2026 SIOP Achievement and Best Paper Award Recipients Honored

Each year, SIOP and the SIOP Foundation present numerous awards recognizing excellence in professional and student work.

The Achievement and Best Paper Award category recognizes outstanding achievements and publications in industrial and organizational psychology. It highlights the development of scientific knowledge, practical relevance, and rigorous research methods central to the field. The awards are designed to honor graduate scholars and practitioners who contribute to workforce improvement through data-driven insights and pedagogical advancements.

SIOP Achievement and Best Paper Award Recipients include:

• Rains Wallace Dissertation Award: Steven Zhou for the dissertation, The Dark Side of Shared Leadership: An Application of Agent-Based Modeling Based on Lab Experiment Data.
• William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award: Christopher M. Berry, Filip Lievens, Charlene Zhang, and Paul R. Sackett for the article Insights from an updated personnel selection meta-analytic matrix: Revisiting general mental ability tests’ role in the validity–diversity trade-off.
• Scott Myers Award for Applied Psychology in the Workplace for Amazon’s Job Profile Library (JPL) research program team. Nivedita Prabhu, Dawn Sepehr, John Steele, Joy Oliver, and Anthony Boyce.
• Raymond A. Katzell Public Impact Award: Connie Wanberg.
• Joyce and Robert Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance: Loes Abrahams, Jasmine Vergauwe, and Filip De Fruyt for their article Within-person personality variability in the work context: A blessing or a curse for job performance?
• Wiley Award for Excellence in Organizational Surveys: Kyle Lundby and Kristofer Fenlason for the ZAM Initiative (Zoos, Aquariums and Museums Engagement Survey Initiative) and ongoing practice and research project.
• Jeanneret Award for Excellence in the Study of Individual or Group Assessment:

Nick Koenig, Scott Tonidandel, Isaac Thompson, Betsy Albritton, Farshad Koohifar, Georgi Yankov, Andrew Speer, Jay Hardy, Carter Gibson, Chris Frost, Mengqiao (MQ) Liu, Denver McNeney, John Capman, Shane Lowery, Matthew Kitching, Anjali Nimbkar, Anthony Boyce, Tianjun Sun, Feng Guo, Hanyi Min, Bo Zhang, Logan Lebanoff, Henry Phillips, and Charles Newton for their article Improving measurement and prediction in personnel selection through the application of machine learning.

• Schmidt-Hunter Meta-Analysis Award: Songqi Liu, Daniel Watts, Jie Feng, Ying Wu, and Jingfeng Yin for their publication Unpacking the effects of socialization programs on newcomer retention: A meta-analytic review of field experiments.
• Joel Lefkowitz Early Career Award for Humanistic I-O Psychology: Keaton Fletcher for his work on topics that advance the cause of worker dignity, economic and social justice; promote the organization’s contribution to the common good; or otherwise illustrate a noteworthy humanistic perspective in the workplace.

SIOP also presents awards in the categories of Distinguished and Career Awards, Research Grants, and Scholarships and Fellowships. More information on these winners and recognized SIOP members will soon be available in the SIOP Salutes digital brochure, which will be published online prior to the SIOP Annual Conference.

SIOP Award recipients will be additionally featured in a social media campaign spanning SIOP’s X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts later this spring.