It has become a tradition that my first blog of the year is an overview of the most viewed Paul Spector blogs of the prior year. Which topics caught most reader attention, either to read themselves or to assign to their students? I ended the 2022 edition with a question. Would Guide to An Industrial-Organizational Psychology Career that got enough views in a month to make position 12 retain a spot for 2023? The result are in, and the guide didn’t make the list. What did have staying power is What is Counterproductive Work Behavior. It is third on the 2023 list, the same rank as in 2022 and is the 2nd most viewed ever. CWB has been a hot topic in the academic world, but it is of concern to practitioners as well.
Most Viewed Paul Spector Blogs
- The Ethics of Academic Peer Review
- What is Work-Family Conflict
- What is Counterproductive Work Behavior?
- Single Item Measures Are Better Than You Think
- The Museum of Industrial and Organizational Psychology
- Three Types of Scientific Inference
- Psychological Reactance Is the Enemy of Change
- Policies Cannot Change Culture
- Bad Behavior Toward Customers
- O*NET Is a Valuable Tool for Job Analysis
- What is a Practitioner Scholar
- Personality Assessment for Employee Selection
Only 3 of this year’s articles were on last year’s list, with 5 of the 9 replacements written in 2023. Four new additions were from prior years, as far back as 2020. The most popular topics vary from year to year, and what is hot one year often fades the next. The best example is last year’s number 1, What is Quiet Quitting that I posted on August 29, 2022. In the last four months of the year, it became the third most read article since the start of the blog, but it has since faded to number 5 and didn’t make this year’s list. Articles about popular media concepts do not always have staying power.
What Are the Trends?
Last year was dominated by the “What Is” series with half of the top dozen explaining an important concept in the field of IO Psychology and Management. This year only three of the list had titles beginning with “What Is”. The articles on the top list cover a wide range of topics. Number 1 is my musings about how academic peer review in my field has drifted into an unethical place with powerful editors inviting vulnerable faculty, especially the untenured, to spend countless hours revising papers only to reject them. It apparently hit a nerve as it has been read nearly 3000 times in just a few months. I wrote it to start a conversation among those who run our journals about how reform is badly needed, but my guess is that external pressure will be needed.
Another article that hit a chord was my overview of a paper by Russell Matthews, Laura Pineault, and Yeong-Hyun Hong challenging conventional wisdom that single-item measures should be avoided. This paper provides dozens of single-item measures for academics and practitioners to use. I’ve begun using them myself for internal organization projects where survey length is a concern. Because of my blog article, I was invited to be part of a Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology conference session this April on single-item measures along with Russell Matthews.
Number 10 about the O*NET was one of the early articles written in April of 2020. I featured it in my IO psychology textbook (there are blog article links in each chapter as a special feature), so my guess is that some instructors who are using the book assigned it in class.
So this is a wrap for 2023. I will continue to post articles each week or two on a variety of topics. I wish everyone a happy and healthy 2024.
Photo by Rakicevic Nenad
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