The goal of focal articles in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice is to present new ideas or different takes on existing ideas and stimulate a conversation in the form of comment articles that extend the arguments in the focal article or that present new ideas stimulated by those articles. The two focal articles in this issue stimulated a wide range of reactions and a good deal of constructive input.
The Current Issue
In our first article, Seymour Adler, Michael Campion, Alan Colquitt, Amy Grubb, Kevin Murphy, Rob Ollander-Krane, and Elaine Pulakos relive a standing-room-only debate at the 2015 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference where, in response to soaring organizational dissatisfaction with performance management programs, these thought leaders crossed swords on whether the elimination of performance ratings might mitigate this dilemma. Adler et al. present a critical analysis of performance management processes in the context of this debate and posit a number of provocative design, implementation, and research considerations for effectively driving reform.
Not surprisingly, this topic evoked an overwhelming flood of commentaries that covered a range of practical and theoretical issues. The common theme that arose was that performance reviews absolutely need to be fixed. However, as foreshadowed in the focal article debate, there was a wide range of proposed solutions, from fixing what we have now to dramatically shifting our entire performance management philosophy. As stated in the first commentary, organizations are not waiting around for us resolve this matter!
In our second article, Thomas Britt, Winny Shen, Robert Sinclair, Matthew Grossman, and David Klieger argue that the lack of conceptual clarity regarding the nature of employee resilience is hindering progress toward creating and maintaining healthy and productive workers and organizations. These authors believe that part of the confusion surrounding employee resilience stems from two key factors: (a) a failure of researchers to properly document what constitutes significant adversity in the workplace and (b) a lack of agreement on a single construct of resilience (e.g., unclear differentiation between the capacity for resilience and the demonstration of resilience). Britt et al. clarify the different perspectives found in the literature and propose a set of parameters and research recommendations for properly quantifying the demonstration of resilience under different types of significantly adverse work conditions.
This topic also generated an abundant and diverse set of commentaries that served to extend the discussion and to offer multiple perspectives on the resilience construct. A number of commentaries reiterated the need for construct validity, offered solutions (both theoretical and methodological), and also called for the incorporation of multidisciplinary research to avoid the jangle fallacy. Several commentaries pointed to the utility of process-oriented models (self-regulatory, operant, profiles) for better understanding and for promoting resilience, while still others addressed practice issues covering both selection and training.
It would not be possible to publish this journal without the hard work of talented reviewers. I appreciate the help and input of Mike Burke, Herman Aguinis, Satoris Culbertson, Mort McPhail, Talya Bauer, and Mark Griffin.
