Industrial and Organizational Psychology in the U.S. Navy and the Talent Management Center of Excellence

The opinions and assertions expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, Department of Defense (DoD), or the RAND Corporation.

Introduction

The influence of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology and human resources (HR) is profound in every element of an enterprise—even within the Department of Defense (DoD) or military elements of the United States (U.S.) Government. More specifically, how does the system support the over 330,000 people (U.S. Department of Defense, 2024), working around the globe with continuous 24/7 operations, in the most dangerous jobs and settings, with a significant number of employees out of contact for months at a time? That is exactly what we are going to explore as we look at how I-O applies to the U.S. Navy and its Talent Management Center of Excellence (TMCoE) within the U.S. Navy Personnel Command (NPC)—as the first article in the I-O at Work articles in TIP.

This article will explore the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) in the NPC and how I-O is embedded in the Navy’s structure, with details on the TMCoE, I-O Research and Practices for three Navy talent management efforts, and the Course for the Future of I-O in the Navy for Change Management and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

SIOP in the Navy Personnel Command

The I-O professionals who work within the MyNavy HR enterprise, led by the Chief of Navy Personnel, understand the challenges of supporting an immensely large organization, working globally with continuous operations, in dangerous settings. Because of the scope and scale of functions, the entire MyNavy HR enterprise could be viewed as a talent management organization which leverages I-O and HR professionals, whether as a uniformed service member, government civilian, or contractor partner.

The Navy’s People Operations Structure

The Navy is an organization of over 330,000 people (U.S. Department of Defense, 2024), with MyNavy HR in charge of supporting the individuals and leaders across the enterprise. The Chief of Navy Personnel, through MyNavy HR, sets the strategy, priorities, and policy for Navy personnel and readiness with support from three supporting commanders—Commander Navy Education and Training, Commander Navy Recruiting Command, and Commander Navy Personnel Command. Each has a unique contribution to the MyNavy HR operations—training and education, recruiting and accessions, and sailor talent management and family support, respectively.

NPC is the operations center for all things related to sailors and families. The range of functions is immense—sailor job assignments, pay and benefits (through the MyNavy Career Center), sailor and family support programs, prisoner of war/missing in action operations, sailor records and performance management, selection and promotion board operations, and even Navy brigs and detention centers. Within NPC, the Talent Management Center of Excellence (TMCoE) was established in 2021 as a research and innovation accelerator for a broad scope of talent management requirements.

I-O in Navy Talent Management

The TMCoE has a robust concentration of I-O psychologists conducting innovative research and transitioning efforts to use within the Navy. Furthermore, TMCoE has been led by a succession of two I-O psychologists: Michael Schwerin and Ben Baran. Both were confirmed to the rank of rear admiral (O7) and are the first and highest ranking Navy officers who are also SIOP members.1

Michael Schwerin (Rear Admiral, Retired) earned his PhD from Southern Illinois University in 1994 in Applied Experimental Psychology, served as the NPC Deputy Commander and TMCoE Director from 2021 until his Navy retirement in 2024, and is currently a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Rear Admiral Ben Baran earned his PhD in organizational science from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in 2011, was selected to the rank of Rear Admiral and nominated for these positions in 2024 to present, and is an associate professor of management at Cleveland State University.

The TMCoE team grew from a team of five in 2021 to 25 in 2024, supported by partnerships with research teams at the Naval Postgraduate School, the Office of Naval Research, and the Naval Information Warfare Center-Pacific, as well as industry partners, including BetterUp, Guardian Defense Group, and the Cognitive Performance Group. The establishment of the TMCoE and partnerships with the Navy and industry partners blend research and practice for the Navy’s talent management efforts, as elaborated on in the next section.

I-O Research and Practice for Navy Talent Management

The TMCoE I-O psychologists conduct innovative research and transition efforts to use within the Navy. The three TMCoE lines of effort are the Navy Leadership Assessment Program (NLAP), MyNavy Coaching (MNC), and the Navy Performance Management Administration (NPMA). Each effort included I-O psychologists in critical roles, whether as internal team members or from partner organizations, to support these Navy-wide talent management initiatives.

Navy Leadership Assessment Program (NLAP)

NLAP is part of the command qualification process, whereby those candidates entering the command qualification process participate in assessment, evaluation, and feedback to determine which officers are best suited for command and where development is necessary. NLAP includes cognitive and noncognitive assessments, operational psychologist interviews based on assessment results, an operational psychologist debrief to the command qualification board, senior leader-led community-centric scenario-based panel interviews, operational psychologist debrief with the candidate, and candidate coaching for development, if desired by the candidate (U.S. Navy, 2025b). Officer communities have the option to include a multirater assessment, writing assignments, and work samples. NLAP has been fully embraced by the Navy Surface Warfare community (Meredith, 2023), engineering duty officers, and submarine forces, and piloted with approximately eight additional officer communities. Some of these officer communities are exploring NLAP use for senior enlisted leaders or earlier in a sailor’s career, where developmental feedback has the potential for greater career-long effects.

MyNavy Coaching (MNC)

MNC is an effort to foster a community and culture of coaching for sailor development with three aims: (a) support a culture that values coaching as a complement to mentoring and performance feedback, (b) train and certify sailor coaches, and (c) augment the NLAP team by providing coaching to NLAP participants for personal or professional development. MNC trained coaches through a partnership with Flatter Inc., but now it is done through a cadre of internal Navy coaching subject matter experts. Similarly, NLAP coaching was supported through a partnership with BetterUp, but now NLAP coach support has been absorbed by MNC coaches.

Navy Performance Management Administration (NPMA)

NPMA is the latest iteration of efforts over the past 25 years to modernize and evolve the Navy’s performance management system and policy to better align with organizational needs. The Navy’s current system relies on computer-based form completion but paper-based routing, signature, submission, and scanning into sailor personnel files. Beyond the technical modernization needs, the Navy’s performance management system (NAVFIT-98; U.S. Navy, 2025a) is plagued with criticisms of trait inflation (Cordial, 2017), inadequate information for personal and professional sailor development (Naito, 2012), and trait and value statements that are not observable workplace behaviors (Brock, 1999) or focused on warfighting competencies (Cordial, 2017; DePaolis & Ginetti, 2019). These sailor criticisms are echoed by a recent Government Accountability Office review that calls for system improvements (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2024).

 

TMCoE has partnered with the Naval Postgraduate School and Naval Information Warfare Center-Pacific to build a prototype new performance management system for a modern, cloud-based system with modules for expectation setting, midcycle feedback, performance evaluation, and promotion recommendation (potential assessment). Multiple I-O psychologists on the team have and continue to work on refining the prototype and conducting user experience testing with sailors on shore and afloat commands to be ready for a future implementation decision.

Charting a Course for the Future

 I-O and HR professionals within the U.S. Navy must prepare for the future. Change readiness and AI are two main areas that need to be considered across all efforts as they are implemented.

Change Readiness Within a Tradition-Based Organization

Cultural change readiness is probably the greatest barrier to implementing change within our people systems. Despite the well-documented shortcomings described above, the Navy is a tradition-based organization that carefully assesses risk and is biased toward maintaining the status quo. The next major hurdle for I-O psychologists and HR officers in key Navy leadership positions is to develop a change-management plan, with a close eye on maintaining as much of the previous culture and tradition as possible.

Survivor Bias

One likely factor in play is survivor bias. In the context of performance, sailors retain, promote, and rise to leadership positions; they are the leading voices, leaders, and decision makers to promote change to the very system in which they survived. Conversely, those who are disadvantaged by legacy systems find their way out of the Navy, and the call for change exits the conversation. Put another way, if legacy systems worked well enough for you to be promoted to senior levels in the organization, how interested would you be in improving that system, and how might you convince your peers—other senior leaders— to do the same? Survivors are probably not likely to be the change agents in the system that they benefited from.

Familiarity and Comfort With Change

Another factor affecting change readiness is our familiarity and comfort with change. The innovations emerging from TMCoE are new or efforts that were tried and stalled. The last time the Navy had large-scale human performance system change was back in 1996. The number of sailors who remember and can share their change experience is rapidly dwindling. Change from a system that sailors have used their entire careers is incredibly difficult. Despite that difficulty, sailors report wanting a change to how we manage our talent, including change to the performance evaluation and promotion screening processes (Hartmann & Ahn, 2022; U.S.  Navy, 2021). The Navy’s job is to instill confidence and assure sailors that they can deliver the change they are asking for. This is precisely where we need our I-O psychologists to reduce the implementation risks.

Riding the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Wave

AI is here to stay—it is a powerful toolset that needs to be well thought out, with ethical considerations, and we must carefully plan where we want to have humans in the decision-making loop. The U.S. Air Force completed a series of RAND Corporation studies to both explore potential AI applications in talent management (Schulker et al., 2021), the ethical considerations (Schulker, Walsh, et al., 2024), and begin developing use cases (Schulker, Williams, et al., 2024). Recently, the U.S. Army described its AI approach for more efficient promotion board screening. They use AI to sort through the large number of known poor records to remove that workload and save more competitive records for human record reviewers (Nieberg, 2025).

The potential also exists to remove the bias and variability of promotion board briefers with an AI-generated avatar briefing all records rather than human board briefers. NPC currently uses some basic machine-learning tools for record markup that reduce bias and improve accuracy. The Navy ought to continue this walk with technology and create systems that are AI-ready and follow the Air Force example by setting the conditions and use cases for AI in performance management and promotion board processes.

Conclusion

Throughout the entire MyNavy HR organization, there are both senior executive leaders and distinct pockets of embedded I-O expertise helping our Navy meet our global mission and national defense priorities. We constantly draw upon our foundational understanding of psychology to build, advise, and lead in our respective organizations. Whether making contributions in recruiting, training, assignments, policy, or talent management (as focused on in this article), I-O psychologists and HR professionals are making profound and lasting contributions. The technical, cultural, and institutional challenges are voluminous, but I-O professionals within the U.S. Navy bring thought- and experience-based leadership that offers a multifaceted appreciation for the range of solutions, risks, and rewards for the MyNavy HR leadership team, offering support within the daily NPC and TMCoE initiatives, as well as charting courses for the future.

Note

¹ Brigadier General Dana Born (U.S. Air Force, retired) is the first I-O psychologist to achieve the military rank at the O7 paygrade.

References

Brock, T. (August, 1999). Nobody asked me but…Take equal opportunity off the FitRep. Proceedings, 125(8/1,158). https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1999/august/nobody-asked-me-buttake-equal-opportunity-fitrep

Cordial, B. E. (2017, December). Time to review the FitRep paradigm. Proceedings, 143(12/1,378). https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/december/time-review-fitrep-paradigm

DePaolis, R. A., II, & Ginnetti, A. R. (September, 2019). A modern force? What happened to talent management?! Proceedings, 145(9/1,399). https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/september/modern-force-what-happened-talent-management

Hartmann, L., & Ahn, S. Y. (2022). Assessment of Navy performance evaluation. Technical Report NPS-DDM-22-004. Naval Postgraduate School. https://hdl.handle.net/10945/71846

Meredith, M. (2023, November 28). Navy Leadership Assessment Program (NLAP) enhances surface force leadership. https://www.surfpac.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/3601020/navy-leadership-assessment-program-nlap-enhances-surface-force-leadership/

Naito, N. A. (December, 2012). What’s missing in Navy personnel performance? Proceedings, 138(12/1,318). https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012/december/whats-missing-navy-personnel-performance

Nieberg, P. (2025, October 16). Army promotion boards will use AI to “augment” selection process. Task & Purpose. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-promotion-boards-ai/

Schulker, D., Lim, N., Matthews, L. J., Grimm, G. E., Lawrence, A., & Firoz, P. (2021). Can artificial intelligence help improve Air Force talent management? An exploratory application (RR-A812-1). RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA812-1.html

Schulker, D., Walsh, M., Calkins, A., Graham, M., Montemayor, C. K., Robbert, A. A., Robson, S., Setodji, C. M., Snoke, J., Williams, J., & Zhang, L. A. (2024). Leveraging machine learning to improve human resource management: Volume 1, Key findings and recommendations for policymakers (RR-A1745-1). RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1745-1.html

Schulker, D., Williams, J., Montemayor, C. K., Zhang, L. A., & Walsh, M. (2024). The personnel records scoring system: Volume 3, A methodology for designing tools to support Air Force human resources decision making (RR-A1745-3). RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1745-3.html

U.S. Department of Defense. (2024, November 6). Active and reserve United States military force personnel in 2023, by service branch and reserve component. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/232330/us-military-force-numbers-by-service-branch-and-reserve-component/

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2024, November 13). Military officer performance: Actions needed to fully incorporate performance evaluation key practices (GAO-25-106618). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-106618

U.S. Navy. (2021). Task Force One Navy: Final report. Department of Defense. https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/26/2002570959/-1/-1/1/TASK%20FORCE%20ONE%20NAVY%20FINAL%20REPORT.PDF

U.S. Navy. (2025a, July 30). NAVFIT98A V33 availability and utility [NAVADMIN 159/25]. https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Portals/55/Messages/NAVADMIN/NAV2025/NAV25159.pdf?ver=LNpXkdSmXbX-EqY-gq5mpw%3d%3d

U.S. Navy. (2025b). Navy Leadership Assessment Program. https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Career-Management/Talent-Management/NLAP/