Rodney L. Lowman

Introduction

Rodney L. Lowman (born 1949) is an American psychologist, academic administrator and entrepreneur whose career has been spent in the territory between clinical psychology and the workplace. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Alliant International University and president of Lowman & Richardson, a consulting psychology firm in San Diego. His main contributions are in career assessment and counselling, in the ethics of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, in the development of consulting psychology as a distinct specialism, and in the argument that clinical and organizational psychology should be trained together rather than separately. A study of the most prolific contributors to Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research between 1992 and 2007 ranked him second. He is a past president of both the Society of Consulting Psychology and the Society of Psychologists in Management, founding editor of The Psychologist-Manager Journal, and long-serving editor of Consulting Psychology Journal.

Early Life and Education

Lowman was born in Oklahoma, where his father served in the United States Air Force. He took a Bachelor of Science in business from Oklahoma State University–Oklahoma City in 1969, then a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of Oklahoma in 1973, and finally both a master's and a doctorate at Michigan State University, completing the PhD in 1979. His training was deliberately double: Michigan State gave him industrial-organizational psychology and clinical psychology in the same programme. He completed his clinical internship at the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences in 1977–78, now part of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Rochester Medical School's Marriage and Family Clinic and at the Washtenaw County Community Mental Health Center in Ann Arbor.

That combination is the key to everything he later wrote. He was one of a small number of psychologists able to read an organisational problem clinically and a clinical problem organisationally, and his recurring theme — that the ethics code and the training model of psychology were designed for one-to-one clinical work and fit organizational practice badly — comes directly from having been trained in both.

Academic and Professional Career

Lowman began as a faculty member at the Institute for Social Research and the department of psychology at the University of Michigan, then headed the department of psychology at Louisiana Tech University. At Alliant International University he was dean and professor in the California School of Organizational Studies (later the Marshall Goldsmith School of Management), director of Alliant's Organizational Consulting Center, and eventually provost, vice president for academic affairs and acting president. He served as the sixth president of Lake Superior State University from 2007 to 2009, and later as a visiting professor in the Department of Industrial Psychology and People Management at the University of Johannesburg.

He founded and led The Development Laboratories, a private consulting firm, for seven years. Within the American Psychological Association he served two terms on its Council, chaired its Board of Professional Affairs and Board of Convention Affairs, sat on the Committee on Professional Practice and Standards, the Ethics Committee and the Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessments, and was a SIOP representative to Council from 2013 to 2016. He is a fellow of three APA divisions — clinical (12), consulting (13) and industrial-organizational (14) — and a diplomate of the American Board of Assessment Psychology.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Ethics for psychologists who work inside organisations

As chair of SIOP's Professional Affairs Committee, Lowman led the effort to produce SIOP's first ethics casebook, later published in two editions jointly by APA and SIOP as The Ethical Practice of Psychology in Organizations. The problem he named is still the field's hardest: the APA Ethics Code assumes a psychologist and an individual client, but in organizational work the "client" may be the individual being assessed, the team, the organisation, or the executive who is paying — and these interests diverge. A psychologist asked to assess a senior executive for promotion is simultaneously serving the person who commissioned the assessment, the person being assessed, and the organisation that will live with the decision, and there is no ordering of those obligations that the code supplies. Lowman's casebook approach was to work through concrete dilemmas rather than to pretend the ambiguity could be legislated away, and he and colleagues including Richard Kilburg and Stewart Cooper ran numerous professional training programmes on it.

Building consulting psychology as a discipline

Lowman spearheaded the effort that won APA approval for a set of guidelines for training consulting psychologists at doctoral and postdoctoral level, structured around individual, group and organizational levels of intervention, and edited the Handbook of Organizational Consulting Psychology, still the field's most comprehensive compendium. He also led the Society of Consulting Psychology's futures task force, whose report set the agenda for six successive society presidents.

Clinical practice of career and work problems

Lowman's The Clinical Practice of Career Assessment (1993) and Counseling and Psychotherapy of Work Dysfunctions (1993) argued that work-related problems deserve their own clinical formulations rather than being treated as side effects of a mood or anxiety disorder. He proposed categories — chronic job dissatisfaction, underachievement relative to ability, career indecision, fear of success, work-related burnout — that could be assessed and treated in their own right, an argument that anticipated the later growth of occupational health psychology. It was also a quiet claim about seriousness: that a person miserable at work is not merely depressed but has a problem with a specific structure, and that treating the mood without treating the structure leaves the cause in place.

Standards for selection testing

Pre-Employment Screening: A Guide to Professional Practice addressed the rapidly growing market in personality, integrity and ability testing for hiring. His position throughout has been that such instruments are defensible only where there is demonstrated job-relatedness, local validation, informed consent, confidentiality and feedback to candidates — a standard that a good part of the testing industry does not meet.

Major Publications

  • Lowman, R. L. (1993). The Clinical Practice of Career Assessment: Interests, Abilities, and Personality.
  • Lowman, R. L. (1993). Counseling and Psychotherapy of Work Dysfunctions.
  • Lowman, R. L. (Ed.). (2002). Handbook of Organizational Consulting Psychology.
  • Lowman, R. L. (2002). An Introduction to Consulting Psychology: Working with Individuals, Groups, and Organizations.
  • Lowman, R. L. (Ed.). The Ethical Practice of Psychology in Organizations (2nd ed.), APA and SIOP.
  • Lowman, R. L. Pre-Employment Screening: A Guide to Professional Practice.

Impact and Legacy

Lowman did more than anyone to give consulting psychology an identity, a training model, a journal and an ethics literature, and his argument that clinical and I-O psychology belong together has partly won: occupational health psychology, executive coaching and organizational assessment are now ordinary career paths for psychologists. He received the Society of Consulting Psychology's Service Award in 2008 and the Richard Kilburg Service Award from the Society of Psychologists in Management.

The case against the field he built

Ethics guidance is not enforcement. The casebook Lowman pioneered is explicitly illustrative, and the ambiguity it was written to manage has not gone away — it has multiplied. Executive coaching, algorithmic hiring, workplace surveillance and AI-driven assessment have generated dilemmas faster than the standards have been revised, and the profession still has no settled answer to the question Lowman posed: who, exactly, is the client? The casebook method has a structural limit here — it teaches judgement through examples drawn from the problems of one era, and the examples do not transfer automatically to settings its authors did not anticipate.

Selection testing remains contested. Personality and integrity testing for hiring has attracted sustained criticism on validity, fakability and adverse impact grounds. Integrity tests grew rapidly in the United States after the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988 restricted lie-detector use, and critics argue that much of what they predict is general conscientiousness rather than honesty, that overt integrity items are easy to fake by anyone motivated to, and that the research base rests heavily on studies funded or conducted by the test publishers. Lowman's own remedy — validation, job-relatedness, informed consent, feedback — is the standard answer, and the fact that it needs repeating is itself a judgement on an industry in which many vendors sell unvalidated instruments. Critics would add that job-relatedness does not address the deeper question of whether some selection instruments measure what employers have a right to ask about at all.

The evidence base for consulting is thin relative to the market. Executive coaching and organizational consulting are multibillion-dollar activities with far less outcome research than their price would justify. Lowman has been unusually candid about this, arguing that consulting psychology must become evidence-based rather than experience-based; the criticism is that the field he helped professionalise has not yet met the standard he set for it.

The standard-setter is also a vendor. Lowman has written the field's ethics literature while founding and running consulting firms, and while holding the academic administrative posts from which credibility in that market derives. That combination is common in applied psychology and is not a conflict in itself — but it is a structural feature of the field rather than an accident of one career, and it is worth naming: the people writing the standards for organizational consulting are, characteristically, the people selling it.

Whose interests does I-O psychology serve? A long-running internal critique, associated with Joel Lefkowitz — with whom Lowman has written on ethics — holds that I-O psychology has historically aligned itself with management's interests rather than with workers', and that its ethical apparatus manages that alignment rather than questioning it. On this reading, informed consent and role clarity make the transaction procedurally clean without changing whose side the psychologist is on. Lowman's response, in substance, is that psychologists who move into organizational roles without organizational training do harm, that role clarity and informed consent protect all parties, and that the answer is better training rather than withdrawal.

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References

  • Lowman, R. L. (1991). The clinical practice of career assessment. The Counseling Psychologist.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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