuss the potential and/or realized practical implications of their research, as well as learn about cutting edge practice issues or questions that could inform new research programs or studies. For practitioners, it provides opportunities to learn about the latest research findings that could prompt new techniques, solutions, or services that would benefit the external client community. It also provides practitioners with an opportunity to highlight key practice issues, challenges, trends, etc., that may benefit from additional research. In this issue of the column we are pleased to coordinate with Rob Snyder in sharing a cutting edge practice and trend which I-O scientists, practitioners, and academics may find beneficial to learn more about: applied social cognitive neuroscience (ASCN).

In this issue, Sharon Parker and I have teamed up to begin to answer two common questions about organizational neuroscience (ON). Why should I bother with ON? How would I use ON? To this end, we discuss an example to illustrate the value added of an ON approach to a classic topic in I-O psychology, namely work design. We focus on research in our example. For an excellent list of ON examples with practical utility see The Bridge column in this issue of TIP.

Sharon Parker is one of the world’s leading experts in work design and she’s currently working on several streams of research to update the field via the Centre for Transformative Work Design. She has published in Annual Review of Psychology and Academy of Management Journal to name a few. She is a Fellow of SIOP and has recently been awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. To say she’s qualified to coauthor this issue is a massive understatement!

As we begin this article, we cannot help remembering a specific scene from the movie “Hidden Figures” when Dorothy Vaughan walks back from the IBM room to her desk.  When the new electronic systems are brought in to replace NASA’s human computers, Dorothy is the first one to recognize the threat; she begins to learn and subsequently trains her staff in FORTRAN programming and coding.  This is perhaps an allegory of the role of technology in jobs today.  The advent of technology has changed the landscape of the modern workplace, and it will continue to do so!  In this article, we have outlined how technology and I-O interact and what that means for I-O graduate students.  We are building a case for technology-related training to develop well-rounded I-O professionals.

Just before his untimely death in 1947, Kurt Lewin paid a hasty visit to his friend and collaborator Dorin Cartwright, overcome by what Cartwright (1979) would call a “brilliant insight” (p. 179). Upon arriving at Cartwright’s home “in a state of a great excitement,” Lewin proclaimed, “Marx was right”:

When I asked Lewin if he could be more specific about what he had in mind, he said that it was now obvious to him that behavior could not be adequately understood simply in terms of cognitive structure, wishes, and expectations, and that some way would have to be found for dealing with the constraints, opportunities, resources and pressures that originate in the social, political, and technological environment…I have no doubt that if he had been able to develop this new line of thinking, social psychological theory would be considerably different today. (p. 179)

What to make of this fascinating piece of history? Was Lewin right about Marx? Was Cartwright right about “social psychological theory [being] considerably different today,” had Lewin lived to see his “brilliant insight” through?