The SIOP Exchange

Washington Post Discusses Wal-Mart vs. Dukes

The Washington Post "Conversations"  series posted a conversation this week discussing the Wal-Mart vs. Dukes case that has made headlines recently. Arguments in the case regarding discrimination against female workers at Wal-Mart began March 29. Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center and products liability defense attorney Matthew Cairns debated the case on The Washinton Post website here.

Questions discussed int he article revolve around numerous workplaces issues, such as the causes of differing pay between men and women:

"How is a fair average pay differential arrived at between men and women when women have shorter average length of employment because of a percentage that change to stay at home moms etc.? It seems like if one group by their own choice have different career statistics that would skew their average wage because of higher wages being related to longer length of service."

To read the answers given by Greenberger and Cairns, read the full story here. 

 

Fly, Drive, Walk, Swim, or Hitchhike to the SIOP Conference This Year!

A Five-Minute Read About Why Students Need to Go to This Conference. (Don’t Actually Hitchhike)

By Christopher M. Rosett, for SIOP
 
When my professor told me I should submit my thesis research for acceptance at SIOP last year I was excited to give it a shot. After all, my goal had always been to present my research at a conference, so SIOP seemed the perfect place to start. When the proposal actually got accepted I thought, “Wow. That’s pretty cool… now what?”
 
As a self-sustaining graduate student, the first thing that hit me was that I really couldn’t even afford to go; the investment was significant for someone on a tight budget. However, both faculty and my parents assured me that the expenditures were worth their weight in gold: “The people you will meet, and the things you will learn will far outweigh anything you spend in the long run,” they said. I decided it was worth it to find the cash.

March Issue of Canadian Journal Includes Feature by SIOP Fellow

The March issue of the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, accessible here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cjas.v28.1/issuetoc, contains a special feature on Positive Organizational Scholarship, Guest Edited by SIOP Fellow Kevin Kelloway of Saint Mary's University.

Book Review: The Blame Game

By Dan Fisher*, Ph.D.

Concern over who gets the credit and who gets the blame is at the core of so much of our work as organizational psychologists, human resource professionals, and internal or external consultants, not to mention our own careers. Chances are, you have experienced at least one of the following: your boss took credit for one of your ideas, a co-worker blamed you for something that may or may not have been your fault, you were tempted to point a finger at someone else to deflect blame, or you sought credit that perhaps you didn’t deserve. It’s also very likely that in your work as a consulting psychologist, executive coach, or OD practitioner you work with clients every day who are wrestling with, and are challenged by, all of the above.

These issues of credit and blame are the topic of long-time SIOP member Ben Dattner’s book, “The Blame Game, How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure”. Dattner provides an eloquent account of the impact of credit and blame in our lives, particularly as they emerge in organizational contexts.

Evaluation Week: Using mTurk to Collect Evaluation Data

By Elizabeth Rupprecht

Hello! I’m Elizabeth Rupprecht, an Industrial-Organizational Psychology graduate student at Saint Louis University.  I would like to tell you more about a great resource for collecting national or international evaluation data—Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk). mTurk is normally used to provide organizations with assistance completing tasks. Typically, an organization will set up a “task,” such as transcribing one minute of audio. Then, mTurk posts this task for any interested mTurk “workers” to complete. After the organization reviews the work done, the worker is paid between one cent to a dollar, depending on the complexity and length of the task.