SIOP Award Winners: Meet the Team Who Won the Schmidt-Hunter Meta-Analysis Award!

Liberty J. Munson

As part of our ongoing series to provide visibility into what it takes to earn a SIOP award or grant, we highlight a diverse class of award winners in each edition of TIP. We hope that this insight encourages you to consider applying for a SIOP award or grant because you are probably doing something amazing that can and should be recognized by your peers in I-O psychology!

This quarter, we are highlighting the team that won the Schmidt-Hunter Meta-Analysis Award, as told by Philip Roth (pictured below).

What award did you win?

The Schmidt-Hunter Meta-Analysis Award. My coauthors were Chad van Iddekinge (pictured left), Phil DeOrtentiis, Kaylee Hackney, Liwen Zhang, and Maury Buster (not pictured).

Read the article!

Roth, P. L., Van Iddekinge, C. H., DeOrtentiis, P., Hackney, K., Zhang, L., & Buster, M. (2017). Hispanic and Asian performance on selection procedures: A narrative and meta-analytic review of 12 common predictors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102, 1178–1202.

Share a little a bit about who you are and what you do.

I am a selection researcher at Clemson University in the Management Department. The entire author team is interested in selection. One of my new research interests is the role of political affiliation in organizations.

Describe the research/work that you did that resulted in this award. What led to your idea?

This is a textbook example of programmatic research work. My colleagues and I (Phil Bobko, Chad Van Iddekinge, and others) have investigated the issue of subgroup differences on various predictors of job performance for years. We noticed comparatively little research on Hispanics and Asians (despite their large and growing numbers). We set out to help the field see the need for more work in this area.

What do you think was key to you winning this award?

A great research team (people make the research!). Chad and his graduate students are world-class literature searchers/finders. They worked tirelessly to find data for the meta-analysis.

Great scientist–practitioner teamwork. Maury Buster, a senior manager at the Alabama Personnel Department, found (and convinced the organization to share) a great deal of data that only a committed insider could find.

A great editor. Chris Berry was both tough as nails and very developmental. We can’t thank editors in APA journals, but Chris was a great editor. He deserves more credit than anyone would imagine.

What do you see as the lasting/unique contribution of this work to our discipline? How can it be used to drive changes in organizations, the employee experience, and so on?

I hope the field can see the need for more research on minority populations, such as Asians and Hispanics.

Who would you say was the biggest advocate of your research/work that resulted in the award? How did that person become aware of your work?

This was more a case of dogged determination. The paper took 8 years to get to publication given extensive revisions and data searches.  Sometimes the publication process takes a lot of patience.

Are you still doing work/research in the same area where you won the award? If so, what are you currently working on in this space? If not, what are you working on now and how did you move into this different work/research area? 

We continue to do work on meta-analysis. A recent publication from what I call the “dream team” (Huy Le, In-Sue Oh, Chad Van Iddekinge, Phil Bobko) addressed the issue of using beta coefficients from multiple regression instead of correlation coefficients in meta-analysis. This practice appears epidemic across many fields in business and the social sciences (about eight meta-analyses a month currently suffer from this practice). We show it is a pretty bad idea (the discussant called the data “horrifying” when we presented it at a convention…she was right). JAP was kind enough to publish that paper in 2018.

What’s a fun fact about yourself (something that people may not know)?

I have a lapdog named Cupcake. She is a Rottweiler.

What piece of advice would you give to someone new to I-O psychology? (If you knew then what you know now…)

Decide as early as you can whether your primary interest is geared toward research/teaching or being a practitioner. Given that knowledge, you can then plan your educational efforts most wisely.

If interested in academe, don’t rule out business schools. B-schools offer a great sense of kinship where all sorts of people are focused on various aspects of improving organizations.

About the author:

Liberty Munson is currently the principal psychometrician of the Microsoft Technical Certification and Employability programs in the Worldwide Learning organization. She is responsible for ensuring the validity and reliability of Microsoft’s certification and professional programs. Her passion is for finding innovative solutions to business challenges that balance the science of assessment design and development with the realities of budget, time, and schedule constraints. Most recently, she has been presenting on the future of testing and how technology can change the way we assess skills.

Liberty loves to bake, hike, backpack, and camp with her husband, Scott, and miniature schnauzer, Apex. If she’s not at work, you’ll find her enjoying the great outdoors, or she’s in her kitchen tweaking some recipe just to see what happens.

Her advice to someone new to I-O psychology? Statistics, statistics, statistics—knowing data analytic techniques will open A LOT of doors in this field and beyond!