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Professional ethics has not been a major focus in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology—in comparison with our study of unethical behavior in organizations. Consequently, we know very little about ethical situations actually faced by I-O psychologists. This article presents and tests a structural perspective on understanding the nature of ethical dilemmas that can facilitate such study. A taxonomy of five paradigmatic forms of ethical dilemmas is defined and placed in a theoretical context. Narrative descriptions of 292 ethical situations were obtained from a sample of 228 professional members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) in the United States and were used to empirically test the taxonomy. The narratives were content analyzed for form of dilemma, work domain of occurrence, relevance to human resource administration concerns, and favorability of the situation’s resolution. The work domains that were most problematic were academic research/publication activities, individual assessment/assessment centers, consulting issues regarding the client, and academic supervising/mentoring. There were no significant differences as a function of respondents’ sex, seniority, or professional membership status (member/fellow). This relatively “content free” structural aspect of ethical dilemmas enables comparisons across different domains (of professions, organizations, demographic groups, age cohorts, etc.) in which the overt idiosyncratic ethical problems experienced are not commensurable. Similarly, it can yield interpretable longitudinal comparisons despite changes in the manifestations of ethical problems encountered over time.

Antiwork is a “multifaceted, negative appraisal of work (i.e., the tradition of paid employment) in and of itself” (ms. p. 4).1 Indeed, the 18 tenets that summarize the perspective are almost unremittingly awful (work demands submission; is tedious and boring most of the time; intentionally made to be meaningless; is exploitative; if experienced as engaging, it’s due to management’s manipulation of workers; et al.). [...]it is viewed “as a totalizing, framing philosophy [that] would seem to have implications for most everything within the purview of I-O” (ms., p. 10). How much input did you have into the terms of the contract you “willingly” signed with your internet service provider or telephone and credit card companies? [...]that is also true for virtually all of the research topics noted in the focal article (cf. Recent surveys in the US have corroborated considerable variation in both positive and adverse experiences of work, related to a variety of factors (American Psychological Association, 2023; U.S. Public Health Service, 2022).

[...]because HWP is conceived of as merely “a new area of research and practice,” it does not require much change in the education and training of I-O psychologists. An expanded scientist–practitioner–humanist (SPH) values model for I-O psychology Why are there no emergent subfields of humanitarian clinical psychology, humanitarian medicine, humanitarian social work, or humanitarian educator? Because psychotherapy, medicine, social welfare, and teaching are intrinsically caring professions; the characterization would be redundant. Rarely have we asked normative questions such as “Is it the right thing to do?” That is why the S–P model is incomplete. [...]the model is biased insofar as—rather than being caring in nature, or even “value free” as many of us proudly proclaim—the practitioner portion is suffused by an economic/managerialist value system that largely determines what we do, how we do it, and how we evaluate what we’ve done. [...]topics like fairness, ethics, and morality were barely mentioned in our texts, classrooms, internship placements, or informal discussions with professors and mentors.

[...]it seems clear enough both from the title of the piece and from their focus on “financial performance, meeting business objectives, and creating value” (p. X) that “outcomes” refers to traditional economic/business/financial indicators—although the authors also include less traditional outcomes such as company-level customer satisfaction. [...]the conceptual and methodological expansion proposed by Schneider and Pulakos would remain enmeshed in the corporatist value system reflecting a managerial bias (Baritz, 1960; Katzell & Austin, 1992; Kornhauser, 1947; Lefkowitz, 2017; Zickar & Gibby, 2007). Consider the following potential organizational outcomes: the company’s economic influence on the local communities in which it operates; its effect on the local labor force and compensation rates; its general “citizenship behavior” in the community; its demonstrable concern for generally unrecognized stakeholders (such as “false rejects”); and fairness/justice aspects of its human resources practices such as compensation, policies regarding alleged harassment, discrimination, bullying, retention policies, and so on. Just as we study employee perceptions of organizational justice vis-a-vis an organization’s internal human resources activities …, we should also be concerned with the social justice implications of the organization’s external actions, which characterize the probity of its role in society.

The values of organizational psychology are criticized as (a) having supplanted psychology's humanist tradition and societal responsibilities with corporate economic objectives; (b) being \"scientistic\" in perpetuating the notion of value-free science while ignoring that it is business values that largely drive our research and practice; (c) failing to include normative perspectives of what organizations ought to be like in moral terms; (d) having a pro-management bias; and (e) having allowed ourselves to be defined largely by technocratic competence, almost to the exclusion of considering desirable societal goods. Illustrations of some adverse consequences of these values are presented. It is suggested we expand our self-image to encompass a scientist-practitioner-humanist (S-P-H) model that includes consideration of different values, advocacy of employee rights and a normative characterization of how organizations ought to be-reflecting the broader societal responsibilities of a true profession.

The distinction is important because Mumby seems intent on sketching a historical-developmental picture of the changed character of work from (a) something onerous and devoid of any inherent motivational qualities or intrinsic rewards; to (b) something harnessed, in ever more sophisticated ways, to control the people who perform it; to (c) work as a life-fulfilling form of flourishing; and finally (in later pages) to (d) the nidus of organizational power struggles. [...]There has been no dearth of descriptive and analytic accounts by social scientists and business scholars reporting on the changed nature of jobs, organizations, terms of employment, careers and the “psychological contracts” between employees and employers…. [...]the profession surely has not made them salient objects of criticism, major topics of professional focus, or expressed concern for the extent to which elements of the economic system have been corrupted and workers exploited. When it is anticipated that actions undertaken to improve organizational effectiveness will adversely impact the well-being of employees or other organizational stakeholders, the appropriate role of the I-O psychologist is to challenge the morality, wisdom and necessity of those actions and, if necessary, to attenuate their adverse consequences to the extent feasible.

A heterogeneous survey sample of for-profit, non-profit and government employees revealed that organizational factors but not personal characteristics were significant antecedents of misconduct and job satisfaction. Formal organizational compliance practices and ethical climate were independent predictors of misconduct, and compliance practices also moderated the relationship between ethical climate and misconduct, as well as between pressure to compromise ethical standards and misconduct. Misconduct was not predicted by level of moral reasoning, age, sex, ethnicity, job status, or size and type of organization. Demographic variables predicted job satisfaction and organizational variables added significant incremental variance. Results suggest the importance of promoting a moral organization through the words and actions of senior managers and supervisors, independent of formal mechanisms such as codes of conduct.

Bergman and Jean (2016) have contributed an important essay to the continuing self-reflection and maturation of the field of industrial–organizational (I-O) psychology—or as it is known in much of the world outside the United States, work psychology. 1 They clearly and adequately document that the field has relatively neglected to study the world of (largely lower-level) workers who are not managers, executives, professionals, or students and that this has affected adversely the validity of our science and the relevance of our professional practice in a number of not-so-intuitively obvious ways. But as critical as those observations are, I believe the most important aspect of their piece has to do with the inferences they offer as to why our published literature is so skewed. They suggest six potential, not mutually exclusive, explanations, including the possibility of personal biases among I-O psychologists. However, before focusing on those explanations, it should be informative to place the Bergman/Jean thesis in context. There is a growing, recent body of critical evidence and/or commentary concerning this and similar issues—although less consideration generally has been given to their likely causes.

One day, a well-dressed, mature gentleman—one might be tempted to describe him as elderly, except he appears extremely vital and alert—walks into a psychotherapist's office for a first visit. After just a few brief exchanges, the therapist gets the impression that the gentleman is a socially adept, financially successful, educated professional, and a well-regarded member of the community. But all is not as it seems on the surface. This new patient “presents” with lingering complaints of vague malaise, and despite his apparent success, he reports having experienced long-term intermittent bouts of anxiety and fear stemming from threats that the therapist cannot be sure are real or imagined: Various people seem regularly aiming to put him out of business; family relatives are disrespectful, demeaning, and do not understand him. Moreover, there is an existential quality to his anxiety: As a younger, middle-aged man, although already successful, he changed his name legally because he felt it better suited his identity. In fact, he came close to changing his name twice again in recent years, but, after agonizing about it for a long time, could not make up his mind what to change it to; nothing seemed to “fit” well enough. The therapist surmised, however, that the patient was more concerned with the impression his name would make on potential business clients and competitors than with any genuine expression of his nature, and he seemed relatively unconcerned with maintaining his nominal family identification. It struck the therapist that his patient's insecurities were not in keeping with his considerable accomplishments in life. In fact, for an educated professional, the patient seemed to lack insight into his own character and values.

A literature review reveals that supervisors’ positive affective regard (‘liking’) for subordinates is associated frequently with higher performance appraisal (PA) ratings, and with other findings such as greater halo, reduced accuracy, a better interpersonal relationship, and a disinclination to punish poor performance. However, the interpretability of the empirical literature is weakened by a number of conceptual and methodological problems. Moreover, most investigators have simply assumed that the effects of liking constitute sources of bias in PAs, and the causal nature of the observed relationships needed to be clarified. Based on the review, nine causal hypotheses constituting a model of 10 latent constructs with 17 paths are presented. Each direct effect is characterized as representing either a relevant (valid) influence, a source of bias, or as biased/valid contingent on the particular indicator or circumstances. Suggestions are made for integrating the model with a developmental approach, and implications are drawn for employment test validation and the investigation of test bias.