Popular and influential social commentators have called organizations complicit in perpetuating weight-based bias and mistreatment. Although our field has advanced our understanding of the economic consequences of being fat at work (e.g., salary; job performance; and promotions), we urgently need more research on the interpersonal experiences of this swath of workers so that we can appropriately advise organizations. In this article, we describe how organizational psychology researchers can answer this call to do more research on weight at work (a) even while feeling uncomfortable with a topic that can feel personal, medicalized, and/or overly intertwined with other DEI-based topics; (b) by incorporating insightful research from outside disciplines that centers weight controllability and weight-based mistreatment deservedness; and, critically, (c) while approaching weight at work research with a respectfulness that conveys an understanding of the complexities intertwining weight, health, and personal agency. In culmination, this article offers to our field a flexible, living document entitled Best Practices for Weight-Based Research in Organizational Studies.

One important issue not highlighted by Guzzo, Fink, King, Tonidandel, and Landis (2015) is that simply establishing construct validity will be significantly more challenging with big data than ever before. One needs to only look as far as the other social sciences analyzing big data (e.g., communications, economics, industrial engineering) to observe the difficulty of making valid claims as to what measured variables substantively “mean.” This presents a significant hurdle in the application of big data to organizational research questions because of the critical importance of demonstrating validity in the organizational sciences as highlighted by Guzzo et al.