The concept of mindfulness has become the topic of heated debates among scholars and practitioners alike. Hyland, Lee, and Mills's (2015) focal article has an ambitious goal: distilling how mindfulness fits into workplace research and practice. This is laudable, and we are pleased that the authors are providing a review of the many ways in which mindfulness may benefit employees and organizations. Unfortunately, the authors fall short of their aspiration to produce a comprehensive overview of the link between workplace mindfulness and performance. We outline three points that we find may have helped the authors achieve their main objective.

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.”

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.

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.

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.