Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants (2018) present outcomes of the 2-day Jeanneret Symposium describing the state of the science and practice related to the assessment and development of senior leaders. They call for cross-disciplinary and/or organization-level research that examines “how organizations mature their assessment and development practices toward an integrated system embedded in a development culture” (p. 646). The purpose of this commentary is to answer this call and add to their work by proposing a systems thinking framework of organizational development where a corporate university plays a pivotal role.

Global leadership is sorely needed to transform the world, given trends such as climate change, water scarcity, and social unrest. We need leaders with multicultural sensitivity who will face paradoxes head on, invite new voices into the dialogue, and collaborate across sector and national boundaries to find more sustainable solutions. This response addresses 3 areas that garnered the most commentaries: competency models, paradoxes, and developing global leaders. We point out several neglected perspectives, including “being” and “individual uniqueness,” along with the absence of non-Western voices in the commentary dialogue. We challenge readers to raise their consciousness and shift from enabling status quo leadership to becoming change agents.

Bergman and Jean's (2016) focal article decries the limited research attention of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists on “workers”—that is, employees such as wage earners, frontline workers, and contractors, who do not fill professional, managerial, or executive positions. We agree. In addition to the scientific and moral benefits of studying workers, there is a practical imperative. An academic discipline that comes across as being disinterested in workers may leave itself open to charges of being the “handmaiden” of management (Hulin, 2002, p. 12). Moreover, such an academic discipline may be ill prepared to provide evidence-based contributions to important societal debates on topics such as income inequality and immigration.

Gross, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich's (2017) article argues that industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has a limited perspective that rarely goes beyond the specific professional populations in formal economies of high-income countries—a perspective they refer to as a POSH perspective. This valuable criticism should also eschew the notion that workers in nonindustrialized countries are necessarily different.

Costanza and Finkelstein (2015) question whether there really are generational differences in the workplace. They argue that the generation construct is not properly operationalized (often confounding age, period, and cohort factors) and that generational research is atheoretical and plagued by methodological problems. We agree that generational research is largely guilty as charged. We also share their concern regarding the generationally based interventions that are being sold to, and adopted by, managers—interventions that are often little more than fads based on popular myths and folklore. We are also in full agreement with the potential significant harm that can be associated with stereotyping groups of individuals.

My reaction to Ryan and Ford's (2010) tipping point discussion stems from the footnote assigned to the title of their article, “In keeping with recent trends in the field, we use ‘organizational psychology’ rather than industrial/organizational psychology throughout, except when directly quoting a source or providing a historical referent.” This one sentence vividly illustrates the identity crisis Ryan and Ford have aptly discussed; even among like-minded colleagues, we are unable to agree on what we should call ourselves and what that label might actually imply. I was especially confused by this choice of professional labeling when Ryan and Ford later concluded that, “[Our field's] distinctiveness is not well articulated for new entrants, affecting the extent to which organizational psychology becomes a deep-structure identity of individuals that will affect, over time, the viability of the collective identity.” What message are we sending to potential new entrants if we are not willing to retain the field's existing moniker because it is too cumbersome or difficult to explain to others? The typical student reaction I experience when discussing our professional name and identity is something along the lines of: “What do you mean SIOP wants to change its name? What's wrong with the one that it already has?”

The focal article (Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants, 2018) reviewed and discussed the challenges, practices, and opportunities for the assessment and development for senior leaders. They summarized a set of accepted wisdom for assessing senior leaders in the areas of assessment criteria, contexts, and implementation, and meanwhile, pointed out what should be explored and done in the future. One of the central premises of the focal article seems to be built on the assumption that organizations may have sufficient resources to follow the accepted wisdom to ensure the quality and effectiveness of assessment and development for senior leaders. In addition, most, if not all, of the research findings summarized and discussed in the focal article may be based on the studies under the context of established companies. Hence, whether the implications and suggestions from the focal article can generalize to small enterprises remain an open question. For example, a typical small enterprise in the United States is a company capitalized with about $25,000 (Shane, 2009). Most of these enterprises are highly centralized, have negative cash flow, and have troubles in securing cash and in obtaining customer acceptance (Rutherford & Buller, 2007). Thus, these companies may not be able to follow the accepted wisdom as recommended in the focal article. We realize that some small businesses and start-ups are extremely well funded, so our following comments apply only to those small enterprises with scarce resources.