The 36th annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference is approaching, scheduled for April 14 through April 17. Like last year’s conference, 2021’s will be a bit different from those held in previous years — it will be virtual. This year, conference sessions will be both live and prerecorded, and many sessions will be available for viewing through May 7.

But one thing remains the same from pre-pandemic years: Hogan’s researchers and consultants are looking forward to attending and presenting some of Hogan’s many advances in personality research. Here’s a detailed schedule of the sessions we will be involved in.

Wednesday, April 14

Improving D&I: Personality Predicts Inclusion Behaviors

Chase Winterberg, JD, MA, Kimberly S. Nei, Jessica Walker

9:00 a.m. CT, Poster Room B

Inclusion fosters the benefits of diversity. Authors meta-analyzed personality, dark personality, and work-value predictors of inclusive work behaviors. Results suggest that individuals more likely to engage in inclusive behaviors at work are those who are emotionally stable, agreeable, conscientious, tolerant, open-minded, trusting, humble, honest, sympathetic, and concerned about helping others.

Providing Personality “Insight” to Competency Differentiation: A Synthetic Approach

Matthew R. Lemming

3:00 p.m. CT, Poster Room A

Competency modeling, when done correctly, should meet certain standards. Authors addressed whether Insight competencies are sufficiently specific without being too limiting. The study used synthetic validity meta-analyses to distinguish the personality predictors of business insight from industry insight and financial insight using the Hogan Personality Inventory and the Hogan Development Survey.

Development and Validation of a Personality-based Measure of General Employability

Michael Boudreaux, Nathan A. Hundley, Brandon Ferrell, Ryne A. Sherman

5:00 p.m. CT, Poster Room A

This research operationalizes a three-dimensional model of general employability. The model focuses on the broad personality domains of rewarding, able, and willing. Authors discuss the methods used to create scales for the general employability model, the psychometric properties and construct validity of those scales, and relationships to job performance.

Thursday, April 15

Executive Coaching in Extreme Times: Handling New and Unusual Scenarios

Josh Rogers

12:30 p.m., Room 8

This panel of experienced coaches will share best practices and insights from personal experience coaching leaders through new or unusual situations. Panelists will use a storytelling approach to this discussion, highlighting contextual considerations and tips for successfully building trust and rapport, as well as leveraging assessments to drive change and measuring the impact of coaching.

Are Machine Learning Algorithms a Hiring Panacea or Pandora’s Box?

Brandon Ferrell, Nathan A. Hundley

1:30 p.m. CT, Room 6

Machine learning has demonstrated value from predicting important workplace outcomes to solving complex data problems. However, challenges persist from limitations in extracting actionable insights to eliminating differences among protected classes. This debate will present different perspectives and seek a framework to analyze both the promises and limitations of machine learning in employment decision-making.

Professional Coaching: Issues, Perspectives, and Future Avenues

Scott Gregory

1:30 p.m., Room 8

The view of coaching is changing, and organizations are now increasingly receptive to its broader organizational value for all employees. This panel proposes discussions around future opportunities for coaching, new populations of employees who can benefit from coaching, and views on a multilevel coaching perspective to help inform future opportunities for IO psychology practitioners.

Friday, April 16

Diversity and Inclusion in Action: Approaches to Ignite Inclusive Workplaces

Kimberly S. Nei

12:30 p.m. CT, Room 3

This Ignite session brings together practitioners from different organizations to discuss the innovative approaches they are using to address diversity and inclusion. These strategies include leveraging engagement surveys to inform D&I initiatives, coaching, creating diverse candidate pools, incorporating minority employee journeys, and including personality measures to promote diversity.

Saturday, April 17

Toward Building a Better Understanding of Female Leaders

Ryne A. Sherman

9:00 a.m., Room 2

This symposium seeks to address the gender gap in the executive ranks by advancing our understanding of personality characteristics, obstacles, and development needs of female executives including ways in which they are different from and similar to their male executive and female nonexecutive counterparts.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• An Investigation of Dark Side Characteristics in Female Leaders (Sherman)
• Queen Bee Syndrome in Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, and Leadership
• Gender Differences in Endorsed Leadership Strengths and Desires for Leadership Coaching

Prerecorded Sessions

Demonstrating Natural Language Processing Applications for Improving Job Analysis

Kimberly S. Nei, Matthew R. Lemming, Nathan A. Hundley

The traditional methods used for validating selection solutions are often time and resource intensive. Recently, researchers have been exploring machine learning methods, such as natural language processing, for improving the efficiency or accuracy of traditional methods. This session will demonstrate actual applications for improving job analysis using natural language processing.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• BERT the Intern: An Application of Transfer Learning for Coding Focus Group Notes for Personality Relevance (Hundley, Nei, & Lemming)
• Automating Job Matching with Artificial Intelligence
• DEEP*O*NET: Using NLP to Leverage Detailed Text Descriptions of the World of Work

The Ever-evolving Testing Industry: Advancements and Trends

Brandon Ferrell, Ryne A. Sherman

This session examines trends in the testing industry (technology, AI, data privacy, diversity and inclusion), how the industry is innovating and adapting, and opportunities for research. The panel includes testing industry leaders from the Association of Test Publishers discussing industry shifts in assessment methods, trends that will shape the industry, and implications for IO professionals.

The Evolution of 360s and Practical Recommendations for Today

Ryne A. Sherman

Over the past 30 years, the psychometric foundations of 360-degree assessments have evolved and a wealth of experience on best practices in 360 assessments has been accumulated. In this session, four experts, two from large multinational organizations and two from major 360 consulting firms, share their knowledge, experiences, and views on changing trends regarding 360 assessments in applied settings.

Chaired by Hogan Chief Science Officer Ryne Sherman, the symposium will feature the following presentations:

• Latest Trends in 360 Assessment
• The Evolution of 360 Assessment at Shell: Conducting 360s at Large Scale
• Every Day is a Winding Road: The Evolution of 360 Feedback at PepsiCo
• The Leadership Versatility Index: A 25-year Odyssey to a Truly Innovative 360

Good Cop/Bad Cop: A Deep Dive into Police Officer Personality

Ryne A. Sherman, Chase Winterberg, JD, MA

Public awareness of police deviance and associated societal costs have driven a rethinking of what makes a police officer capable of doing their job well. Authors bring together three studies that examine the role of the police personality in public opinions about police, performance under pressure, and performance more generally. Implications for future research and practice will be discussed.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• A Public-Recommended Personality Profile of Successful Police (Winterberg)
• Cool Under Fire: Psychopathic Personality Traits and Decision-Making in Law Enforcement-oriented Populations
• One Bad Apple Ruins the Bunch: A Critical Examination of Dark Personality and Job Performance Among Police Officers (Sherman)

How Do We Measure Up?: Benchmarking Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Karen M. Fuhrmeister

Benchmarking data can be a powerful tool to inform decision-making and strategic planning. Clients are increasingly interested in benchmarking data, but the conversations around this topic often remain brief and shallow. This hybrid panel will discuss the “what,” “when,” and “how” of effective benchmarking in consulting practices through four large-scale studies and an interactive Q&A session.

Personality in the Workplace: How Much Does the Situation Matter?

Nathan A. Hundley, Ryne A. Sherman

Four studies uniquely illustrate how methodological and theoretical advances in situations research can be leveraged to advance our understanding of the role of personality in predicting individuals’ functioning in the workplace.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• Person-job Fit: Taking Situations Seriously (Hundley & Sherman)
• Personality States at Work: The Role of Traits and Self- and Other-rated Situations
• How Do Managers, Coworkers, and Subordinates Affect Workers’ Personality Expression?
• Situations Predicting Changes in Transformational Leadership and Core Self-evaluations

Research Incubator: Linking C-suite Personality/Behavior to Firm-level Metrics

Matthew R. Lemming, Jessica M. Walker

C-suite success is measured by a company’s financial performance. Using a research incubator format, authors present work linking CEO personality to firm financial metrics and share challenges faced when building our dataset and generating models used for analyses. They then break into groups to collaborate and discuss future research ideas using leader personality data linked to firm performance.

Selection Strategies to Hire Safe Workers and Improve Workplace Safety

Michael Boudreaux, Stephen Nichols

Workplace safety is a critical, multilevel issue. Much of the past research on occupational safety has focused on environmental factors to promote safer workplaces. More recent research focused on individual factors has shown that personal characteristics can be used to identify people likely to cause accidents, hire safer employees, and build large-scale training programs.