Advancing Science and Practice - HumRRO's Internal Research and Development (IR&D) Program

Since 1951, HumRRO's mission has been to provide state-of-the-art answers to the pressing challenges facing organizations and educational institutions. One ongoing means by which HumRRO supports this mission is through its Internal Research and Development Program (IR&D). The IR&D program's goals are twofold: (a) to encourage innovative research that extends HumRRO's services and products, and (b) to develop and expand capabilities that enable HumRRO to make major contributions to science and practice in the fields of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, educational psychology, and human resources management.

As of September 2005, five IR&D projects have been completed and eight are currently active. Completed projects have involved topics such as:

1. optimal person-job matching for improving the Army's efficiency in assigning new recruits to the jobs for which they are most qualified,
2. development of ATLAS (Assessment of Team Leader AbilitieS), a multi-rater assessment and feedback tool, and
3. handbooks outlining how to develop online surveys.

Current projects address topics such as:

1. building and maintaining an archive of data/statistical tools,
2. developing a faking-resistant measure of the Big Five personality traits,
3. identifying improved methods of estimating interrater reliability when research designs do not support estimating required variance components,
4. developing a multisource assessment of collaborative behavior in work teams, and
5. conducting a content analysis of performance level descriptions from various states' high school accountability testing programs.

Consistent with the program's goals, HumRRO IR&D projects have contributed to both applied practice and to science. For example, results of these efforts have contributed to practice by advancing how Army recruits are assigned to entry-level jobs. Similarly, projects targeting teamwork have produced competency models and assessment tools, such as ATLAS, that have helped organizational team leaders (and members) learn where to focus efforts to improve the skills needed to enhance their team's effectiveness (Sun and Keenan, 2003).

IR&D contributions to science have been realized through presentations at professional conferences and publications. For instance, work associated with the development of a faking-resistant measure of the Big Five was presented at the 2001 and 2003 conferences of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and has yielded two publications (McCloy, Heggestad, Reeve, 2005; Heggestad, Morrison, Reeve, & McCloy, in press). In addition, early work on methods for estimating interrater reliability in real-world situations was presented as a workshop for the Personnel Testing Council of Metropolitan Washington in 2002 and as a master tutorial at SIOP in 2004.

In sum, HumRRO's IR&D program provides its staff with an exciting means by which they can pose and investigate their own research questions, simultaneously satisfying their own curiosity and making innovative contributions to HumRRO's capabilities and to science and practice at large.

For more information, contact:
Dr. Rod McCloy or Research Notes