Robert M. Guion (1924-2012).

Presents an obituary for Robert M. Guion (1924-2012). Bob received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa in 1948 and his master's degree (1950) and doctorate (1952) from Purdue University, the latter in I-O psychology. His doctoral mentor, about whom he always spoke with gratitude, was C. H. Lawshe. Although Bob found employment opportunities limited on graduation, he knew that he wanted the freedom and independence of an academic position. He joined the faculty at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in 1952. Bob served as chair of the department from 1966 to 1971 and edited the Journal of Applied Psychology from 1983 to 1988. He continued to rise through the professorial ranks and was ultimately named a Distinguished University Professor. In 1965, Bob won the James McKeen Cattell Award for research design from Division 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology; SIOP) of the American Psychological Association (APA). He won it again in 1981. His landmark text Personnel Testing (1965, McGraw-Hill) was required reading for almost every I-O graduate student. In 1998 he published another classic, Assessment, Measurement, and Prediction for Personnel Decisions (Erlbaum). As an educator, Bob led the development of the master's and doctoral programs at BGSU and served as mentor for many of today's leaders in the field. As a contributor to professional psychology, he served as the president of two APA divisions, 14 and 5 (Evaluation, Measurement and Statistics), and also chaired APA's Board of Scientific Affairs. His career is a model of the blend of theory, research, and application. Bob was a model of integrity and deeply believed that the waste of human resources should pain the professional conscience of I-O psychologists. Bob worked tirelessly toward the development of a fundamental science that promotes human welfare at work.

Would you work if you won the lottery? Tracking changes in the American work ethic.

Although many social scientists and political commentators have speculated that the American work ethic is in decline, the last longitudinal study of this issue was conducted by Vecchio (1980) on data collected over 30 years ago. Vecchio examined whether workers would wish to continue working even if it were not financially necessary (i.e., the so-called lottery question from the National Opinion Research Center survey) and concluded that there had been a significant decline in work ethic since the 1950s. In the current study, the authors used an updated data set that included data from 1980 through 2006 and found evidence for a declining trend since Vecchio's study, although the decline seems to be leveling out. Demographic characteristics do not account for this apparent decline in shared sentiments about the importance of work for a productive life. The authors caution against drawing definitive conclusions, given the limitations of the lottery item as a measure of work ethic.

Examining corporate reputation judgments with generalizability theory.

The researchers used generalizability theory to examine whether reputation judgments about corporations function in a manner consistent with contemporary theory in the corporate-reputation literature. University professors (n = 86) of finance, marketing, and human resources management made repeated judgments about the general reputations of highly visible American companies. Minimal variability in the judgments is explained by items, time, persons, and field of specialization. Moreover, experts from the different specializations reveal considerable agreement in how they weigh different aspects of corporate performance in arriving at their global reputation judgments. The results generally support the theory of the reputation construct and suggest that stable estimates of global reputation can be achieved with a small number of items and experts.

Personality trait inferences about organizations: development of a measure and assessment of construct validity.

The authors conducted 4 studies to construct a multidimensional measure of perceptions of organization personality. Results of the first 2 studies suggest that (a) 5 broad factors are sufficient to capture the structure of organization personality perceptions, (b) real-world organizations differ on personality profiles, and (c) personality trait inferences are related to organizational attraction. Results of a 3rd study suggest that personality trait inferences assessed in 1 sample are related lo ratings of organizational attractiveness by a 2nd sample. Finally, results of a 4th study suggest that the measure is sensitive to experimental manipulations of organizational descriptions. Implications and suggestions for the use of this measure in future research are discussed.

Familiarity, ambivalence, and firm reputation: is corporate fame a double-edged sword?

This research questioned the proposition that corporate familiarity is positively associated with firm reputation. Student images of familiar and unfamiliar Fortune 500 corporations were examined in 4 experiments. The results suggested that, consistent with behavioral decision theory and attitude theory, highly familiar corporations provide information that is more compatible with the tasks of both admiring and condemning than less familiar corporations. Furthermore, the judgment context may determine whether positive or negative judgments are reported about familiar companies. The notion that people can simultaneously hold contradictory images of well-known firms may help to explain the inconsistent findings on the relation between familiarity and reputation.