The assessment center in the measurement of potential for business management.

Abstract

The assessment process in the Bell System's Management Progress Study is described, and the results of several analyses of the process are presented. Included are studies of assessment staff evaluations, contributions to the process of selected techniques, and relationships of assessment data to subsequent progress in management. The results, based on 355 young managers, indicate that the evaluations by the assessment staffs were influenced considerably by their overall judgments of the men assessed but also made many intraindividual discriminations. The results also show that all of the techniques studied made at least some contribution to the judgments of the assessors. Situational methods (group exercises and In-Basket) had considerable influence; paper-and-pencil ability tests had somewhat less influence; personality questionnaires were given the least weight. (Projective methods and interviews were not included in the analyses but are being studied.) The relationships between assessor judgments and subsequent progress in management, though covering only a relatively short time period, indicate that the assessors' predictions were quite accurate. The results also show that a complex of personal characteristics is more predictive of progress than any single characteristic. Some of the characteristics, however, appear to have higher relationships to progress than do others. Of the techniques studied the situational methods and paper-and-pencil ability tests are more predictive of progress than the personality questionnaires.

The Importance of Exercise and Dimension Factors in Assessment Centers: Simultaneous Examinations of Construct-Related and Criterion-Related Validity

“…The first and earliest stream of research focused primarily on the criterion-related validity of AC ratings (see the Management Progress Study, Bray & Grant, 1966). This is understandable as ACs are more costly and labor intensive to develop and administer than most other selection tools and processes.…”

Choosing How to Choose: Institutional Pressures Affecting the Adoption of Personnel Selection Procedures

“…Compliance, the conscious obedience or incorporation of psychometric and legal considerations in personnel selection can be found in numerous reports about assessment centers (Bray & Grant, 1966;Otte, 1995), structured interviews (Latham et al, 1980;Schuler, 1992), pencil and paper tests (Bartussek, Raatz, & Stapf, 1986), or job-knowledge tests (DuBois, Shalin, Levi, & Borman, 1993). These reports show the great lengths to which organizations may be willing to go when conducting a job analysis, developing, pre-testing, and constantly validating and updating selection tools that fulfil legal and psychometric expectations.…”

A Reevaluation of Assessment Center Construct-Related Validity

“…In its wake it has left most researchers and practitionersconvinced that assessment centers do not function in the way in which they are intended to function. Despite being designed to measure individual differences in performance dimensions (Bray & Grant, 1966), the prevailing view is that assessment centersactually measure some form of situational specificity. However, the little existing research that does not rely on a problematic statistical methodology (i.e., a CFA of an MTMM matrix) paints a much different picture of assessment center functioning.…”