Practitioner's Guide to Legal Issues in Organizations

This highly useful reference outlines best practices in key areas of human resources that are not only fair and equitable, but that can withstand legal scrutiny. Industrial/organizational experts apply their empirical knowledge and practical experience to aspects of HR that are commonly litigated, including broad and specific topics in testing of potential employees, disability issues, compensation and pay equity, and work hours. The book is written to be accessible to readers currently in HR-related graduate-level training as well as HR practitioners with or without background in industrial/organizational psychology.

And to add to its utility, chapters feature practical strategies for addressing each of the legal issues presented.

Among the topics covered:

• Measuring adverse impact in employee selection decisions.
• Using background checks in the employee selection process.
• Disabilities: best practices for vulnerabilities associated with the ADA.
• Physical abilities testing.
• Wage and hour litigation.
• Clinical psychological testing for employee selection.
• Conducting compensation equity analyses.

Practitioner’s Guide to Legal Issues in Organizations brings clear, up-to-date information to graduate students studying human resources, management, industrial/organizational psychology who are interested in legal issues, as well as applied HR practitioners such as industrial/organizational psychologists, human resources generalists, management and labor economists.

Chester Hanvey, Ph.D. is a Senior Managing Consultant at Berkeley Research Group (BRG) where he provides consulting services to private and public sector organizations. His work focuses on labor and employment legal issues including wage and hour compliance and discrimination. His wage and hour work includes analyzing managerial misclassification at the Federal and State level, meal and rest break compliance and off-the-clock work. His discrimination work has included evaluation of adverse impact at hiring and termination, discrimination on the basis of disability, physical abilities tests and equal pay comparison. He specializes in designing and conducting job analyses and conducting statistical analyses to evaluate wage and hour compliance, appropriateness of class certification, discrimination, and damage estimates. Dr. Hanvey has worked with more than 70 organizations across a range of industries. Prior to joining BRG, Dr. Hanvey was a Senior Consultant at Lamorinda Consulting where he specialized in providing consulting related to wage and hour issues and discrimination allegations. Dr. Hanvey earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) psychology with an emphasis in statistics from the University of Houston and his B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hanvey has authored journal articles and presented at professional conferences on wage and hour litigation, job analysis, class certification issues, and statistical analyses in litigation.

Kayo G. Sady, Ph.D., is an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist and Senior Consultant at DCI Consulting Group where his practice centers on employee selection and compensation equity evaluation. Kayo’s primary areas of expertise are employee selection measures, validation strategies, compensation practices, and quantitative methods in the equal employment context. His applied work includes (1) designing and managing personnel selection projects involving various validation strategies (e.g., criterion-related, content), designing and conducting compensation equity analyses, advising clients based on complex HR risk management analytics, and serving as an expert during litigation. Kayo received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology with a concentration in quantitative methods (statistical analysis) from the University of Houston. Prior to joining DCI Consulting Group, Kayo worked at Valtera Corporation (now CEB Valtera) as a Consultant in the Assessment and Selection Group. Kayo has extensive experience teaching statistics at both the undergraduate and graduate level and is an adjunct faculty member at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he teaches graduate courses in both Introductory and Advanced Statistics.