##Statistics Seminar##\\ Department of Mathematical Sciences ~~META:title =March 9, 2017~~ ^ **DATE:**|Thursday, March 9, 2017 | ^ **TIME:**|1.15p-2.15p | ^ **LOCATION:**|WH 100E | ^ **SPEAKER:**|Seth Spain, School of Management, Binghamton University | ^ **TITLE:**|Gauss is not mocked: Distributions of Individual Job Performance| \\ **Abstract** Recent research has suggested that individual job performance in a variety of job types may be distributed according to a power law. This has led to a vigorous debate about the use of the normal distribution as a modeling default in the organizational sciences. I will examine further evidence, which shows that most heavy-tailed performance distributions are not well-described by a power law, but that many are not normally distributed either. These findings raise a number of theoretical questions about how performance distributions arise and what processes might govern them.