Over the last 5 years, there has been a surge of interest and activity among large groups of practitioners and scientists in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, who have joined together with a broad range of agencies and organizations, in small to very large collaborative teams, to examine some of the grand challenges and problems facing our field. For example, a consortium of university professors and their counterparts in five Fortune 100 firms, two global human resources (HR) consultancies, and NASA have been working together to examine the practical and scientific challenges in determining how to optimize the selection and on-boarding of a new generation of workers charged with building the first colony on Mars. One I-O practitioner involved with this initiative said, “Our project represents one of the most seamless and productive integration efforts involving the practice and scientific community, perhaps in the history of our profession.”

Ryan and Ford (2010) have argued that organizational psychology is at a tipping point in terms of its distinctiveness from other fields. Although the four scenarios they propose for organizational psychology's future cover a wide range of potential outcomes, we propose that there is another, more expansive, more optimistic scenario for our field: our identity needs to continue to evolve, expand, and extend itself to accommodate the evolving and expanding nature of the modern organizations we study. We suggest that the way forward for organizational psychology is to continue what we have done in the past: integrate theories from multiple disciplines, adopt multiple perspectives to the questions we face, and embrace the ambiguity inherent in the organizations we study. This additional scenario, which we term identity expansion, follows both from the history of the field and from research on professional identity. Below, we argue that both historically and theoretically such a future for our professional identity makes the most sense. Furthermore, we believe that organizational psychologists are in an excellent position to both shape and benefit from this expansion in identity.

Research and practice in performance appraisal and performance management seem to suffer from the same “delusion of absolute performance” that Rosenzweig (2007, p. 112) described with respect to commentators’ evaluations of company performance in a competitive market economy. Commentators on business success factors have tended to speciously neglect or downplay the relative nature of performance (Rosenzweig, 2007). Downplaying the relative nature of performance is apparently the strategy endorsed by most performance appraisal scholars, too. Goffin, Jelley, Powell, and Johnston (2009) estimated that less than 4% of the published performance rating research has involved relative or social-comparative approaches, despite demonstrable advantages for relative over absolute rating formats (discussed below). Similarly, social comparison research and organizational scholarship have not traditionally been closely integrated (Buunk & Gibbons, 2007; Greenberg, Ashton-James, & Ashkanasy, 2007).

Lievens and Motowidlo (2016) present a convincing case for why situational judgment tests (SJTs) should be developed specifically to measure general domain knowledge, but I have two concerns regarding the use of SJTs in psychological research and practical settings if the reconceptualization of SJTs offered by the authors is adopted to the exclusion of other current approaches. The first concerns abandoning SJTs as a helpful job analysis tool if we encourage intentional conflation of trait expression with job effectiveness in the development of SJT items. Second, diluting the situational component of SJTs may reduce their acceptance as selection tools by job applicants and practitioners in organizations.

Research collaborations are two-way streets. To obtain support from organizations, academics must communicate the value of their research projects to the stakeholders. In their focal article, Lapierre et al., (2018) described this process as the academic “sales pitch”, one that must be “short yet attention grabbing” (p.20). Academic research in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, however, is rooted in esoteric jargon (e.g., validity and reliability) and unconvincing evidence (e.g., r and r2) (Highhouse, Brooks, Nesnidol, & Sim, 2017; Rynes, 2009). These concepts are difficult for non-academics to understand and may even undermine the value of our work (Brooks, Dalal, & Nolan, 2014; Kuncel & Rigdon, 2012; Mattern, Kobrin, Patterson, Shaw, & Camara, 2009). CEOs and other senior leaders often have limited time, attention, and expertise to process your pitch: A bad one could effectively derail the collaboration before it even began.

The article by Macey and Schneider (2008) brings me nostalgically back to 1975–1979 and my graduate program at the University of South Florida. In the Industrial-Organizational (I-O) program, Dr. Herb Meyer was reminding us of “split roles in performance appraisal,” and in the Clinical program, Dr. Charlie Spielberger was gaining fame on his state–trait anxiety research—propelling him to president of the American Psychological Association in 1991. The logic of “state–trait” was compelling then and has withstood the test of time. It is surprising that it has taken this long to apply state–trait logic to other important measurements. As a practitioner who is soon to hire 12,000 new employees under one roof to open CityCenter in Las Vegas (2009), it is my hope that we can move beyond concept to selection tools that can help organizations create engaged cultures.

In their focal article, Ree, Carretta, and Teachout (2015) argue that a large general factor (DGF), defined as the first component of an unrotated principal components solution, is characteristic of many different domains. In their view, ignoring the DGF in assessment and prediction in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology is counterproductive. They readily acknowledge that the existence of a DGF does not preclude the existence of distinguishable specific factors. Their message is simply that the general factor (unrotated) frequently accounts for over half the reliable variance, and rather than ignore it, the reasons for it and the usefulness of it should be investigated. Further, the general factor is a construct, and all constructs must be supported by the various kinds of evidence that demonstrate construct validity. The DGF is no exception.