Extra! Extra! Read all about it: research from our very own Julia McMenamin and Dr. Natalie Allen has been featured in UWO's Media Relations. McMenamin and colleagues examined how team members' personality impacts performance during space missions, finding that conscientiousness is a key predictor of outcomes during these missions.  

You can access the Media Relations article by clicking on the above image, and you can further learn about this research in McMenamin, Allen, and Battler's paper titled 'Team Processes and Outcomes During the AMADEE-18 Mars Analog Mission' in Astrobiology.

Image:  Analog astronauts Joao Lousada and Stefan Dobrovolny before sunset.  (c) ÖWF (Florian Voggeneder)

Our IO Psych Area at Western was very busy in 2018. Here are a few of our highlights:

• Congratulations to Dr. Johanna Weststar and Dr. Alex Benson on receiving grants for their innovative research through SSHRC. 

• New podcast alert! Jose Espinoza and UWO alum, Nicholas Bremner, launched an IO Related Podcast ‘Mind Your Work’ - listen to current and previous episodes at (http://mindyourwork.io/)

• See you at SIOP! Our students Natasha Ouslis, Sarah Carver, and Kabir Daljeet will be presenting their research in Washington, D.C. at the 2019 Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology conference. 

• Congratulations to Jose Espinoza and Natasha Ouslis on winning the SSHRC Doctoral Award. Also, congratulations to Trevor Coppins and Sarah Carver on winning the SSHRC Master’s Award. 

• Congratulations to Kabir Daljeet on winning the Ontario Graduate Doctoral Scholarship, and to Eva Kwan on winning the Ontario Graduate Master’s Scholarship. 

• We’ve been busy publishing! Look out for Kabir Daljeet’s article ‘The Dark Triad and Breakup Distress’ in Personality and Individual Differences; Alexander McGregor’s article ‘You can change the world, we’re just here to help: Activist consultancy firms as forms of neoliberal governmentality’ in Globalizations; Jose Espinoza, Dr. John Meyer, Brittney Anderson, Chelsea Vaters, and Christina Politis’s article ‘Evidence for a bifactor structure of the Scales of Psychological Well-being using exploratory structural equation modeling’ in the Journal of Well-being Assessment; Dr. Johanna Weststar’s article ‘Women’s experiences on the path to a career in game development’ in Feminism in Play; and Julia McMenamin and Dr. Natalie Allen’s article 'Team processes and outcomes during the AMADEE-19 Mars analog research’ in Astrobiology.

• Vacationing with purpose: Dr. Joan Finegan traveled to Nicaragua with a group of undergraduate students through Western’s Alternative Spring Break program; Eva Kwan spent 5-weeks in Chicoutimi, Quebec conversing only in French through Western’s French Immersion program. 

• Our students worked tirelessly to host the 2018 Southwestern Industrial Organizational and Organizational Behaviour Student Conference. With 50+ attendees, eight engaging panelists (including our very own Dr. Alex Benson and Erica Sutherland), and an incredible key-note speaker Dr. Ann Peng, the conference was a huge success! Thank you to our conference sponsors: CSIOP, Psychology Department at Western, Western SOGS, and Dr. Ann Peng - without you, the conference could not have happened. 

• Congratulations to Dr. Alex Benson for receiving the Mitacs Accelerate Cluster Grant 2018-2020: ‘Having a pulse for the group: An app-based approach to collecting multiple time-point longitudinal data’. Further congratulations to Noelle Baird who received a Mitacs position through Dr. Benson’s Mitacs partnership.

• Kabir Daljeet taught an undergraduate Psychology Research Methods and Statistics course at Western University.

• We’ve been busy presenting! Kabir Daljeet’s research was presented at SIOP in Chicago; Noelle Baird’s research was presented at CPA in Montreal; Natasha Ouslis’s research was presented at INGroup in Maryland. Further, Julia McMenamin, Dr. Natalie Allen, and Dr. Melissa Battler gave a presentation at CASI ASTRO18 titled ‘The psychology of extreme teams: Thoughts on the evaluation of input-process-outcome trajectories’; Dr. Johanna Weststar was invited to speak at the Montreal International Games Summit with a talk titled ‘Unions in a Nutshell: History, Theory, Examples’; and Dr. Natalie Allen gave an invited talk during Surgical Grand Rounds at University Hospital (London Health Sciences Centre titled ‘The psychology of teamwork: A research-based look at challenges & strategies’. 

• We welcomed a new student to the program! Welcome Shruti Kumar, who is working under the supervision of Dr. Johanna Weststar.

• Julia McMenamin and Dr. Natalie Allen made key contributions in space analog research, including a study conducted during the AMADEE 18 Mars Mission Simulation conducted in Oman in February. See the Mars simulation project here https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/01/see-how-astronauts-simulate-mars-mission-on-earth/  

• Congratulations, graduates! Alexander McGregor, Chloe Cragg, and Natasha Ouslis successfully defended their master’s thesis, and Kevin Doyle, Aaron Halliday, and Justin Feeney successfully defended their doctoral research. 

• Awards, awards, awards! Trevor Coppins was one of Western’s Three Minute Thesis finalists; Kabir Daljeet received an award from HRPA; and Jose Espinoza won the Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award for 2018 from SOGS.

• R you ready to learn? Kabir Daljeet started an R learning group to familiarize our area with R programming.

Congratulations to everyone in our area on a fantastic year. We look forward to seeing everyone’s accomplishments in 2019! For current updates on our area, follow @IOWestern on Twitter.

We'd like to congratulate some of our students on their recent awards!

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Kabir Daljeet, one of our PhD. candidates, was awarded the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA), London & District Chapter Graduate Scholarship.

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Two our MSc. students, Noelle Baird and Trevor Coppins, received the Douglas N. Jackson Memorial Award.

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The I/O area is very proud of Noelle, Kabir, and Trevor's accomplishments and hope their future efforts are recognized as well!

On Saturday, November 24th, 2018, Western hosted the 13th annual Southwestern IO/OB student conference. The conference was a huge success, bringing together students, alumni, and professionals from across the province. We were fortunate enough to have fantastic speakers spanning academic and applied IO/OB positions. To hear more about this event and to see our speaker list, please see our IO/OB conference web page!

We would like to extend our congratulations to the most recent graduates of our program. Congrats to Kevin Doyle, who successfully defended his dissertation and to Alex McGregor, Chloe Cragg, and Natasha Ouslis for defending their Master's theses! We wish all of you the best in your future academic and career pursuits!

Congratulations to Trevor Coppins for making the list of this year's Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) finalists! Trevor is a first year Master's student in the I/O program, and has been named the top ranked competitor from Social Sciences in this year's 3MT. He will move on to compete for the spot as Western's representative in 3MT Ontario. Best wishes on your upcoming presentation, and congratulations on your successes thus far!

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For more information on the Three-Minute Thesis competition, and a complete list of finalists, see here.

The I/O area wants to extend their congratulations to three students who successfully defended their work this year. Congratulations to Rima Tarraf and Hayden Woodley for defending their PhDs, and to Julia McMenamin, Christina Politis, and Rebecca Factor for defending their Master's theses! Check out our Goblet Gallery in the Social and Recreation tab of our website to see the scholars celebrating post-defense!

This year, the Western I/O Psychology department is pleased to welcome Dr. Alex Benson, who is joining the Psychology department as an associate professor. For more information on Dr. Benson's research and career, click here.

The I/O program is excited to welcome the new incoming graduate students for 2017! This year, Eva, Trevor, and Jaime will be joining Dr. Johanna Weststar's lab, while Noelle and Sarah will be supervised by Dr. Jennifer Robertson and Dr. Joan Finegan, respectively. 

This fall, check out Dr. Meyer’s new book on commitment, the Handbook of Employee Commitment. Dr. Meyer, along with collaborators, both local and around the world, provide a culmination of the current research and theorizing on employee commitment, as well as suggestions for the future of this area of research. For more information on this publication, click here.

The I/O program welcomes its new graduate students! This September, Natasha, Alex, and Chloe joined our program at the Master’s level, supervised by Dr. Allen, Dr. Rothstein, and Dr. Finnegan, respectively.