Sackett earned his PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Ohio State University in 1979 and has held the Beverly and Richard Fink Distinguished Professorship of Psychology and Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota since 2006 [1][2]. His editorial and leadership record runs the length of the field’s institutions: President of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) in 1993, Editor of Personnel Psychology from 1984 to 1990, and Founding Editor of SIOP’s Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice from 2006 to 2009 [2][3]. He chaired the National Research Council’s Committee on the Youth Population and Military Recruitment in 1999, co-chaired the committee that produced the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, and chaired both APA’s Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessments and its Board of Scientific Affairs [2][3].
His honors are concentrated in the specific sub-field he’s spent a career on: measurement and testing. SIOP gave him its Distinguished Service Contribution Award (2000), Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (2003), and Distinguished Teaching Contribution Award (2018) [2], then the field’s own Dunnette Prize — a $50,000 award, only the third ever given, for “programmatic, significant and lasting contributions to understanding the causal nature of individual differences on behavior and performance,” presented at the 35th Annual SIOP Conference in April 2020 [1][4]. The prize is named for Marvin Dunnette, the I/O psychologist whose retirement from Minnesota’s psychology department coincided with Sackett’s arrival there; Sackett reports viewing it as his mission to uphold Dunnette’s legacy [4]. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Ghent University (2011) and the Academy of Management HR Division’s Herbert G. Heneman Jr. Career Achievement Award (2007) [2].
Sackett isn’t purely an academic observer of institutions — he has governed one. He served on the Board of Trustees of HumRRO — the Human Resources Research Organization — first elected in December 2003 and chairing the board from 2015 until a retirement recognized at its December 2023 board meeting in Alexandria, Virginia [5]. Across those 20 years he guided multiple HumRRO CEOs and sat on its Executive, Investment, Board Composition, Nominating, and Presidential Search committees [5]. That’s applied stewardship of a research organization, not a corporate operating record.
By his own account, his research clusters around five recurring themes: the tension between designing selection systems to maximize job performance versus to maximize ethnic, racial, and gender diversity; the measurement and prediction of counterproductive workplace behavior, meaning integrity testing — screening candidates for who is likely to misbehave once hired; methodological rigor in evaluating personnel decision-making; the assessment of managerial potential, including the assessment center, where candidates run a one-to-two-day simulation of a manager’s job; and the role of personality in selection [2]. His 1982 paper with Dreher is the most cited of that assessment-center line, and it found the pattern of data did not support the theory underlying the technique [2]. In 2004 he documented the common misrepresentation of prior stereotype-threat research, reminding the field that identity-group performance differences on standardized tests exist beyond what stereotype threat accounts for [1].
The work MC cites is the 2022 one, and it is the same move at larger scale. Personnel-selection meta-analyses routinely correct for range restriction, and those corrections typically run through an artifact distribution [6]. In Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection, Sackett, with Charlene Zhang, Christopher M. Berry, and Filip Lievens, found that every commonly used approach to that correction “has significant issues that often result in substantial overcorrection and that therefore the validity of many selection procedures for predicting job performance has been substantially overestimated” [6]. Redoing the arithmetic reordered the field: “Structured interviews emerged as the top-ranked selection procedure” [6].
Sackett sits at the devoted end of the spectrum: from the 1979 PhD onward, his declared research themes are all the measurement and prediction of people at work [2] — not a researcher visiting management from an adjacent field. His word carries the most weight on the psychometrics of personnel selection — validity corrections like the 2022 range-restriction fix [6], assessment-center theory, testing standards [2][3] — the terrain his editorships, committee chairs, and honors all sit on. It carries less independent weight on broader questions of Recruiting & hiring practice — interviewing craft, sourcing, or organizational hiring process design — where he is a methodologist correcting the numbers other practitioners rely on, not a practitioner himself.