Philip Bobko Wins 2024 Michael R. Losey Excellence in HR Research Award

Philip Bobko, author and professor emeritus at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, is the winner of the 2024 Michael R. Losey Excellence in Human Resource Research Award. The $50,000 award was announced Nov. 22 at the SHRM Volunteer Leaders’ Business Meeting.

The SHRM Foundation administers the award named in honor of Losey, who served the HR profession for more than 45 years. Losey retired as president and CEO of SHRM in 2000.

Bobko “has made a great contribution to our knowledge of HR, which then directs how HR professionals think about and analyze problems,” Clemson University professor Philip L. Roth wrote in the nomination letter. The letter was submitted by Roth and fellow academics Huy Le, In-Sue Oh, and Chad Van Iddekinge.

They noted that Bobko’s work has:

• Helped organizations understand how various tests administered for the purpose of personnel selection predict job performance, including the validity of those tests in areas such as cognitive ability, personality, and work samples.
• Illuminated the potential adverse impact of various employee tests. This has helped managers design selection systems that maximize validity and minimize the adverse impact on job candidates.
• Demonstrated how to analyze the fairness of tests. “This work,” they noted “is still state of the art that guides analysis of fairness to this day in both military and civilian organizations.”
• Helped develop knowledge that affects work on key scientific and practice-related panels. One example the nominatorscited was Bobko’s contributions as a member of a blue-ribbon advisory board for an Army project that “helped many researchers understand the process of personnel selection, classification, and utility analysis.”

He also continually works with organizations to build and refine their HR related systems, they wrote. That has included helping to develop job satisfaction and other attitudinal measures, statistical analysis of the outcomes of HR practices, and working with the Center for Creative Leadership to train managers how to effectively present data and analyses.

Bobko was humbled by the nomination.

“Who is this person they’re writing about?” he told SHRM he asked himself. “It can’t possibly be me. I know some of the individuals who have won the award in the past but never in a million years did I think somebody would see fit to say, ‘Phil, you’re at the top of our list.’ I was quite surprised and honored.”

Wendi Safstrom, president of the SHRM Foundation, congratulated Bobko:

“Dr. Bobko’s ability to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical applications is truly inspiring. His work has had a profound impact on how organizations select their talent by illuminating potential biases and improving the validity of selection methods which has equipped HR professionals with invaluable tools.”

His Background

Bobko received his doctorate from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, N.Y., where he majored in economic and social statistics and minored in organizational behavior and psychometrics. His master’s degree in educational research is from Bucknell University in Union County, Pa. He received his bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., where he majored in mathematics and minored in music.

Bobko is serving his third year as chair of the new US Space Force Talent Science Advisory Group, which helps build out all of that organization’s HR processes, including web-enabled recruiting, selection, training, and appraisal. He also has been principal scientist on a multiyear effort for the US Air Force for the last several years.

“Throughout my career, HR topics have been central to much of my work—both in theory and practice,” Bobko said. He wanted to find answers to questions such as ‘How do I measure people’s performance, their satisfaction, engagement with the work, their willingness to stay with a particular organization?’

Bobko has written and co-written several books. The 2001 revised edition of his book, Correlation and Regression: Principles and Applications for Industrial Organizational Psychology and Management (SAGE Publications) was recognized at a recent Academy of Management (AOM) meeting for helping HR professionals understand key issues in personnel selection, according to Roth.

Bobko has contributed articles to journals and chapters to books. In 2023, a paper he and Roth co-wrote on doxing and its effects on hiring-related decisions won for best paper in the AOM’s HR Management Division. Bobko also has served on a variety of editorial boards: the Academy of Management Journal, including two years as editor; Journal of Applied Psychology; Journal of Management; Organizational Research Methods; and Journal of Organizational Behavior.

He was a member of the faculty at Rutgers University, serving in its Industrial Relations and Human Resources program and Psychology program; the University of Kentucky; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; the University of Maryland; and Cornell and Bucknell universities. He is a member of AOM, the American Psychological Association and is an elected fellow in both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Society and the Consortium for the Advancement of Research Methods and Analysis. Additionally, he helped start AOM’s research method division and became that division’s first elected chair.

Bobko plans to donate the majority of the award money to two endowed foundations he and his wife, Barbara—a teacher and reading specialist—created several years ago: the Russell-Bobko Rehab Lectureship Series, which supports the training and certification of practicing physical therapists in the area, and another created through MIT that enhances student experiences in the liberal arts.