Aguinis and Glavas (2013) provide a framework for understanding corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs and their outcomes. They suggest that embedding CSR within the strategy and everyday practices of an organization will help employees find meaning and purpose in their work. However, successfully implementing a large-scale organizational change—such as embedding CSR in all aspects of strategy and day-to-day business practices—brings many challenges. For example, in order for organizational change initiatives to succeed, organizational members must buy into the change, those at the top must drive the change, organizational members must be held accountable for implementing the change, and rewards should be tied to the behaviors that align with the change (Austin & Bartunek, 2003). In this article, we will expand upon Aguinis and Glavas to provide recommendations of how to uncover a shared purpose to inform CSR initiatives. Herein we provide recommendations for how to increase the likelihood of success when embedding CSR by first achieving the necessary understanding of what drives the organizational members' purpose and meaning before implementing the change.

In their debate about whether companies should keep traditional, numerical ratings of employee performance in an ever-changing world of work, Colquitt and colleagues argued that performance ratings are too hard to do correctly, while Adler and colleagues (Adler et al., 2016) countered that “‘too hard’ is no excuse for I-O psychology.” I would like to build on this by suggesting that “too hard” is not only no excuse but also a complete dismissal of the central aspect of what our science seeks to achieve.

Schiemann and Ulrich's (2017) discussion of opportunities for industrial–organizational (I-O) psychology speaks directly to the growing movement of companies eliminating their performance ratings. One of the main issues that the focal article highlights is the need for strong analytics and measurement. A core domain of industrial psychology historically has been employee performance measurement. However, by some accounts, as of September 2015, at least 51 large companies were in the process of eliminating their performance ratings (Rock & Jones, 2015). Whether eliminating performance ratings is a good idea is a subject of debate in the I-O psychology community. In addition to a focal article in the summer of 2016 edition of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Adler, Campion, et al., 2016), several sessions addressed this topic at the 2016 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology convention (e.g., Adler, Colquitt, et al., 2016; Hettal, Garza, Levy, & Cleveland, 2016; Hunt et al., 2016; Roch & Gorman, 2016). The I-O psychology community appears to be divided on the value of performance ratings. In my opinion, the recent drive to abandon rigorous performance measurement appears to be a step backward rather than a step forward.