On May 18, the Department of Labor (DOL) released its final rule to modify the existing overtime pay regulations covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  The final rule, which was officially published in the Federal Register on May 23, raised the salary threshold for salaried executive, administrative, and professional employees to qualify for overtime pay, from $455 per week ($23,660 per year) to an estimated $913 per week ($47,476 per year).  Employers are expected to be in compliance by the time the rule goes into effect on December 1, 2016.

What if the president of the United States of America was selected rather than elected? In other words, what if candidates applied for the job of president in much the same way that executives apply for the job of CEO? What would the selection process look like? What knowledge, skills, and abilities would the ideal presidential candidate possess? I-O psychologists are all over the place in government work. For example, SIOP’s GREAT committee advocates for evidence-based decision making in government. Many I-O psychologists work within government agencies such as the TSA, the FBI, OPM, and the Social Behavioral Sciences Team. There are also plenty of I-O organizations that often subcontract with the government, including FMP, HumRRO, and PDRI. Clearly, I-O psychologists are deeply involved in many government processes. Why not selecting a president? We posed these questions during interviews with a variety of SIOP members.  We are not suggesting a change in the Constitution.  Consider this as a kind of thought experiment in employee selection.

Over the past decade, critical scholarship in the field of management has experienced a veritable explosion. A burgeoning new area of research, teaching, and practice under the name of “critical management studies” (CMS) has inspired numerous course readers (Alvesson & Willmott, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d; Grey & Willmott, 2005), handbooks (Alvesson, Bridgman, & Willmott, 2011; Prasad, Prasad, Mills, & Mills, 2016), textbooks (Alvesson & Willmott, 2003; Tadajewski, 2011), and practitioner guides (Cox, Letretn-Jones, Voronov, & Weir, 2009; Malin, Murphy, & Siltaoja, 2013), not to mention a recent “All-Academy Conference Theme” at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management (“Capitalism in Question” in 2013). Despite this momentum, critical scholarship has yet to penetrate the closely related field of industrial-organizational psychology.

Gerard (2016) presents a case for the value of the critical scholarly tradition to work psychology.  The term “the scholarly tradition” is essential.  It denotes that the approach is more about a philosophical orientation than, say, a highly prescribed set of methods of scientific inquiry and it denotes that several theoretical variations are subsumed under that label.  Critical theory applied to understanding works of art, for example, rests on different foundations than critical theory applied to organizations, but both bring in social, political, and cultural backgrounds to interpretations.  But how applicable is critical theory to the psychology of work?

In recent years, the integrity of our scientific research has been called into question by the popular press who has asked if the scientific method is flawed (Lehrer, 2010). This assertion has been examined by many researchers as well (e.g., Bedeian, Taylor, & Miller, 2010; Kepes & McDaniel, 2013; O’Boyle, Banks, & Gonzalez-Mulé, in press). These authors have argued that the current states of I-O psychology and management are flawed for several reasons. First, the theory fetish (Hambrick, 2007) in our field is making it nearly impossible to publish null results or replications, which has prevented us from developing solid theory (Cucina & McDaniel, 2016). Second, for academics, the necessity to publish for tenure, retention, promotion, raises, and so on encourages researchers to engage in questionable research practices (QRPs) if the obtained results do not align with a priori expectations or do not reach statistical significance (e.g., Banks, Rogelberg, Woznyj, Landis, & Rupp, 2016; O’Boyle et al.).