Allies From Within: I-O Practitioners in Organizations

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The focal article (Lapierre et al., 2018) highlights many good suggestions but only briefly mentions partnering with an academically trained internal industrial and organizational (I-O) practitioner. We believe beginning a partnership with a similarly trained ally well-versed through training in academic language and through experience in “business speak” will yield a stronger end result. The appreciation for an internal I-O practitioner should not go overlooked; when an academic partners with the right practitioner in the right environment, the partnership can be mutually beneficial and more rewarding than other options. For instance, recently we collaborated to set up a partnership for scientific discovery and mutual interest that involved 12 teams representing 14 different institutions spanning academe and practice to conduct a machine learning competition. This partnership enabled many academics and practitioners access to a complex organizational dataset in order to contribute to both an organization and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) community (see Putka et al., 2018).