Organizations are undergoing unprecedented transformation in the area of talent management (TM). Companies are rapidly adopting new tools and approaches in a variety of what has traditionally been core areas of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology such as performance management, employee attitudes, recruiting, testing and assessment, and career development. Increasingly, however, these new approaches have little to no research backing behind them, and they do not tend to be the focus of I-O psychology theory and research. We call this trend anti-industrial and organizational psychology (AIO), as we believe these forces to do not advance the field for long-term strategic impact. We present a framework that describes how AIO practices are adopted by organizations, and how I-O psychologists often gravitate away from these practices rather than actively help to separate the wheat from the chaff. We found support for our hypothesis through a brief analysis of Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, the peer-reviewed journal of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). In this analysis, we found that only 10% of the focal articles from 2008 to 2016 represented topics that we call frontier—emerging areas in organizations but where there is no research support for them. We propose a set of recommendations for the field of I-O psychology and call for a more strategic approach to identifying and vetting new TM trends in order to increase the relevancy and impact of I-O psychology for our key stakeholders.

In this article, we review recent psychometric practices to determine how item response theory (IRT) has been used in organizational research. We identified and coded 63 articles that used IRT on empirical data published in industrial-organizational and organizational behavior journals since 2000. Results show that typical usage for IRT conforms to best practices in several ways; however, in other ways, such as testing for and reporting model fit, there is still significant room for improvement. Next, we surveyed academic and practitioner members of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) on their experiences and attitudes toward IRT. We conclude that IRT is one area where practice outpaces science. There is a cadre of practitioners that consider IRT essential to their professional life. For others, however, IRT is seen as less relevant. Based on our coding analyses and survey results, we provide suggestions on how to better incorporate IRT into organizational research and practice.

Personality assessment has a long history of application in the workplace. While the field of organization development has historically focused on developmental aspects of personality tools, other disciplines such as industrial-organizational psychology have emphasized its psychometric properties. The importance of data-driven insights for talent management (e.g., the identification of high potentials, succession planning, coaching), however, is placing increasing pressure on all types of applied behavioral scientists to better understand the stability of personality tools for decision-making purposes. The current study presents research conducted with 207 senior leaders in a global consumer products organization on the use of personality assessment data over time and across two different conditions: development only and development to decision making. Results using three different tools (based on the Hogan Assessment Suite) indicate that core personality and personality derailers are generally not affected by the purpose of the assessment, though derailers do tend to moderate over time. The manifestation of values, motives, and preferences were found to change across administrations. Implications for organizational development and talent management applications are discussed.

It is well established in the risk literature that men tend to take more risks than women. This gender difference, however, is often qualified by its domain specificity. Considering recent research on the domain generality of risk taking as a disposition, there is a need to examine the degree to which men take more risks than women, in general. In order to make substantive conclusions about the gender differences in risk‐taking propensity, one must first establish measurement invariance, which is required for the meaningful interpretation of observed group differences. In this paper, we examined the measurement invariance of the Domain‐Specific Risk‐Taking scale (DOSPERT)—one of the most popular measures of individual differences in risk taking. We found that the DOSPERT violated configural invariance in a bifactor model, indicating that the underlying factor structure of the DOSPERT differs between men and women. Even after removing the social risk dimension, DOSPERT still failed to reach scalar invariance. Taken together, these findings suggest that score differences in the DOSPERT may be due to response artifacts rather than true differences in the latent construct. Therefore, gender differences in the DOSPERT must be interpreted with caution. Implications for the measurement of risk taking are discussed.

Although burnout is a risk factor for various negative mental and physical outcomes, its prevention is hampered by the stigma associated with burnout. The current research therefore reports on the initial development and validation of a novel measure of perceived burnout stigma. Study 1 (n = 318) describes the construction and initial evaluation of scale items derived from established mental health stigma and burnout scales. Study 2 (n = 705) then replicated the burnout stigma factor structure established in the initial study. Additionally, it evaluates relationships between occupational and school burnout stigma and indicators of mental health. Hierarchical multiple regressions showed that burnout stigma accounted for variance in depression, anxiety, and stress over and beyond that of burnout. Study 3 (n = 682) extended these findings via crosslagged and bidirectional models, demonstrating that burnout stigma predicted mental health indicators 6 weeks later. Study 4 (n = 717) supplemented earlier exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses using item response theory to further demonstrate that perceived burnout stigma is a unidimensional construct potentially applicable to both work and school settings. Overall, the current research resulted in an eight-item burnout stigma instrument (BSI-8) with excellent psychometric properties that predicts indicators of mental health.