The faculty of the Organizational Psychology department are proud to announce that PhD student Amatia Golbodaghi submitted, and has been accepted as, a session leader at this year’s annual conference for the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP).

As a student in the Organizational Psychology program, Ms. Golbodaghi has attended the SIOP annual conference the past two years. She indicated past conferences have been positive learning and networking experiences and has especially has enjoyed the collegiality that has developed from attending the conference with her colleagues from the Organizational Psychology program each year.

With the development of the “Me Too” movement in the past year, Ms. Golbodaghi developed professional interests about what Organizational Psychologists can do to positively effect businesses in terms of gender safety in the work environment.

Due to the delicate and sensitive nature of gender safety in the work environment, Ms. Golbodaghi collaborated with colleagues Nicole Saulnier and Amy Wax, PhD at Cal State Long Beach to apply positive psychology techniques in developing tangible solutions for organizations. Ms. Golbodaghi developed a panel session with her collaborators, to be presented at the conference. The panel session involves discussion of three primary topics:

1. Discussion of systematic problems that occur in organizations, including issues such as stereotypes.
2. Discussion of tangible solutions, including ways I/O psychologists can collaborate to support solutions, and roles women in organizations can play in solution generation
3. Discussions of recommendations and advice generated from the session discussion.

Positive psychology has to do with building positive experience, relationships, and required support structures to reinforce these experiences and relationships within organizations. Ms. Golbodaghi has demonstrated advanced skills as a scholar-practitioner in the field of Organizational Psychology through developing this team of experts to apply leading techniques to a contemporary problem in organizations.

This Guest Author Blog was written by Organizational Psychology Program Director, Dr. Jennifer Harper.