Germany is pivotal to the success of any trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. As the third largest exporter in the world, Germany is dependent on open markets; throughout the post-war period, government support for free trade has been unequivocal. Despite these positive incentives for expanding free trade, both German business and the wider public voiced fierce opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP became a flash point for the German public to overcome collective action problems and create a broad protest movement against a free trade agreement for the first time in German history. This movement enabled the public to successfully exercise influence on German foreign economic policy-making, which had long been protected from public pressure. By 2015, the success of that pressure in penetrating the policy-making apparatus combined with growing government concern about the potential of international firms to undermine national policy. As a result of the confluence of these two forces, German leaders changed their position in TTIP negotiations.

This article investigates how Singaporeans’ creativity is influenced by Kiasu, an indigenous construct corresponding to fear of losing out. We examine the impact of Kiasu on creativity, both as a personal value and a shared cultural norm in four studies. Study 1 showed that Singaporeans’ Kiasu value endorsement predicts lower individual creativity. Study 2 demonstrated that this negative relationship is mediated by a self-regulatory focus on prevention. Study 3 further showed the impact of Kiasu as a personal value and a cultural norm by finding a significant three-way interaction effect of Kiasu prime, personal Kiasu value endorsement, and need for cognitive closure on participants’ creativity. Study 4 addressed the Singaporean paradox and found that Singaporeans exhibit higher creativity when primed with their multi-ethnic culture than under control conditions. However, those who associated Singapore with Kiasu lost this advantage. These findings support the situated dynamics framework of cultural influence on behavior such that values, norms, and situational cues play a role in producing a cultural pattern of creative performance. This research also has implications for how to incubate creative performance in Asian countries.

Morelli, Potosky, Arthur, and Tippins (2017) articulate a strong need for industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists to develop a more theory-based understanding of the role of technology in employee selection and assessment. We agree with their concerns but argue that this issue should include examination of how technology impacts training also. Researchers have noted that training is increasingly important for firms, and technology-enhanced training can improve learning and transfer (Ford & Meyer, 2013). However, the arguments that the authors make about the need for a theory-driven approach for examining the impact of technology on selection applies to training outcomes as well. Although considerable evidence exists that workplace training is effective and that technology can impact the success of training, there has been less theory-driven research exploring how technology can enhance or detract from training success. Researchers have already identified several variables related to technology that promote learning, but one variable that remains consistently unexplored in the organizational literature is immersion. This research is particularly important given how increasingly accessible immersive technology, such as virtual reality (VR), is becoming. Thus, we argue that as virtual training environments become more widely available, the variable of “immersion” in training environments is a particularly important one that warrants additional research.

Aguinis et al.’s (2017) analysis of the “most frequently cited sources, articles, and authors in industrial-organizational psychology textbooks” is a commendable piece of scholarship. Certainly, they have applied themselves to an important question and articulated a meaningful set of answers. We have no doubt too that for many readers the insights and answers they provide will be informative, compelling, and even reassuring—if only because they reinforce a view of the world with which they are familiar and by which they are comforted, even if that familiarity and comfort are framed in terms of a set of knotty professional concerns (Morton, Haslam, Postmes, & Ryan, 2006).