Bio:
My name is Michael Zickar and I am the Sandman Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Bowling Green State University. I am proud to be a SIOP Fellow, and I have served as SIOP Historian as well as previously serving on the Executive Board (2010-2014). I also served as Chair of the Department of Psychology at BGSU for 12 years. I received my PhD in industrial-organizational psychology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have attended every SIOP conference (with the exception of one after the birth of his daughter) since 1992.
My research is in the area of psychological measurement as well as personnel selection and history of applied psychology, and has been published in top journals in the field. I am on the editorial boards of Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Research Methods, and Journal of Business and Psychology. As director of BGSU’s Institute for Psychological Research and Application, I collaborate with doctoral students on consulting projects with organizations big (Fortune 500) and small (local nonprofits).
Goals Statement:
Like many of you, I feel lucky to have stumbled in the field of IO psychology and to have made it a career that has been rewarding and satisfying. The work of SIOP over the years has been important in promoting our field to audiences who have lots of uncertainty about what it is we do. The External Affairs officer has input on the role of SIOP’s interface with other organizations such as SHRM, APA, APS, and international organizations. These relationships are crucial to strengthening the influence of IO psychology and need to be nurtured and continued. The work that SIOP’s visibility committee does is indispensable in helping promote IO psychology as a career, working to communicate our career to future generations, such as high school students and undecided college students. In addition, increased visibility helps us reach additional organizations who might not even realize that they could benefit from our services.
My goals include:
- Promoting the excellent work that is already being done by SIOP and the visibility committee.
- Enhancing outreach being done to high school students and undecided undergraduate students. One way to do this would be to collect testimonials from current doctoral students or recent graduates about their journey to graduate school and the profession. These could be done in video form, shared on social media and hosted on the website. In particular, we can use this outreach to reach underrepresented populations.
- Broadening the reach with other professional organizations to find new ways of partnering.
