This study examines the fairness and equivalence of three widely used personality and values assessments-Hogan Personality Inventory, Hogan Development Survey, and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory-across race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and intersectional identities. Employing comprehensive statistical analyses, the study assesses differences in item functioning, scale reliability, and factor structure. Results indicate that the assessments generally function equivalently, with negligible or small differences across groups. Moderate differences were observed primarily in the values measures for sexual orientation and intersectional identities, though these did not compromise overall fairness. The study underscores the importance of inclusive and equitable assessment practices.
Helping individuals develop new behaviors and lasting habits is critical to consulting psychologists in the coaching, training, and consulting programs they are involved in. Despite the numerous theories, models, and frameworks for habit and behavior change practitioners and leaders are still in search of a concise, evidence-based model to effectively assist clients and employees in setting and achieving goals that enhance individual, team, and organizational effectiveness and support change initiatives. This article revisits and updates the theory-based 3E (enlighten, encourage, and enable) model of individual behavior change to translate insight and intentions into deliberate practice leading to successful individual change outcomes (Mashihi & Nowack, 2025; Nowack, 2009).
Given the increasing regularity of organizational change, there is a growing demand for organizations to build the capability needed to navigate constant change and maintain alignment with the evolving business environment. The complexity of today's business context highlights the inadequacies of traditionally top-down and linear change management models, underscoring the need for more adaptable and resilient approaches. This article defines the construct of organizational change capability, traces its origin to strategic management, reviews existing empirical findings, discusses its relationships with other organizational change models and concepts, and identifies areas where psychological theories can further advance research and practice. It then introduces the articles in this special issue, emphasizing the pivotal role that change practitioners, particularly consulting psychologists, can play in developing sustainable change capability at different levels of the organization. The underlying hope of this special issue is to stimulate more scholarly investigations into the psychological and behavioral foundations of organizational change capability and offer practical guidance for organizations and business leaders striving to adapt and thrive in an increasingly volatile business environment.
This article examines how to build change capability at the enterprise level. The article focuses on the need for faster and more effective change outcomes and leadership perceptions of change outcomes and change fatigue. Solutions to build ongoing ability to respond to change and successfully pivot are outlined in categories of "people and capability" and "process and tools." Change-ready mindsets and best practices for change networks are identified. Emphasis is placed on articulating clear, compelling change visions; adopting expansive mindsets about uncertainty; and creating responsive stakeholder feedback loops and decision-making frameworks. Suggestions are made for an agile change approach that focuses on creating the conditions within which change can thrive and sparking change momentum versus simply trying to manage change. Practical ideas are shared to combat change fatigue and establish enterprise change infrastructure for repeatable change success.
In today's era of perpetual whitewater leaders face turbulence, complexity, and ambiguity that demand new capabilities for leading change and supporting their organizations' overall change capability. This article synthesizes existing literature on building sustainable change capability through leadership. It is organized around five roles leaders can play: As navigators, leaders scan environments, interpret signals, and provide real-time navigation through situational awareness and sensemaking. As learning guides, they model and nurture curiosity, developmental readiness, and learning agility while orchestrating cultures where experimentation and reflection drive collective growth. As pilots, leaders compassionately guide people through the human side of change, reducing friction, by helping them process uncertainty, align diverse perspectives, and co-create shared meaning. As engineers, leaders design systems, structures, and distributed leadership practices that balance stability with agility, embedding adaptability into the fabric of the organization. Finally, as stabilizers, leaders steady their teams by demonstrating versatility, emotional agility, self-care, and boundary setting, providing microstability that complements organizational agility. Together, these roles highlight the paradoxical demands of modern leadership-balancing stability and flexibility, force and enablement, and learning and performance. Consultants and coaches can support leaders in understanding and cultivating these capacities and as a result help leaders both guide organizations through disruption but also embed resilience, adaptability, and trust as enduring capabilities for thriving in a world of constant change.
This article introduces the special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal focused on the science and application of emotional intelligence (EI) in the workplace. Although the term EI has been applied in the context of organizations for over 35 years to define emotion-related abilities associated with important workplace outcomes, significant controversy remains related to its definition, measurement, and construct validity. In this introductory article, we briefly explore the history of the EI paradigm and its potential utility to consulting psychologists in areas such as assessment, as well as its use in training and leadership development. We also briefly review evidence for the validity of EI as an applied theory and highlight research demonstrating the potential to enhance EI through training and development. Although the evidence for the applied utility of EI is significant, more research is still needed to inform practice. To this end, we provide a research agenda that will address issues of special significance to applied practice. We conclude with a summary of each of the five focal articles that make up the special issue.
The study investigates the relationship between nurses' surface-level emotional labor and well-being at work, with a special emphasis on the moderating role of emotional intelligence abilities. Drawing predictions from the objective theory of self-awareness, we complemented the ability model of emotional intelligence in order to verify that emotional intelligence can reinforce the negative relationship between nurses' surface acting and work-related well-being. The data were obtained from 374 female Polish nurses who completed a performance measure of emotional intelligence and reported on their perceived surface acting, job satisfaction, work engagement, and burnout using a paper-and-pencil survey. Surface acting was negatively related to job satisfaction and work engagement, but it was positively related to burnout. These relationships were found to be stronger for nurses with higher emotional intelligence who displayed a high level of surface acting. Additional analyses revealed that the ability to understand emotions was primarily involved in the obtained effects. The findings raise the intriguing possibility that there are domains in which emotional intelligence could exacerbate reactivity to emotionally demanding situations.
The solution-focused approach facilitates positive change through brief interventions that enhance solution-focused thinking. The Solution-Focused Inventory (SFI), which measures solution-focused thinking, is increasingly being used to assess outcomes of this approach, as well as in other applications. The SFI has been translated into multiple languages (Chinese, Spanish, Turkish). This article presents a translation of the SFI into Hebrew (SFI-H), validated using two separate samples of MBA students (N = 753 and N = 173) and a sample of third-year undergraduate students in an entrepreneurship program (N = 169). The SFI-H reproduces the SFI's three-factor structure and shows adequate validity and reliability, as well as sensitivity to change when used to measure the outcomes of a solution-focused coaching intervention. This study further confirms the scale's divergent validity in comparison to a scale used to measure psychological capital-a construct that bears similarities to, yet is ultimately distinct from, solution-focused thinking (the construct measured by the SFI-H). Notably, compared with measurements of psychological capital, the SFI shows superior capacity to predict entrepreneurship performance. This scale contributes to international efforts to expand access to the solution-focused approach to consulting, coaching, and counseling and the capacity to assess its outcomes.
Employee surveys inquiring about job attitudes, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job engagement, are widely used by organizations around the world for action planning and developing interventions. Despite primary and meta-analytic evidence demonstrating the presence of a dominant general factor among attitudinal constructs (referred to as the "a" factor), practitioners typically analyze and report the results of the employee surveys in ways suggesting that specific attitudinal constructs are orthogonal to each other (e.g., sometimes the results would be reported at the item level; other times the items would be rolled up to scales corresponding to the aforementioned attitudes). Overlooking the role that the "a" factor may play in employee surveys may lead to overemphasizing the importance of specific factors, underemphasizing the role of the general factor, and consequently, to developing ineffective and incomplete organizational interventions. Using archival data from large-scale employee surveys as an example, we offer a step-by-step guide (tutorial) to practitioners, describing how to analyze and interpret the results of job attitudes surveys at both the individual and the organization level of data aggregation in light of a dominant general factor.
As U.S. post-9/11 veterans leave the military and enter the military-to-civilian transition phase, they navigate cultural and social identity adjustments, and their well-being is impacted by factors that are distinct to them. Post-9/11 veterans are a younger, more demographically diverse subpopulation of military veterans with higher prevalences of trauma exposure, mental disorders, life stressors (e.g., perceived underemployment, financial strain), and service-induced injury and disability than prior veteran cohorts and civilians. A previous large, longitudinal veteran study established that some post-9/11 veterans struggle to assimilate, particularly females, people of color, and those in the lowest enlisted pay grades. Using data findings from this longitudinal study, the online Veteran Transition Screener (VTS) was developed to equip veteran-serving providers with real-time data reports on clients' military-to-civilian transition assimilation status and risks (e.g., demographics, specific experiences [i.e., adverse childhood experiences, combat exposure, military sexual trauma, moral injury], employment, education, finances, health, social relationships). By empirically matching a veteran's individualized risks to research-derived predictors of well-being and by providing a VTS client report that includes action-oriented, research-informed recommendations, a veteran-serving provider's selection of effective program components for prevention and intervention is better informed. Results from a pilot test of VTS's functionality and utility demonstrated satisfaction by two veteran-serving organizations that used VTS with 32 veteran clients. This pilot justifies quasicontrolled studies to assess the value of possible large-scale implementation. VTS, if scaled, could potentially strengthen individualized veteran support, and aggregated veteran data could become predictive analytics that further inform veteran programs, practices, and policies.
The article introduces the special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal on "Ethical and Legal Issues in Artificial Intellingence for Organizational Consultants and Managers." The content of the six articles in this special issue is described along with general themes cutting across articles. Implications for practice are also discussed.
Change is ubiquitous in today's world of work. In order to achieve and remain successful, teams must be able to adapt to environmental changes and bounce back from adversity. Psychologists are well suited to help teams build change capability by providing coaching to team leaders and members and by implementing evidence-based team-development interventions. In this article we provide an overview of team attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions that drive team change capability, providing practical strategies and recommendations for psychologists to help teams build these change capabilities before, during, and after team performance episodes. In doing so, we equip psychologists to support their teams in becoming more adaptable, more resilient, and ultimately more effective over the long haul.
In recent years the prevalence of online and blended coaching formats has surged significantly. Recent results have revealed no differences in perceived coaching success across face-to-face, blended, and online coaching formats from coaches' and clients' perspectives. However, clients have reported more undesirable side effects in blended coaching formats. We assumed that transitioning from online to face-to-face coaching could be operationalized as a critical incident leading to positive effects and challenges. Therefore, this study explored the transition from online to face-to-face coaching by identifying key themes, examining positive effects and challenges, and evaluating their impact on coaching success. Hence, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of two complementary studies. Study 1 employed a qualitative design using a semistructured critical incident interview with 15 coaches and ten clients after an online to face-to-face coaching transition. We identified three primary themes concerning the transition: (a) positive effects, (b) challenges, and (c) neutral factors. Subsequently, Study 2 evaluated the findings from Study 1 in a larger quantitative sample of coaches (N = 120). The results indicated that coaches experienced more positive effects (M = 4.52) than challenges (M = 2.61) during the transition and perceived it as positive or neutral. Moreover, the number of perceived positive effects was significantly associated with coaching success, while challenges were not. Our findings suggest that positive effects and challenges can coexist within the same coaching experience without necessarily negating each other. Our findings provide valuable insights for practitioners and scholars in the field of business coaching.
This study investigated how prior career experiences imprint on individuals' behaviors, particularly in military contexts, shaping their transition into civilian life upon retirement. Resistance to change, one's tendency to resist or avoid making changes, and personal sense of power, one's perception of their ability to influence people and resources, often become by-products of military institutionalization, influencing military-to-civilian retirement transition and well-being. A moderated mediation model was proposed wherein personal sense of power would moderate the indirect relationship between resistance to change and well-being, mediated by transition difficulty. The sample was comprised of retired Indian Army personnel (N = 256). Confirmatory factor analysis validated the scales culturally, and Hayes' PROCESS Macro was used to test moderated mediation. Findings reveal that resistance to change and transition difficulty negatively affect well-being. Moreover, transition difficulty partially mediates the relationship between resistance to change and well-being. Notably, personal sense of power moderates this mediation, acting as a buffer. The study underscores the significance of organization-relevant dispositional factors in comprehending the challenges of military retirement and their implications for overall well-being. The study provides recommendations for addressing dispositions such as resistance to change and personal sense of power through interventions like preretirement counseling, scenario-based exercises, growth mindset training, and confidence-building workshops to help veterans navigate transitions more effectively.
This article reports the results of, and discusses methods for, using a behavior-based 360-degree emotional intelligence (EI) assessment to help determine the readiness of frontline leaders to step up into more senior leadership positions. Participants (n = 485) were frontline school leaders in a public school system who were rated by 2,435 raters on a 360-degree leadership assessment measuring leadership performance proficiency, the Genos Social and Emotional Competency Survey, and two global items measuring leadership capability: specifically, a single item measuring how well the participants interacted with others at work and a single item measuring the participants' overall job performance. The EI 360 was shown to account for an additional 17% of the variance in how well the participants interacted with others at work and an additional 8% of the variance in their overall job performance over the leadership performance proficiency. Participants (n = 70) deemed "not yet ready" for more senior leadership positions (based on low observer-rated EI scores) participated in a longitudinal EI development program. Their EI was then retested using the same raters 6 months or more later. Comparisons of their Time 1 and Time 2 EI 360 results show that the EI development program improved how well participants demonstrated their EI by on average 43 percentile points. Although further research is needed to substantiate the claim, we argued these results show that an EI assessment can contribute significantly to organizational decisions on leadership talent above and beyond the more traditional measures used in this context.
Leadership versatility refers to the flexible, balanced, and situationally appropriate use of a broad range of opposing yet complementary leader behaviors. This article presents a definition and measure of versatility along with an explanation for its increasing importance in modern organizations and empirically examines two general propositions: first, that leader versatility can be quantified in terms of a hierarchical structure that distinguishes complementary behaviors in the interpersonal domain and in the organizational-task domain which, together, cohere in a higher order factor; second, that leader versatility predicts team performance and leader effectiveness with differential effects for versatility in the interpersonal and organizational-task domains. Analyses of ratings for 1,861 upper level managers and executives from dozens of American corporations representing several industries provided support for both the measurement of versatility and its relationship with team engagement, team productivity, and overall leader effectiveness. Implications are considered in terms of future research on versatility and recent, conceptually similar models of leadership for disruptive environments. What's It Mean? Implications for Consulting Psychology Leadership versatility concerns the flexible, balanced, and situationally appropriate use of a broad range of opposing yet complementary leader behaviors. This empirical article provides evidence for the validity of leadership versatility in terms of both measurement and predicting a range of outcomes in a large sample of upper level managers and executives. Versatility distinguishes leaders who can optimize competing organizational goals and successfully navigate through a volatile environment of disruptive change.
This article serves as an introduction for the special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal focusing on "Beyond the Generic Brown: South Asian and Arab People in the Workplace." This section is part of a larger series of ongoing articles assessing diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of consulting psychology. Additionally, research and consulting gaps are noted and addressed, with recommendations and a call for consultants and coaches.
This article details the state of the art in measuring emotional intelligence (EI) in workplace settings, with a focus on the needs of practitioners who want to put scientific findings to use. It starts by defining EI as an umbrella construct that consists of a series of related yet distinct facets. Rather than focusing on theoretical models of EI, the article is organized around three measurement models-namely, self-report, ability testing, and observer report-and elaborates trade-offs based on each method's strengths and weaknesses. Self-reported EI is highly correlated with personality traits such as agreeableness, and it is best conceptualized as confidence and motivation rather than intelligence. Self-reported EI is no more appropriate for hiring and promotion than are self-reported technical skills, but it can be valuable for developmental use, particularly when juxtaposed with other EI measures to highlight gaps in self-awareness that represent blind spots or hidden opportunities. Self-reports are also important for career counseling because self-perceptions and actual abilities can drive decision-making separately. Ability-tested EI shows greater validity for distinguishing EI from personality and other constructs, although ability reports can be more resource-intensive to administer and there are challenges in defining "right answers." Finally, observer reports are valid and reflect people's competencies in daily use more than their hypothetical best performance. The article emphasizes the importance of matching the method of measuring EI to the goal for doing so and suggests the value of all three types of measures in combination.
Team coaching is a relatively new and emerging field, with always evolving ideas around what it is and how it differs from team facilitation and development (Hackman & Wageman, 2005). Team-coaching programs are in many ways still in their infancy, with different curricula being developed across different institutions and training providers, however with an overall agreement that they need to differ from the training of individual coaches. After all, individual coaching is about individual learning and development and the psychology of the dyad, while team coaching is about team reflection, team development, and group dynamics, which can be very different from dynamics in a dyad. But what about the supervision of team coaches? What do current supervision models have to offer team coaches and their practice? Over the last 9 years, we have been experimenting, in the context of a team-coaching program, with a new group supervision method that specifically benefits team coaches and consultants who work regularly with intact teams. In this article, we want to initially share some thoughts on the role of the parallel process in supervision and how it has shaped our approach to team-coaching supervision. We will then describe our method, looking at the impact we have noticed and exploring the benefits and drawbacks of using it in an open or closed supervision group. Some reflections on the role of the supervisor will be offered, and we will conclude with some thoughts on the implications for supervision.
