Leveraging I-O Psychology During Times of Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Source note: Based on a May 2, 2026, SIOP Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA, roundtable discussion chaired by Mariangela Battista. Quotations are lightly cleaned for readability; specific speaker names are intentionally omitted. The authors served as joint facilitators of this roundtable and thank participants for engaging in thoughtful and meaningful conversations about the uncertainties faced and potential mitigations.

Introduction

This may be the defining question for industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology practice today: When the rules are shifting, the tools are evolving, and the social contract at work feels increasingly fragile, how can organizations remain fair, humane, evidence-based, and accountable? That question energized a SIOP roundtable at the 2026 annual conference, where I-O psychologists engaged in a practical, candid, and deeply felt conversation about what it means to practice amid converging uncertainty. The discussion was not abstract. It reflected the real pressures practitioners face as they advise leaders, protect fairness, support managers and employees, evaluate emerging technologies, and help organizations make sound decisions in conditions where clarity is partial, stakes are high, and the ground keeps shifting.

I-O psychologists are accustomed to complexity. The field is grounded in the science of work and the application of research to organizational, group, and individual programs, including job analysis, selection, training, performance management, organizational design, leadership, employee experience, and change (SIOP, 2024). Fink and Napper (2025) emphasized that I-O practitioners help leaders design, manage, and improve systems related to manager and team effectiveness, employee listening, job architecture, organizational wellness, psychological safety, and change management. That systems orientation matters now more than ever because the uncertainty facing organizations is not a single change event and does not affect a single domain. It is multifaceted and all-encompassing: shifting regulations and legal interpretations, organizational fear around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and fairness, manager strain and declining engagement, and the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence into knowledge work.

Three themes dominated the discussion: preserving fairness amid regulatory changes and uncertainty; supporting leaders and motivating employees amid instability; and adopting AI without compromising critical thinking, ethics, or human accountability.

Roundtable theme	Core I-O question
DEI, fairness, and regulatory uncertainty	How can organizations preserve fairness and lawful inclusion when language, metrics, and programs are being scrutinized or restricted by federal policy?
Leadership, respect, and engagement	How can leaders create stability, trust, motivation, and sustainable workplaces when managers themselves are stressed and disengaged?
AI and knowledge work	How can organizations use AI as a tool for augmentation without eroding human judgment, agency, privacy, and accountability?

 

1. Fairness Under Regulatory Changes and Uncertainty

The first discussion focused on the changing regulatory environment and its impact on DEI-related work, particularly for federal agencies and contractors. Roundtable background included recent executive orders affecting federal DEI programs and contractor requirements, litigation over those orders, and a 2026 Department of Justice settlement with IBM.

• EO 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”(January 20, 2025): Directed federal agencies to eliminate DEI offices, positions, materials, performance requirements, programs, contracts, and grants.
• EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”(January 21, 2025): Revoked EO 11246, ended OFCCP enforcement of federal contractor affirmative action requirements, and required contractors to certify they do not operate prohibited DEI programs.
• EO 14398, “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors”(March 26, 2026): Required federal contracts and subcontracts to prohibit “racially discriminatory” DEI practices, permit audits of contractor DEI programs, and warned of penalties including termination or debarment.
• April 2026 IBM settlement:IBM agreed to pay $17 million to resolve DOJ allegations that it unlawfully used race, sex, and other protected characteristics in compensation, hiring, promotion, interviews, and development opportunities tied to diversity targets.
• National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education v. Trump(Case 1:25-cv-00333): On February 21, 2025, a Maryland federal district court temporarily blocked key portions of the January 2025 DEI executive orders; on March 14, 2025, the Fourth Circuit stayed the injunction, allowing the orders to proceed during appeal. (The injunction remained in effect at the time of the SIOP roundtable.)

The discussion was not a legal analysis. It was an applied I-O conversation about what happens inside organizations when fear, ambiguity, values, and compliance pressure collide.

Participants described organizations responding in four broad ways: halting work that might be perceived negatively by the federal government; discontinuing DEI-labeled activities while continuing EEO and civil rights obligations; continuing as before and accepting risk; or rebranding and modifying programs so that lawful fairness work continues, with changes to language, metrics, and structure. The fourth path appeared most common. DEI titles were being replaced with terms such as employee experience, belonging, justice, or well-being. Employee Resource Groups and affinity groups were being discontinued or reframed to focus on leadership development, allyship, and universal participation. Some demographic analyses, DEI dashboards, and subgroup reporting were being limited or removed.

How do companies continue to ensure that we have fairness in the way we do things, and that there is diversity within the company, when we are not allowed to even track any of this?

For I-O psychologists, this is the central measurement dilemma. Fairness is difficult to manage if organizations stop examining whether experiences and outcomes differ across groups. At the same time, participants recognized that many organizations operate in a high-fear environment, where even routine analysis may be viewed as risky. The practical contribution for I-O psychologists is to help organizations separate legal requirements from fear-based overcorrection, preserve lawful and job-related fairness practices, and keep managers focused on inclusive, respectful leadership behaviors that do not depend on a formal DEI label.

Participants also identified a possible silver lining: broader language may invite people who previously felt excluded from identity-specific programs to participate more fully. Universal inclusion, allyship, employee experience, and intersectionality may provide a path to broader engagement, provided organizations do not use those terms as substitutes for addressing real barriers.

Organizational response	Primary risk	I-O contribution
Stop all related work	Fairness monitoring, employee trust, and early warning signals may be lost. EEO and civil rights obligations may be blurred with discretionary DEI initiatives.	Partner with legal counsel to clarify what is required, what must stop or change, and what can continue. Document decisions and communicate clearly.
Stop DEI-labeled programs; continue EEO/civil rights requirements	Valuable data and initiatives may be lost, and employees may misinterpret changes as abandonment of fairness or values.	Maintain lawful, job-related fairness practices; sustain legally required actions; explain changes transparently.
Continue as before	Potential legal, contract, reputational, or political exposure.	Review programs for job-relatedness, access, consistency, outcomes, documentation, and defensibility. Advise on risk mitigation.
Rebrand and modify	Language may change without meaningful inclusion, or needed analysis may be avoided.	Translate fairness values into lawful behaviors, manager expectations, employee listening, open-access development, and inclusive work design.

 

2. Leadership When Managers Are Also Struggling

The second discussion shifted from regulatory uncertainty to leadership in an ever-unstable environment. Participants described a sharp shift in their managers’ lived experience. Supervisors who once felt competent, accomplished, and empowered are now navigating political and social divisions, market pressures, AI-driven change, resource cuts, COVID-related aftereffects, employee well-being needs, and the expectation that they remain “always on” for their teams.

Managers are now expressing higher levels of stress, loneliness, and just pure unhappiness at work, even as they want to do well.

This is a critical point for I-O practice. Many leadership interventions implicitly assume that managers are the delivery mechanism for organizational change, yet managers’ effectiveness depends not only on skill but also on the demands, resources, uncertainty, and emotional load embedded in their roles. The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model emphasizes that high job demands can produce strain and burnout when not balanced by resources such as autonomy, feedback, role clarity, and social support (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). More recent research linking leadership and JD-R theory reinforces the idea that leadership effectiveness is shaped by the work context surrounding leaders, not simply by individual capability or training (Tummers & Bakker, 2021). In practice, this means that when managers are depleted, lonely, demoralized, or unsure, organizations should not respond only with another toolkit or training course. Roundtable participants shared examples to address the constant strain and fatigue among managers, such as clarifying priorities, identifying what to stop doing, strengthening peer and senior-leader support, setting boundaries around change load, and building a more realistic model of sustainable leadership.

Respect emerged as one of the most important levers of leadership. Participants described it as foundational to trust, collaboration, innovation, inclusion, and performance. Respect is not merely interpersonal niceness; it is a condition that creates psychological safety. Edmondson’s (1999) research defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, enabling people to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge assumptions without fear of embarrassment or punishment. In this sense, respect must be “all ways”: respect for the team and respect for the manager. When respect is mutual and embedded in the team climate, it enables productive disagreement, risk-taking, early surfacing of problems, and engagement under unstable external conditions.

The most hopeful leadership frame holds that uncertainty and possibility are linked. Leaders cannot always restore certainty, but they can help people avoid the threat-rigidity response, which narrows attention and leads people or organizations to rely on familiar routines when adaptive behavior is needed (Staw et al., 1981). Leaders must not “freeze” during uncertainty; instead, they must create conditions for learning, experimentation, and adaptation. Furr and Furr (2022) likewise frame uncertainty as a source of possibility, arguing that people can learn to navigate the unknown by reframing it, taking action, and using practical tools to discover new options. In that sense, uncertainty can become the raw material for innovation rather than merely a source of threat, especially when leaders encourage small steps, rapid learning, shared sensemaking, and disciplined testing of new ideas (West & Farr, 1990).

We are teaching leaders to reframe uncertainty as a learning opportunity for their team. OK, so we aren’t sure what to do, let’s decide on something we can pilot test. You never fail when you’re learning.

Participants also emphasized self-care and boundaries as leadership practices. Hobbies, decompression, sleep, meditation, reduced smartphone notifications, and separate work and personal devices may sound simple, but they have significant implications for I-O psychology practice: sustainable performance depends on recovery. Research on work recovery identifies psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery experiences, and control over nonwork time as mechanisms for recovering from job demands (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). The stressor-detachment model further suggests that when people cannot mentally disengage from work, job stressors are more likely to carry over as strain and impaired well-being (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015). For leaders, this means that self-care and boundary management are not peripheral wellness activities; they are central to effective leadership. Leaders cannot consistently model “calm in the storm,” respect, and adaptability if their own nervous systems are continually overloaded.

Leadership challenge	What leaders need to do	Why it matters
Uncertainty and ambiguity	Take small steps, experiment, and keep teams moving forward.	Freezing spreads through teams; action creates momentum and learning.
Declining respect and civility	Model mutual respect in everyday interactions and disagreement.	Respect enables psychological safety, trust, inclusion, collaboration, and performance.
Manager depletion	Clarify priorities, reduce unnecessary demands, strengthen support, build boundaries, and foster recovery.	Managers cannot support others sustainably if they are depleted.
Technology and policy disruption	Treat human experience as central to implementation.	Technology and policy changes succeed or fail through people.

 

3. AI, Knowledge Work, and Human Accountability

The third discussion focused on artificial intelligence and its disruption of knowledge work. Participants did not frame AI as purely negative. AI can improve data analysis, content creation, client service, workflow efficiency, and organizational capacity. The group’s concern was overreliance, especially when AI becomes a substitute for thinking rather than a tool that supports it.

Several participants raised concerns that students, interns, and early-career professionals may rely on generative AI before they have developed sufficient domain knowledge to evaluate its output. The concern was not merely about cheating or shortcuts. It was about professional formation: if people do not grapple with concepts, evaluate evidence, test assumptions, and build judgment, they may lose agency over their expertise. UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI in education and research emphasizes that although generative AI may appear easy to use, sophisticated outputs require skilled human input and critical evaluation before use (Miao & Holmes, 2023). Similarly, emerging research on student overreliance on AI dialogue systems suggests potential risks to critical cognitive capabilities, including critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and decision-making (Zhai et al., 2024). The leadership and developmental challenge, therefore, is not to discourage AI use but to ensure that early-career professionals learn to use it as a tool for inquiry, critique, and augmentation rather than as a substitute for the effortful development of expertise.

The group also discussed AI as a strategic issue. From a business-profit perspective, participants described the current technological change as an “AI arms race.” From an organizational effectiveness perspective, AI agents and chatbots enable teams to redesign work, expand service capacity, and operate with fewer additional hires. The I-O question is therefore not whether AI will affect work, but how work should be redesigned to augment AI while preserving human judgment and accountability.

There is value in the tool, but humans still need to be intentionally included in decision-making processes.

Participants repeatedly emphasized the intentional use of AI. Organizations should clarify when AI is an aid and when it is a hindrance; what data AI tools can access or capture; where data are stored; who can access them; and where human review is required. These questions are especially important in settings involving sensitive employee, client, patient, or assessment data. For I-O psychologists, AI adoption is not merely a technology implementation issue. It spans work design, selection, training, ethics, performance, culture, and leadership. The field is well-positioned to help organizations define appropriate use, preserve human accountability, build critical evaluation skills, and redesign workflows to augment rather than deskill people.

 

AI question for I-O psychologists	Why it matters
Where should AI augment work, and where should it not be used?	Clarifies appropriate use and protects judgment-sensitive tasks.
What human knowledge is required to evaluate AI output?	Prevents deskilling and preserves early-career expertise.
What data are captured, stored, reused, or exposed?	Protects privacy, confidentiality, and employee trust.
Who is accountable for AI-assisted work?	Ensures that responsibility remains with people, not tools.
How should jobs and workflows be redesigned?	Moves AI from ad hoc use to intentional work design.

 

4. What This Moment Asks of I-O Psychology

Taken together, the roundtable revealed a profession at the complex intersection of law, leadership, technology, ethics, and human experience. The uncertainty participants described is not temporary noise around otherwise stable systems. It has become part of the operating environment, with important implications for I-O practice.

Implication	What I-O psychologists can contribute
Translate values into defensible systems	Help organizations preserve fairness through job-related, evidence-based, legally grounded practices.
Separate law from fear	Support leaders in distinguishing actual requirements from overcorrection, rumor, and fear-based decision making.
Make respect measurable and actionable	Treat respect as a leadership behavior linked to psychological safety, trust, innovation, inclusion, and performance.
Support managers as humans	Design leadership systems that address manager strain, recovery, boundaries, and sustainable performance.
Rebuild capacity for learning and resilience	Help teams experiment, reflect, recover, and adapt rather than freeze in the face of uncertainty.
Shape responsible AI adoption	Guide work design, governance, training, privacy, and accountability for AI-enabled work.

The common thread is accountability. Organizations remain accountable for fairness even as language and civil rights applications evolve. Leaders remain accountable for respect and the employee experience, even when they are strained. People remain accountable for decisions and outputs, even when AI assists with the work. I-O psychologists can and must help organizations maintain these accountabilities while adapting to new contexts and constraints.

Conclusion

The SIOP roundtable made clear that uncertainty is not a side issue for the profession. It is now a central feature of organizational life. Drastic changes to executive orders and regulations, complex legal risks, rising social divisions, AI disruption, and managerial depletion are reshaping the conditions under which people work and the conditions under which I-O psychologists practice. These roundtable themes should be understood as practitioner perspectives rather than formal legal guidance, consensus recommendations, or empirical findings.

The opportunity for the field is to bring clarity, build adaptability and resilience at all levels, and avoid treating the environment as simple or one-dimensional. I-O psychologists can help organizations ask better questions to cut through uncertainty and design measures that account for complexity: What does the law actually require? Which fairness signals are being lost? What data are needed to understand risk and opportunity? What do managers really need to lead sustainably? Where does AI help, and where does it threaten judgment or trust? Which human capabilities must be developed and protected as work changes?

In uncertain times, the value of I-O psychology may be less about providing a single perfect answer and more about helping organizations keep their footing: evidence over fear, respect over reaction, learning over freezing, and human accountability over abdication to technology.

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