Mark Bing
OXFORD, Miss. – A University of Mississippi management professor is the latest addition to a distinguished academy of fellow scholars in the field of industrial and organizational psychology.
Mark Bing, associate professor of management, has been selected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, which is the 14th Division of the American Psychological Association. The prestigious honor recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the field and awarded to only a few select recipients. Bing is the only SIOP fellow in Mississippi, society officers confirm.
“I was both relieved and elated,” Bing said. “This was a long-standing career goal of mine, and associate professors rarely achieve fellow at SIOP. So I was unsure as to what the outcome of the nomination would be.”
Nominees for SIOP fellow must have a full decade of professional experience since the attainment of either a master’s or doctoral degree. Selection is based upon research, practitioner accomplishments and other criteria.
Receiving the notification was also a bittersweet moment for Bing.
“I also regretted the fact that my mentor, Dr. Lawrence R. James, the former Pilot Oil Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, was no longer with us to witness the event,” Bing said. “In one of our last conversations that we had before he passed from complications arising during heart surgery, Larry indicated that he wanted to see me make fellow at SIOP. After Larry died late summer of 2014, Dr. Phil Roth volunteered to lead the nomination, which was very generous on his part.”
Bing joined the UM faculty with summer funding for research in 2005 and began teaching that fall. Before UM, he was a faculty member at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Bing later became the SUBSCREEN principal investigator and director of psychological screening for the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Force at the Naval Submarine Base New London in Connecticut.
He earned his doctorate from the University of Tennessee, his master’s degree from Villanova University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado.
Colleagues said Bing is most deserving of the honor.
“We are thrilled that Dr. Bing has been chosen as a SIOP fellow,” said Ken Cyree, dean of the UM School of Business Administration. “With Dr. Bing being the only person in Mississippi in this prestigious group, it adds to the importance of the award and highlights the exclusivity of this select group. The School of Business congratulates him on this achievement.”
Bing’s research interests include human resource selection, personality measurement, personality test faking, test development and validation, counterproductive workplace behavior, research methods and statistics.
“There were probably two primary sets of achievements that contributed most to my induction as fellow at SIOP,” he said. “The first would in all likelihood be the advances in personality theory and measurement, along with detecting faking and correcting for it within the area of personality testing and personnel selection.
“The second set would likely be my development of a statistical regression equation in 2001, and implemented in 2002, that was used to predict success and failure in the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Force among Basic Enlisted Submarine School students.”
Bing’s equation was used for more than a decade to pick out those BESS students who were highly likely to fail in the submarine service for negative causes, such as suicidal ideation, suicidal gesture and attempt, substance abuse, performance problems and misconduct.
“For over 10 years, the equation was used to improve the accuracy of select-out separation decisions made on those submariners in training who were at-risk for failure within the force,” Bing said. “Moreover, this use of the prediction equation improved the base rate of submarine mission accomplishment along with submarine operations in general.”
For more information about the SIOP, visit http://www.APA.org. For more about the School of Business Administration, visit http://business.olemiss.edu.