When we began our journey to this month’s I-Opener, we immediately thought of a newspaper article that we had come across just days earlier. The article described an experiment in the works that began in 2014 when the middle-left government coalition in Gothenburg, Sweden decided to reduce the working hours in at least one public department from forty to thirty hours per week without reduced compensation. It was after a conversation that the first author had with Dr. Jürgen Deller from the University of Lüneburg, Germany, speaker for the Institute for Strategic HR Management Research and Development, an interdisciplinary panel designed to find innovative solutions to strategic HR questions, that we realized that this article should rather cover a much bigger picture than just an insular experiment in a Scandinavian country[i]. Instead we decided to focus on the fundamental question of how we organize work, labor, and whether we should re-evaluate a philosophy that served us well for way more than a century. Opening this Pandora’s box shows to have all sorts of implications for I-O practitioners as well as organizations. But one [thing] after another…

‘Well-being’ is everywhere, just look at social media, popular culture, or the self-help section of your local bookstore. Along with this growing interest, the discussion of well-being has transformed, moving from a traditional focus on the physical aspects of health to the psychological and emotional components, and from the home domain to the working environment. As I-O practitioners and researchers, we often emphasize the importance of individual well-being in supporting organizational functioning; yet, despite our knowledge and appreciation for this area, we often fail to practice what we preach.

Note.  The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of U.S. Customs and Border Protection or the U.S. Federal Government.  

My 2-year term as SIOP Historian has drawn to a close.  The role of Historian is now in the very capable hands of Nathan Carter whose debut History Corner column will appear in the next issue of TIP.  In my last installment of the History Corner, I announce the completion of two major History Committee initiatives: the closure of the SIOP Time Capsule and the launch of the SIOP Virtual Museum.  I also cover the SIOP 2016 Living History Series interview with Locke and Latham.

Generally speaking, talent management involves assessing and anticipating the human capital skill requirements of the organization and putting in place processes and procedures to meet those needs.  Another way to describe it is the use of strategic human resource planning to ensure that the talent in the organization will meet business needs and increase shareholder value.  A talent management strategy needs to link to and support the organization’s business strategy and it must be “owned” by the business and designed and supported by the Human Resources function.  This column will identify many ways in which the science of I/O Psychology should inform the design of the processes.

It’s relatively quiet on the Watch this quarter—a good time to catch up on things that have been slowly simmering as the weather gets warmer.

Let’s take up where we left off:  the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC’s) proposal to require pay data on the annual EEO-1 reporting form.  A public hearing was held with the expected results:  the civil rights community praised the effort and the business community pointed out problems ranging from the usefulness of the information to the burden of reporting it.  Technical comment has been minimal.  However, Bronars, Blom, and King (2016) implemented a suggestion from critics-- that EEOC try out its methodology on available federal agency data.  The authors noted that the pilot sponsored by EEOC explained data collection but did not consider the quality of the data.  In their study, five agencies with the most significant gender pay gap were identified by the Mann-Whitney test mentioned by the EEOC.  Using multiple regression and controlling for explanatory factors (age, age squared, tenure, tenure squared, education, and occupation), the authors came up with different rankings of gender pay disparity for the agencies; in one case, a 29% initial pay gap was entirely accounted for.  The study indicated that the analyses were not thorough enough for conclusions on pay discrimination but were sufficient to show that a more detailed methodology would lead to conclusions different from methodology proposed by EEOC.  The proposed pay categories were also criticized as being broader than the differences EEOC was trying to detect.