Publications Board Taps DeNisi, Murphy, and Pulakos

SIOP Administrative Office

New SIOP Series Editors Seek to Leverage, Extend Brands

The SIOP Publications Board is proud to announce that three SIOP Fellows have been chosen to serve as editors of the SIOP Organizational Frontiers and Professional Practice Series. The editors will assume their duties in April 2019, and the term of the appointments is 5 years.

Keenly aware of changes in the field of publishing and the global growth of I-O psychology, the editors will work to broaden the reach of the two series through strategic adaptations of process and technology.

Elaine Pulakos, president of PDRI, will edit SIOP’s Professional Practice Series. Angelo De Nisi, professor in the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, and Kevin Murphy, faculty member for the University of Limerick in Ireland, will co-edit the Organizational Frontiers Series. In addition to being SIOP Fellows, all three of the editors are also past presidents of SIOP.

SIOP members with extensive publications experience participated in the search committees, with Mark Poteet chairing the Professional Practice Search Committee and Neal Schmitt the Organizational Frontiers Search. Committee members included Rich Klimoski, Steve Kozlowski, Ron Landis, Megan Leasher, Nancy Tippins, and Mo Wang. The appointments were confirmed by a vote of the Executive Board.

Although unusual, the decision to appoint De Nisi and Murphy, who have been good friends for more than 30 years, as joint series editors, makes a lot of sense. The two have diverse perspectives, contacts, and experiences, with Murphy having spent most of his career in psychology departments and De Nisi in business schools. Murphy said he expects that as a team, they “will be able to accomplish more in terms of global outreach than either might as a sole editor.”

The duo found out they were both applying for the position when they sought each other out for letters of support. Murphy said they realized “their recent collaborations (notably, a paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology Centenary issue reviewing 100 years of research on performance appraisal) was successful and enjoyable and decided to apply to serve as co-editors.”

Elaine Pulakos plans to leverage her wide experience as a business leader and author to help raise the profile of I-O psychology. “Throughout my career, I have been passionate about building a stronger brand for I-O. I believe the Practice Series affords this opportunity,” she said.

Pulakos has several credits as an author and editor, including a soon-to-be-released edition for the Practice Series. She has also held executive leadership roles at companies with revenues of up to $200M in times of dramatic changes brought about by shifting business models and leadership priorities, as well as technology advances.

“I have led significant change, several times needing to reinvent the business. I have also led significant technological transformation, shifting our business from selling professional services labor to selling repeatable, scalable I-O product subscriptions,” she said. “Importantly, I have implemented change while maintaining high levels of growth and profitability.”

Pulakos sees the ability to lead through periods of transformation as particularly relevant in the realm of publications. “The publishing industry has seen significant business model and technological changes. It will thus be important to examine how to leverage these changes for SIOP’s benefit as part of strategy development for the series,” she said.

“The field of I-O psychology has grown dramatically in the US, but its growth in other parts of the world is even more impressive,” Kevin Murphy said. The Organizational Frontiers team expects to increase international representation in the series as part of an effort to broaden the global reach of the publications, and the organization. “Vital and important work is being done all over the world in I-O psychology, and SIOP publications will benefit from incorporating a wider array of viewpoints and research streams,” he concluded.

Murphy said he and De Nisi will work with their editorial board to create publications on two threads, including:

1. emerging ideas and streams of research that are likely to expand the frontiers of our field, and

2.critical evaluations of ideas, concepts and the like that span many parts of our field and that are likely to benefit from a genuinely critical review that pulls together thinking on the strengths and weaknesses of current work and that points toward directions for future research.

According to the online history of SIOP created by Laura Koppes Bryan, SIOP Historian from 1996 to 2001, Frontiers of Industrial and Organizational Psychology published its first volume in 1986 under the editorship of Raymond Katzell. The debut volume for the Professional Practice series was published by Editor Douglas Bray in 1991.

See the current listing of Organizational Frontiers titles here; find the Professional Practice title list here.