In this article, we argue that changes in workplace characteristics over the last few decades may affect work relationships and call for adjustments in the traditional theoretical framework used to understand them. Since the last quarter of the 20th century, there have been theories regarding changes in labor relationships following technological, political, globalization, and economical changes. However, we examine the changes in light of psychological theories rather than labor or industrial approaches. We review four main areas where social exchange theory (SET) has been implemented, address recent changes that challenge the traditional SET perspective, and propose alternative models. We refer to these models as “hybrid” as they integrate traditional SET premises with new-era workplace characteristics. First, we describe several changes in workplace characteristics. Next, we review some of the most conventional applications of SET to work relationships. Finally, we critically examine whether this theory meets the requirements of work relationships in the new world of work and conclude by arguing that SET needs to be adjusted to reflect the assumption that frequent changes in employee and organizational characteristics in the new workplaces require similar frequent adjustments in exchange relationships.

To the extent that leadership is learned, it is learned through experience. This article begins with seven conclusions about the role of experience in leadership development, ponders the reasons that what is known is so rarely applied, suggests some ways to put experience at the center of leadership development efforts, and concludes with a series of recommendations for practice and for future research.

Workers with invisible disabilities encounter unique challenges compared to workers with other concealable identities and even workers with visible disabilities. These challenges occur not only in the decisions of whether to disclose the invisible disability in the workplace but also in the detection and acceptance of having a disability to disclose. Disclosure of disabilities in the workplace likely has implications for the individual worker's health, social relationships, and work performance as well as for an employing organization's outcomes. We argue that current legislation and policies might not be sensitive to the unique experiences and disclosure decisions faced by workers with invisible disabilities. We invite researchers and practitioners to consider adjustments to current legislation and workplace practices in order for employing organizations to account for the unique challenges facing workers with invisible disabilities and fully accommodate those workers.

We agree with Landers and Behrend's (2015) proposition that Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) may provide great opportunities for organizational research samples. However, some groups are characteristically difficult to recruit because they are stigmatized or socially disenfranchised (Birman, 2005; Miller, Forte, Wilson, & Greene, 2006; Sullivan & Cain, 2004; see Campbell, Adams, & Patterson, 2008, for a review). These groups may include individuals who have not previously been the focus of much organizational research, such as those of low socioeconomic status; individuals with disabilities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) individuals; or victims of workplace harassment. As Landers and Behrend (2015) point out, there is an overrepresentation of research using “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic” participants. It is important to extend research beyond these samples to examine workplace phenomena that are specific to special populations. We contribute to this argument by noting the particular usefulness that MTurk can provide for sampling from hard-to-reach populations, which we characterize as groups that are in the numerical minority in terms of nationwide representation. To clarify, we focus our discussion on populations that are traditionally hard to reach in the context of contemporary organizational research within the United States.

Despite years of research and practice, dissatisfaction with performance appraisal is at an all-time high. Organizations are contemplating changes to their performance management systems, the most controversial of which is whether to eliminate performance ratings. The pros and cons of retaining performance ratings were the subject of a lively, standing-room-only debate at the 2015 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology conference in Philadelphia (Adler, 2015). Given the high interest in this topic, this article recaps the points made by the panelists who participated in the debate. The arguments for eliminating ratings include these: (a) the disappointing interventions, (b) the disagreement when multiple raters evaluate the same performance, (c) the failure to develop adequate criteria for evaluating ratings, (d) the weak relationship between the performance of ratees and the ratings they receive, (e) the conflicting purposes of performance ratings in organizations, (f) the inconsistent effects of performance feedback on subsequent performance, and (g) the weak relationship between performance rating research and practice in organizations. The arguments for retaining ratings include (a) the recognition that changing the rating process is likely to have minimal effect on the performance management process as a whole, (b) performance is always evaluated in some manner, (c) “too hard” is no excuse for industrial–organizational (I-O) psychology, (d) ratings and differentiated evaluations have many merits for improving organizations, (e) artificial tradeoffs are driving organizations to inappropriately abandon ratings, (f) the alternatives to ratings may be worse, and (g) the better questions are these: How could performance ratings be improved, and are we conducting the entire performance management process properly? The article closes with questions organizational members have found useful for driving effective performance management reform.

Although extensive research and practice have focused on understanding and improving performance management systems in organizations, the formula for effective performance management remains elusive. We propose that a significant part of the problem is that performance management has been reduced to prescribed steps within formal administrative systems that are disconnected from the day-to-day activities that determine performance management effectiveness (e.g., communicating clear work expectations, setting short-term objectives and deadlines, and providing continual guidance). We argue that interventions to improve performance management should cease their exclusive focus on reinventing formal system features. Although well-developed tools and systems can facilitate performance management, these alone do not yield effective performance management. In lieu of making further changes to formal performance management systems, we argue for devoting more attention to improving manager–employee communication and aspects of the manager–employee relationship and propose an approach we believe holds promise for improving performance management processes in organizations.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) offer compelling arguments for the need to consider resilience trajectories and to identify the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors accountable for unique trajectories. We welcome the call for more focused research efforts toward uncovering the role of resilience in organizations and concur with Britt et al. that there is a need for a clearer characterization of resilience among employees, the correlates of resilience, and the way that resilience can be facilitated. Our objective here is to build on the main thrust of Britt et al.’s focal article by outlining a novel perspective on employee resilience, which we believe will constitute an important contribution to the organizational resilience literature.

Evidence-based practice is now well established in several fields including medicine, nursing, and social policy. This article seeks to promote discussion of whether the practice of industrial–organizational (I–O) psychologists is evidence based and what is needed to make I–O psychology an evidence-based discipline. It first reviews the emergence of the concept of evidence-based practice. Second, it considers the definitions and features of evidence-based practice, including evidence-based management. It then assesses whether I–O psychology is itself an evidence-based discipline by identifying key characteristics of evidence-based practice and judging the extent these characterize I–O psychology. Fourth, some key strategies for promoting the use of evidence in I–O psychology are considered: practice-oriented research and systematic reviews. Fifth, barriers to practicing evidence-based I–O psychology are identified along with suggestions for overcoming them. Last is a look to the future of an evidence-based I–O psychology that plays an important role in helping consultants, in-house I–O psychologists, managers, and organizations become more evidence based.

Ratings of job performance are widely viewed as poor measures of job performance. Three models of the performance–performance rating relationship offer very different explanations and solutions for this seemingly weak relationship. One-factor models suggest that measurement error is the main difference between performance and performance ratings and they offer a simple solution—that is, the correction for attenuation. Multifactor models suggest that the effects of job performance on performance ratings are often masked by a range of systematic nonperformance factors that also influence these ratings. These models suggest isolating and dampening the effects of these nonperformance factors. Mediated models suggest that intentional distortions are a key reason that ratings often fail to reflect ratee performance. These models suggest that raters must be given both the tools and the incentive to perform well as measurement instruments and that systematic efforts to remove the negative consequences of giving honest performance ratings are needed if we hope to use performance ratings as serious measures of job performance.

Bergman and Jean (2016) include freelancers as one of the categories of workers who are understudied in the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology literature. This neglect is particularly striking given the attention paid by the popular media and by politicians to the rise of the “gig economy,” comprising primarily short-term independent freelance workers (e.g., Cook, 2015; Kessler, 2014; Scheiber, 2014; Warner, 2015). This may be due in part to challenges involved in accessing and researching this population, as discussed by Bergman and Jean, but it may also arise from complexities in defining and conceptualizing freelance work, as well as from misunderstandings about the nature of the work now performed by many people who are considered freelancers. Major topics of interest to I-O psychologists such as organizational attraction, job satisfaction, and turnover may seem at first glance to lack relevance to the study of workers who are officially classified as self-employed. But there is substantial opportunity for I-O psychologists and other behaviorally oriented organizational researchers to contribute to our understanding of the growing number of people who earn all or some of their income by freelancing.

In spite of numerous attempts over decades to improve performance management (PM) systems, PM is viewed as more broken than ever, with managers and employees seeing it as a burdensome activity that is of little value. Yet, the behaviors that PM is meant to achieve are in fact important drivers of engagement and performance. So where is the disconnect? The problem is that formal PM systems have reduced PM to intermittent steps and processes that are disconnected from day-to-day work and behaviors that actually drive performance: communicating ongoing expectations, providing informal feedback in real time, and developing employees through experience. To deliver on its promise, PM needs to shift from focusing on the formal system to focusing on the PM behaviors that matter every day. We describe a 5-step PM reform process that helps organizations achieve this change and that shows promise for increasing satisfaction and positive outcomes from PM processes. Central to the intervention is that organizational members need to intentionally practice and solidify effective PM behavior through a structured, on-the-job, experiential learning intervention that yields meaningful behavior change. The change-management and training interventions discussed here provide a model for organizational culture and behavior change efforts beyond PM.

As the title suggests, this article takes a broad perspective on personality as it is conceptualized and measured in organizational research, and in the spirit of this Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology journal, we framed the article as a series of 7 questions. These 7 questions deal with (1) personality and multidimensional models of performance, (2) personality taxonomies and the five-factor model, (3) the effects of situations on personality–performance relationships, (4) the incremental validity of personality over cognitive ability, (5) the need to differentiate personality constructs from personality measures, (6) the concern with faking on personality tests, and (7) the use of personality tests in attempting to address adverse impact. We dovetail these questions with our perspectives and insights in the hope that this will stimulate further discussion with our readership.

As organizations become more complex and dynamic, individuals' ability to learn from experience becomes more important. Recently, the concept of learning agility has attracted considerable attention from human resource professionals and consultants interested in selecting on and developing employees' ability to learn from experience. However, the academic community has been largely absent from this discussion of learning agility, and the concept remains ill defined and poorly measured. This article presents a constructive critique of the existing literature on learning agility, seeks to clarify the definition and conceptualization of the construct, and situates learning agility within a broader nomological network of related constructs. We conclude by discussing several important directions for future research on learning agility.

The focal article by Landers and Behrend (2015) makes the case that samples collected on microtask websites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are inherently no better or worse than traditional samples of convenience from university students or organizations. We wholeheartedly agree. However, having successfully used MTurk and other online sources for data collection, we feel that the focal article was insufficient regarding the caution required in identifying inattentive respondents and the problems that can arise if such individuals are not removed from the dataset. Although we focus on MTurk, similar issues arise for most “low-stakes” assessments, including student samples, which seem to be increasingly collected online.

Research on stereotyping as related to workplace evaluations and decisions has been going on for more than 30 years. Recently, implicit association theory has emerged as a less conscious manifestation of stereotyping mechanisms. In this article, I review the relevance of research on both stereotyping and one of the more popular tests of implicit associations, the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Claims have been made that both stereotyping research and, more recently, IAT research provide theoretical and empirical support for the argument that protected demographic groups (e.g., ethnic minorities, women) are the victims of biased personnel decisions and evaluations. My review of the literature suggests that both stereotyping and IAT research study designs are sufficiently far removed from real work settings as to render them largely useless for drawing inferences about most, but not all, forms of employment discrimination.

Due to rising pressure to appear egalitarian, subtle discrimination pervades today's workplace. Although its ambiguous nature may make it seem innocuous on the surface, an abundance of empirical evidence suggests subtle discrimination undermines employee and organizational functioning, perhaps even more so than its overt counterpart. In the following article, we argue for a multidimensional and continuous, rather than categorical, framework for discrimination. In doing so, we propose that there exist several related but distinct continuums on which instances of discrimination vary, including subtlety, formality, and intentionality. Next, we argue for organizational scholarship to migrate toward a more developmental, dynamic perspective of subtle discrimination in order to build a more comprehensive understanding of its antecedents, underlying mechanisms, and outcomes. We further contend that everyone plays a part in the process of subtle discrimination at work and, as a result, bears some responsibility in addressing and remediating it. We conclude with a brief overview of research on subtle discrimination in the workplace from each of four stakeholder perspectives—targets, perpetrators, bystanders, and allies—and review promising strategies that can be implemented by each of these stakeholders to remediate subtle discrimination in the workplace.

The central premise of this article is that organizations have social and economic interests in building policies and practices that support lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) workers. This argument is based on empirical evidence that (a) LGBT workers continue to face discrimination at work from which they are not protected under federal law, and (b) discrimination has negative consequences for individual's mental and physical health, and on reasoning that (c) organizations share responsibility for the social good of the communities in which they operate. We offer practical suggestions for creating LGBT-supportive organizations and propose that industrial–organizational psychologists have an ethical obligation to support such efforts.

We propose that I/O psychologists who coach executives have overlooked psychotherapy outcome research as a source of information and ideas that can be used to improve our executive coaching practices. This research, based on thousands of studies and many meta-analyses, has converged on the conclusion that four “active ingredients” account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes. We describe how this literature has identified four primary “active ingredients” that account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes: 1) Client/extratherapeutic factors (40%), 2) The relationship or alliance (30%), 3) Placebo or hope (15%), and 4) Theory and technique (15%). Working on the assumption that psychotherapy and executive coaching are sufficiently similar to justify generalization from one domain to the other, we describe these four active ingredients at length and explore how they may be at work in the executive coaching process. We also suggest that I/O psychologists have training and experience that allows us to leverage some of these active ingredients in our executive coaching (e.g., understanding of client individual differences related to coaching outcomes). But we also have areas of weakness (e.g., building a strong working relationship with an individual client) that may need to be bolstered with additional training and development experiences.