The assessment and development of leadership potential in organizations is a critical factor in an effective talent management strategy. Given the business environment, war for talent, and greater involvement from Boards of Directors on succession planning many organizations have prioritized their high-potential identification practices over other human capital goals. Although much has been written about theories and tools in the area of high-potential assessment, there remains little independent guidance for practitioners looking to compare practices across organizational settings. This article represents a follow-up study to Church and Rotolo (2013) based on responses from 80 top leadership development companies on their high-potential and senior executive talent programs and assessment practices. The results of this more in-depth study focus on how organizations define leadership potential, content domains being assessed today, and various other design elements including degree of transparency of high-potential labels, shelf-life of assessments, talent distributions, and access to results. Attitudes toward assessments, including performance impact, are also discussed. The article concludes with summary observations and implications for industrial-organizational psychologists, consulting psychologists, and talent management professionals.

Personality assessment has a long history of application in the workplace. While the field of organization development has historically focused on developmental aspects of personality tools, other disciplines such as industrial-organizational psychology have emphasized its psychometric properties. The importance of data-driven insights for talent management (e.g., the identification of high potentials, succession planning, coaching), however, is placing increasing pressure on all types of applied behavioral scientists to better understand the stability of personality tools for decision-making purposes. The current study presents research conducted with 207 senior leaders in a global consumer products organization on the use of personality assessment data over time and across two different conditions: development only and development to decision making. Results using three different tools (based on the Hogan Assessment Suite) indicate that core personality and personality derailers are generally not affected by the purpose of the assessment, though derailers do tend to moderate over time. The manifestation of values, motives, and preferences were found to change across administrations. Implications for organizational development and talent management applications are discussed.

No abstract

Most organizations require some level of emphasis on sustained performance to survive. This is particularly true of publically traded organizations or those concerned with profit-and-loss accountability. In short, performance needs to be managed. As a result, performance management (PM) is a key practice in business and is often one of the primary areas of responsibility for industrial and organizational (I-O) practitioners in organizational settings. It is also a key lever for change in organization development (OD) interventions (e.g., Church, Rotolo, Shull, & Tuller, 2014), particularly when linked to specific behaviors that are being introduced and/or reinforced for the future success of the organization. Unfortunately, as Pulakos, Mueller Hanson, Arad, and Moye (2015) have noted, leaders and employees in most organizations fundamentally dislike PM. In fact, this dislike is so intense that it has resulted in professional conferences, workshops, and popular business books focused on the simplification, replacement, or even demise of the field (e.g., Culbert, 2010; Effron & Ort, 2010). There is even a PM book for dummies (Lloyd, 2009).

No abstract