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.

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).

Top management teams (TMTs) of postmodern multinational corporations are increasingly confronted by new multiple context shifts defining our advancing global knowledge era (Grant, 2000). These include seven major context changes, not the least of which is knowledge becoming the new driver, not labor, machine, or money (Graen, in press). In addition, some complicating elements are the dysfunctions of human psychology under drastic changes in contexts (Snowden & Stanbridge, 2004). Clearly our 20th-century organizational designs and processing engineering systems are in need of continuous improvement to remain competitive. What TMTs seek are new practical ways to bring about needed changes in corporate structures and systems (Graen, 2007).

As pointed out by Hyland, Lee, and Mills (2015), the most prominent effect of mindfulness is a significant decrease in experienced stress levels, and one of the most popular mindfulness interventions is mindfulness-based stress reduction. When it comes to psychological stress, desirable outcomes are both expected and documented for employees who adopt a mindful approach to work. But how are these beneficial effects happening, exactly?

As a workforce evolves, it is important for employers to consider how trends and changes in the workforce have implications for organizational processes such as recruiting, selecting, training, and rewarding a cohort of workers (Costanza & Finkelstein, 2015). This article examines the practical aspects of workforce changes on organizations’ recruitment efforts. Particularly in the face of recruiting shortages, it is important to understand how to best to develop a large and qualified pool of applicants.

Popular and influential social commentators have called organizations complicit in perpetuating weight-based bias and mistreatment. Although our field has advanced our understanding of the economic consequences of being fat at work (e.g., salary; job performance; and promotions), we urgently need more research on the interpersonal experiences of this swath of workers so that we can appropriately advise organizations. In this article, we describe how organizational psychology researchers can answer this call to do more research on weight at work (a) even while feeling uncomfortable with a topic that can feel personal, medicalized, and/or overly intertwined with other DEI-based topics; (b) by incorporating insightful research from outside disciplines that centers weight controllability and weight-based mistreatment deservedness; and, critically, (c) while approaching weight at work research with a respectfulness that conveys an understanding of the complexities intertwining weight, health, and personal agency. In culmination, this article offers to our field a flexible, living document entitled Best Practices for Weight-Based Research in Organizational Studies.