Special Feature: 50-Year Members Honored With Gold Star Status

Not only has SIOP changed in the last 50 years but so has the entire field of I-O psychology.

Over the next few months, we are honored to share conversations with a few of our 34 Gold Star (50-year) members as they reminisce about SIOP and I-O psychology.

This first installment was provided by Dr. Reginald Shepps, who has been a SIOP/Division 14 member since 1967:

I have been an APA and SIOP member since the late sixties, immediately after I got my PhD in I-O psychology from Case Western Reserve University. The field was a late interest of mine, academically speaking, developing soon after a 1962 Clinical Psychology Masters at Yale as a direct result of encountering Fred Herzberg and his work at Wayne on worker motivation and particularly the sources of satisfaction/dissatisfaction and in effect morale.

Mostly because Fred was overwhelmed by more and more demands for workplace/employer consultation, I did my doctoral dissertation under an early president of Division 14, Jay Otis, on the subject of a particular measurement of need achievement, having taken exactly 7 years to complete doctoral studies, but only 1 year to start and finish my thesis. Lesson learned? The thesis should NOT be a monument to oneself ... plenty of time to do that later, but only a task to be accomplished, a kind of apprenticeship period really.

My career in I-O ended up being a kind of journey in finding myself, as it were, from I to, finally, O. I started in more or less "pure I" by spending the first dozen years of my 50-plus career back home in New York City as a field (read sales) personnel researcher, then manager, and finally director focused on the selection, read test-supported selection, of life insurance sales personnel and, eventually, their supervisors and managers.

Over the next 30 years I worked for a variety of corporations undergoing a growing awareness that their difficulties were as much organization or organizational process driven as these were situational or event driven. My role became more and more that of an internal and on occasion external consultant. Among many lessons learned was that organizations often saw their pain, as it were, driving the hiring of more or less specialized talent fitting that type of pain, with less need for that special type of help as the urgency for resolving that pain became less and organizational interest and perhaps passion shifted to another, perhaps related, perhaps not, urgency.

What I saw was that organizations with broader, more long-term views, survived and thrived, although all organizations that I knew of seemed to have a kind of lifespan, and like people, could also die suddenly, often due to executive mistakes or inadequacies. The mission of an I-O psychologist ultimately became that of winning a place at the table, as it were, of trusted advisors to the president and his or her key advisors.

My various work experiences at organizations like MetLife, Harley Davidson, Nestlé, and British Petroleum Amoco taught me to respect the dedication of their thought leaders and executives at all levels, a dedication sometimes leading to deep-seated organizational conflict.

During a couple of years with Drake Beam Morin working with executives undergoing, what shall we call it? Outplacement? I gained the benefit of a wide variety of views of organizations, their conflicts, and their career paths.

As a member of our profession, I was happy to have served its members as president of two regional I-O associations, the greater NYC METRO and Michigan's MAIOP.

All this while as an always growing and learning I-O psychologist. Perhaps my unique talent, I tried to maintain some connection with academia and the academic views of organizations and their issues by part-time teaching, most notably at Pace University's Wall Street Campus and Wayne State University Graduate School I-O Master’s Program in Detroit near the original GM headquarters.

The main lesson learned was that as an I-O psychologist I needed to keep growing and learning with, as well as ahead of, my organizational clients and to become, in the end, one of their trusted advisors. I always tried to tell them, by the way, the whole truth, as I saw it, and not just what they obviously wanted to hear.

Thus, over the years I think I grew, along with my clients and the field of I-O. I do think we all grew, over time, from a more narrow or special problem-based view of what was going on and what to do about it to a broader or organizational view of what needed to be done. How has I-O changed over the years? It has matured from largely immediate problem solving to a more strategic view of organizations ever more deeply embedded in the problems of wider society and the world. You all know as well as I what these problems are. Has all this been enough? To save it and us? We are about to see, I think.

As a now, all but retired I-O psychologist, I am content. I look forward with admiration and high expectations to the work and contributions of younger members of our profession. And I would appreciate any reactions or thoughts to this, my learning journey in the world of OD.

Reginald Ronald Shepps, Ph.D.
Lic. MI Psychologist/Practice of Work Psychology
"Experiential Learning/We Help Each Other Learn"
sheppsron@yahoo.com