The goal of focal articles in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice is to present new ideas or different takes on existing ideas and stimulate a conversation in the form of comment articles that extend the arguments in the focal article or that present new ideas stimulated by those articles. The two focal articles in this issue stimulated a wide range of reactions and a good deal of constructive input.

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology has begun to shed its reputation as a handmaiden to corporate and managerial interests, in part, through its engagement with humanitarian concerns. However, as highlighted by recent commentary, I-O psychology still has a decidedly POSH perspective on the world; that is, it has focused on Professionals who hold Official jobs in a formal economy and who enjoy relative Safety from discrimination while also living in High-income countries. This POSH perspective reflects an underlying bias away from people living in multidimensional poverty. We empirically illustrate some of the connections between a POSH perspective and poverty by reviewing 100 years of research in I-O psychology, and then we make a case for why a neglect of people living in poverty undermines the discipline's science, its practice, and its humanist charge. As moral justification for greater engagement with humanitarian concerns and as a guide to navigate the difficult ethical quandaries involved in doing so, we suggest that I-O psychologists should consider the capability approach. We discuss the concept of human capabilities, relate it to I-O psychology, and demonstrate its utility in the form of three hypothetical scenarios. Perhaps our most controversial claim is that there is a moral imperative for I-O psychology to overrepresent people living in the deepest forms of poverty in both its science and practice.

Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) present a compelling argument (or rallying call) for there being a “moral imperative for I-O psychology to overrepresent people living in the deepest forms of poverty in both science and practice” (p. 330). We agree. Our research has been dominated by a POSH perspective, and it is incumbent upon us to ensure that our science benefits those who are most affected by poverty. We believe the interest in engaging in humanitarian work psychology is growing among industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists, yet many of us may not feel prepared to conduct such research and/or we may feel that we lack the skills to do so. Further, as Gloss et al. (2017) note, to the extent that we are unprepared to engage in research that benefits those living in poverty, in particular, we run the added risk of harming the very populations we are wanting to help. As such, the interest is there, but we may be daunted by the method. We argue that in order to heed that rallying call, without harm, we need to develop our own capabilities to engage in this important work.

Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) present compelling arguments on a moral/humanistic need for I-O psychologists to consider workers that are living and working in deep poverty. Their case nicely shifts focus to large percentages of global workers who heretofore have only been represented minimally in the scholarly discourse in our field. I would like to accomplish two goals in this commentary. First, I would like to present a brief historical perspective on why industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology's focus has been on POSH workers. Second, I will provide conceptual extensions to Gloss et al.’s (2017) focal article by presenting some insights into the world of informal workers.

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is indeed moving forward in its involvement in humanitarian concerns (Berry et al., 2011), but as Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) point out, I-O psychologists tend to focus less on those of low income and the informal economy and more on working professionals in the formal economy (POSH). We propose (a) additional reasons for why the POSH bias may undermine science, (b) more solutions to benefit the impoverished, and (c) a broader conceptualization of humanitarian work psychology (HWP).

The focal article (Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, & Oesterich, 2017) highlights the neglect of individual and societal well-being concerns in I-O psychology theory and practice. A similar concern is currently being articulated within the interdisciplinary field of services (i.e., service management, services marketing, and service science) with the identification of critical underrepresented issues including economic disparities in healthcare, food deserts in poor urban locations, racial-ethnic discrimination in retail, discriminatory practices in lending, lack of access to basic quality-of-life services among poor “base of the pyramid” populations, and the underemphasis of employee and consumer health in service design and delivery (e.g., Fisk et al., 2016; Rosenbaum et al., 2011). Originating in a call for improving consumer well-being through academic research (Mick, 2006), transformative service research (TSR) is now recognized as a key research priority in services (Ostrom, Parasuraman, Bowen, Patricio, & Voss, 2015). Indicators of the scholarly interest in this topic include but are not limited to the following: (a) a seminal article in this research stream (Anderson et al., 2013) has been cited an average of 40 times each year since its publication, (b) multiple special issues have appeared in service-related journals (Journal of Business Research and Journal of Service Research), and (c) special conferences have been organized to examine transformative issues. It can be argued that a humanitarian or POSH agenda in I-O psychology can be informed by TSR while deriving its sustenance from our time tested scientist–practitioner traditions. Some of the key lessons that can be learned from the current trajectory of TSR evolution are discussed in this article.

The focal article by Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) makes a very convincing case that industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology as a profession needs to consider a realignment—from one focused primarily on professional workers in Western companies to the wider world of workers, especially those in poverty.

Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) neglected the “how-to” component of their proposal for increasing humanitarian efforts in the field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. Implementing change at an earlier point in the education process, through social justice awareness and applied service learning, is likely to lead to a more robust and fruitful shift away from a POSH bias compared to an attempt at persuading those currently in the field to adopt this change after their training (although I would never argue that the latter is utterly irrelevant). I hold an unwavering conviction that a natural route toward change would be to ensure that I-O psychology educators are explicitly focusing on the humanitarian workplace movement within our courses and that I-O professionals in organizations aid this cause by encouraging a humanitarian perspective as they train their newly hired, fresh-faced I-O graduates. The purposeful threading of humanitarian goals into I-O psychology education, in large part through service learning or civic education, is the key to our effectiveness. Without such a focus in the beginning stratum of I-O psychologists’ training, our other well-intentioned attempts at shifting the field's focus toward humanitarian concerns may be in vain. Below, I offer suggestions to reach this goal.

It appears that although Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) have considered many of the arenas where industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology intersects with impoverished or atypical populations, an oft-overlooked domain is that of I-O psychologists working in military settings. Arguably the largest humanitarian aid and development organization in the world, national militaries offer a rich opportunity for I-O psychologists to study not only the more “POSH” aspects of work, but also the difficulties surrounding employees who must address impoverished citizens, lack of resources, bureaucracy far removed from the front lines, discrimination, threats to safety, and all kinds of cross-cultural interactions. As such, this humanistic, humanitarian movement could do well from studying the ways military units have successfully and not-so-successfully approached a timely and difficult subject.

Gross, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich's (2017) article argues that industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has a limited perspective that rarely goes beyond the specific professional populations in formal economies of high-income countries—a perspective they refer to as a POSH perspective. This valuable criticism should also eschew the notion that workers in nonindustrialized countries are necessarily different.

My mother, who lived her early years in the British Raj in India, assures me that POSH referred to the well-to-do European's wish to travel “Port Out, Starboard Home” on ships to and from India, which meant enjoying the predominantly shaded side of the ship, protected from the ravaging heat that “ordinary” folk had to endure. What an apt, provocative, and profound analogy Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) have given us in their description of the primary focus of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology on “Professional, Official, Secure, and High income” work.

Among many salient shifts in international development research over the last few decades has been growing legitimacy in recognition/documentation of the “rise of the South” as noted in the UNDP Human Development Report (2013). This has redirected both research and practice beyond just Northern (read “Western”) approaches, opened up new resource flows for “Southern” institutions, and initiated a whole new set of initiatives around “South–South” cooperation (Malik, 2014). To Mahbub ul Haq's original theme of “enlarging people's choices” were added new dimensions of looking beyond just western economies (and solely “economistic” analysis and prescriptions) for solutions to existential threats to sustainable development among the world's poorer nations (UNDP, 1990, p. 9). Fundamental shifts such as these, epitomized in Mahbub's well-known statement on human capacity, provide the basis for the focal article by Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) that builds skillfully on a framework, which of course also calls on Amartya Sen's work (so closely aligned with and influential in the Human Development Report series). The result is an original, carefully argued, and, perhaps some will agree, long overdue article synching the broad discipline of modern industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology into a more realistic awareness of how the majority of the world's populations sustain their livelihoods. However, there is a crucial “space” that I-O psychology seems to be still missing, and one barely touched on by this article, and that is the macropolicy environment that brings institutions in government and civil society together in more strategic approaches to developing human “resourcefulness.”

Although I wholeheartedly agree with Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) that a focus on those living in the deepest forms of poverty is sorely needed in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, the real issue is not so much who we serve but how we serve, and specifically how we continue to neglect the systemic failures of capitalism at the root of poverty. Ultimately, it is this global market system that determines not only the distribution of wealth but also how wealth is often achieved at the expense of another's poverty. Moreover, it is this system that constrains and undermines capabilities. For these reasons, I am skeptical of the authors’ proposal for mitigating the pervasive POSH bias in our field, especially because this bias seems premised on a pervasive neglect of capitalism the authors fail to fully address.

The case for making human capabilities the business of I-O psychology is at first glance persuasive. It is indisputable that I-O psychology and its associated fields still suffer from a strong bias favoring POSH (Professionals, Official work in formal economy, Safe from discrimination, and High-income countries) and WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) also provide ample evidence of human development indices being low among countries that are underrepresented or unrepresented in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology studies. Moreover, it cannot be denied that many of the evidence-based recommendations that we now make with confidence will not hold water in these poverty-stricken areas of the world. However, when one juxtaposes the case for building human capabilities with the extant approaches of restoring equity in society, one is confronted with the grim possibility that the idea of human capabilities may not only fail to make significant positive differences in the lives of poor people in the world, but may also worsen the quality of life of everyone on this earth. In this short essay, I discuss two major problems with the human capabilities approach and propose a modification to the approach that can potentially help solve the problem of poverty.

Rejecting situational specificity (SS) in meta-analysis requires assuming that residual variance in observed correlations is due to uncorrected artifacts (e.g., calculation errors). To test that assumption, 741 aggregations from 24 meta-analytic articles representing seven industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology domains (e.g., cognitive ability, job interviews) were coded for moderator subgroup specificity. In support of SS, increasing subgroup specificity yields lower mean residual variance per domain, averaging a 73.1% drop. Precision in mean rho (i.e., low SD(rho)) adequate to permit generalizability is typically reached at SS levels high enough to challenge generalizability inferences (hence, the “myth of generalizability”). Further, and somewhat paradoxically, decreasing K with increasing precision undermines certainty in mean r and Var(r) as meta-analytic starting points. In support of the noted concerns, only 4.6% of the 741 aggregations met defensibly rigorous generalizability standards. Four key questions guiding generalizability inferences are identified in advancing meta-analysis as a knowledge source.

Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) describe two main sources of uncertainty that are usually reported in a meta-analysis: uncertainty about the value of the underlying mean correlation (which they describe as SE(rxy)) and uncertainty about the individual values of rho that arise from the random-effects variance (the square root of which they describe as SD(rho)). They proceed to recommend descriptions of small, medium, and large values of each uncertainty that meta-analysts should report and consider for interpretation. However, there exists a simpler solution to expressing and interpreting such uncertainty.

The implicit philosophy for how research and practice in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has pursued inferences about our field's core phenomena has largely been based on a nomothetic, variable-based, and aggregate/“large-sample” ideal. As Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) expertly highlight, there are more insightful means for drawing inferences about the nature of such aggregate relationships based on meta-analytic techniques than the current practice in the organizational sciences. However, the motivating force behind our commentary has less to do with the issues raised by Tett et al. (2017) concerning the practice of using meta-analysis for purposes of validity generalization and more to do with the practice of using meta-analysis for purposes of scientific inference. Between-person philosophies in which the end-goal is to identify general conclusions that apply to the aggregate (cf. Hanges & Wang, 2012) have historically guided our scientific inferences and have supported the proliferation of meta-analytic techniques (including what Tett et al. describe as tertiary analyses based on such findings). These philosophies have led to a dearth of understanding at the within-person and social system levels—the levels at which most of our meaningful phenomena exist (e.g., Hamaker, 2012; Von Bertalanffy, 1950). Learning, performing, decision making, communicating, sense-making, feeling/expressing emotion: These are the concepts that drive the lived experiences of individuals both inside and outside of the workplace, and all are vulnerable to being misunderstood or misinterpreted by focusing only on aggregate evidence at the between-person level. Consequently, we wish to first supplement Tett et al.’s recommendations for drawing generalizability inferences in meta-analysis and suggest a “pre-emptive” question (i.e., Question 0) to the list of four they advance in their focal article.

Over the years, many in the field of organizational psychology have claimed that meta-analytic tests for moderators provide evidence for validity generalization (Schmidt & Hunter, 1977), a term first used in the middle of the last century (Mosier, 1950). In response, Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) advise caution when it comes to our inclination toward generalizing findings across workplaces/domains and urge precision in attaching meaning to the statistic we are generalizing. Their focal article was insightful and offers important recommendations for researchers regarding certain statistical indicators of unexplained variability, such as SDρ. In this commentary, we would like to make a different point about SDρ, namely that it, and other statistics based on residual variance, will be deflated due to the lack of variance in moderators. It is this lack of between-study variance, as much as anything else, that leads to misguided conclusions about validity generalization.

Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) raise an important issue related to meta-analysis and our frequent overinterpretation of point estimates to the diminishment of variability of the estimate. We view this as analogous to the situation in which weather forecasters communicate the likely track of hurricanes. Such predictions involve point estimates of where the center of the storm is likely to be at some future time. These point estimates can be connected to identify the most likely path of the storm. In addition to these point estimates, however, forecasters caution that we should also attend to the “cone of uncertainty.” That is, we should not focus exclusively on the point estimate to the exclusion of the errors of prediction.

Generalization in meta-analyses is not a dichotomous decision (typically encountered in papers using the Q test for homogeneity, the 75% rule, or null hypothesis tests). Inattention to effect size variability in meta-analyses may stem from a lack of guidelines for interpreting credibility intervals. In this commentary, we describe two methods for making practical interpretations and determining whether a particular SDρ represents a meaningful level of variability.