Craig Russell has done us all a service in his review of current turnover research (2013), but I think he is too severe in his judgment of the validities and relevance of our field's research, and he encourages us to go down some questionable research paths in the future. Despite his expertise in the field, there are several points where I believe other views are more attractive.

We can recognize the usefulness of assessing so many studies and meta-analyses done in recent decades, as summarized in his Table 1 (drawn from Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000). But let us also note that Russell would have done readers a bigger favor if the results were presented in some logical order. Right now, not even an alphabetic order among the variables is evident. This is a flaw that obscures key understandings. Looking at the data another way can make one more optimistic about its predictive validity and relevance.

Aguinis et al. (2017) contribute interesting analyses of cited sources in contemporary undergraduate industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology textbooks and continue their ongoing investigation into the long-term viability of I-O psychology as a unique discipline (see Aguinis, Bradley, & Brodersen, 2014). These analyses, conducted by authors who are members of business schools, attempt to answer questions related to the nature of work conducted by I-O psychologists, comparing the quality and importance of work conducted by faculty in business schools with that conducted by faculty in psychology departments. One of their general themes is that members of business schools are conducting important research that is influencing the future of I-O psychology by overtaking undergraduate textbooks. As such, the article has the feel of a conquering hero taunting its vanquished foe.

Bergman and Jean (2016) skillfully summarize how the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology literature generally overrepresents salaried, core, managerial, professional, and executive employees. We concur that that the underrepresentation of traditional workers (i.e., wage earners, laborers, first-line personnel, freelancers, contract workers, and other workers outside managerial, professional, and executive positions) can negatively affect our science. In our commentary we extend the arguments of Bergman and Jean by (a) discussing the appropriate use of samples, which are determined by study goals and hypotheses, and (b) further examining samples in occupational health psychology (OHP) and related journals, which generally require worker samples.

As organizations become decentralized and work becomes team based, organizations are adopting performance management practices that integrate employees’ performance information from multiple perspectives (e.g., 360-degree performance ratings). Both arguments for and against the use of performance ratings presented in the focal article focused on rater agreement (or lack thereof) as evidence supporting the position that multisource ratings are a useful (or not a useful) approach to performance appraisal. In the argument for the use of multisource ratings, Adler, Campion, and Grubb (Adler et al., 2016) point out that multisource ratings are advantageous because they lead to increased interrater reliability in the ratings. Although Adler and colleagues were not explicit about why this would be true, proponents of multisource ratings often cite the measurement theory assumption that increasing the number of raters will yield more valid and reliable scores to the extent that there is any correlation in the ratings (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). In the argument against the use of multisource performance ratings, Colquitt, Murphy, and Ollander-Krane argued that because multisource ratings pool together ratings from raters who are systematically different in terms of their roles and perspectives about the target employee's performance, the increased number of raters is not expected to resolve the low level of interrater agreement that is typically observed in performance ratings (Viswesvaran, Ones, & Schmidt, 1996).

At the heart of the debate between Colquitt's and Adler's (Adler et al., 2016) camps is a disagreement about the degree to which employees can be expected to respond favorably to challenging, negative, or critical feedback. Colquitt and colleagues argue that we often try and avoid blame, select jobs that don't rate us against others, and respond unhappily to accurate appraisals. Adler and his collaborators, by contrast, are more optimistic. They point to how feedback drives us to seek new strategies, change our behavior, and improve our skills.

Jones and Stout (2015) have shed much needed light on an organizational reality that industrial and organizational psychologists have unfortunately not paid much attention to: nepotism and cronyism (or what Jones and Stout have called social connection preference; SCP). Jones and Stout (2015) have made a good case (a) that SCP is pervasive, (b) that there are good reasons to believe that policies (and beliefs) against SCP are frequently counterproductive, (c) that SCP involves compelling moral dilemmas, and (d) that there are workable solutions to dealing with these moral dilemmas. I would like to offer a few observations about some additional issues involved in SCP: bias against SCP; SCP and cooperation; and nepotism, altruism, and personnel decisions criteria.

In their focal article, Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants (2018) stress the importance of context in leadership assessment. For instance, they argue that senior executives work in a different context compared to lower-level managers and that this should be taken into account. A simple example is that the competency of strategic thinking is critical for executive performance but much less so, if at all, for front-line supervisors. The claim that context matters in leadership and in the assessment of leaders is easy to grasp but difficult to apply in practice.

Since 2007, my work has involved helping companies to maximize the value of a technology system that supports strategic human resource processes, including performance management (PM). This technology is largely agnostic when it comes to PM process design. It can be configured for PM processes that make extensive ratings or avoid ratings entirely, encourage elaborate goal cascading or completely forego the use of goals, focus on once a year PM events or encourage ongoing employee–manager check-ins, and so forth. In sum, the system can be configured in any number of ways.