Despite keen interest, questions remain about defining and measuring the behavioral flexibility of managers. This paper reports a conceptual and empirical comparison of three alternative methods of assessing this construct. Results suggest that the way managerial flexibility is typically assessed in practice -as a trait-like characteristic with coworker ratings that describe a general tendency to vary behavior across situations -is deficient. However, more complex models that represent flexibility as a higher-order construct reflecting mastery of specific and opposing behaviors in both the social/ interpersonal domain and the functional/organizational domain show promise. They demonstrate construct validity evidence, predict as much as 42% of the variance in overall effectiveness, and provide more specific diagnostic information to guide behavior change.

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Recent technologies have reduced some of the major barriers to capturing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data from survey respondents. This has prompted a renewed interest in including open-ended questions on employee surveys and a corresponding need to better understand the potential biases of personnel who choose to provide comments. The present study used data from a climate survey ( N = 661) to empirically examine qualitative comments and their relationship with quantitative survey ratings. Results revealed that relatively dissatisfied employees were more likely to provide comments than their more satisfied counterparts. Moreover, open-ended responses were disproportionately negative in tone and tended to echo commenters' closed-ended satisfaction ratings. For most survey dimensions studied, the length of comments increased as they became more negative in tone. Finally, the data revealed very few demographic differences between respondents who provided comments and those who did not.

It is almost a cliché to say today's managers must be flexible-television commercials sell organizations on becoming more agile, business magazines warn that the only constant is change, and so on. Despite keen interest in both practitioner and scholarly circles, several questions remain about managerial flexibility: How best to define the construct? How to measure it? How to help managers develop it? We analyzed three different methods for assessing the flexibility of managers in the context of developmental feedback. Our results indicate that the way organizations typically measure flexibility-as a global trait-like characteristic-is severely deficient. However, more complex models that represent the paradoxes confronting managers show promise. Specifically, measures that represent flexibility as a mastery of specific and opposing behaviors in both the social/interpersonal domain and the functional/business domain demonstrate construct validity evidence and are highly predictive of ratings of overall effectiveness.

Center for Creative Leadership Qualitative Methods l Procedures for 'coming to terms with the meaning, not the frequency'of a phenomenon by studying it in its social context (Van Maanen, 1983) l Allow for greater cross-cultural understanding and less likely to suffer from "cultural"bias and ethnocentric assumptions on the part of the researcher than survey instruments l Data are context specific l Researcher often understood to be the instrument-identity and role important impact Assumptions l Researcher can be beyond own frameworks to allow data to speak for itself lStudy is not comparative across groups likely to differ in significant ways with respect to focal question l Qualitative research always takes on "emic"perspective Research Epistemology l Emic-insider or local perspective, concrete reality, context rich lEtic-outsider or global perspective, research abstraction, scientific explanation l Both important, necessary-most ethnographers use both l Combined in best comparative, crosscultural research

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