Understanding the assessment center process: Where are we now? (original) (raw)

Understanding the Assessment Center Process: Where Are We Now? Introduction Assessment centers have become widespread in Western Europe, Northern America, and Australia (Newell & Shackleton, 1994). The Task Force on Assessment Center Guidelines (1989) defined assessment centers as "a standardized evaluation of behavior based on multiple inputs. Multiple trained observers and techniques are used. Judgments about behaviors are made, in major part, from specifically developed assessment simulations. These judgments are pooled in a meeting among the assessors or by a statistical integration process" (p. 460). Originally, the assessment center method was considered to be an alternative measurement instrument to estimate predictor-criterion relationships. The vast majority of research also dealt with criterion-related validity and demonstrated that assessment centers were predictive for a variety of criteria of managerial effectiveness. Yet, through the years the original conceptualization of assessment centers has changed dramatically (Howard, 1997). Three changes seem most noteworthy. First, whereas the output of assessment centers is still important, much more attention has been paid to assessment center 'processes'. This is most strongly reflected in the research on the construct validity of assessment centers. A second change is that the application of assessment centers has moved beyond selection/placement/promotion purposes. Recent surveys (e.g., Spychalski, Quinones, Gaugler, & Pohley, 1997) show that assessment centers are increasingly used for developmental purposes. As noted by Kudisch, Ladd, and Dobbins (1997) the goals of these developmental assessment centers vary from identification of participants' training needs, to formulation of personalized developmental recommendations and action plans, to skill development on the basis of immediate feedback and on-site practice. A third change is that Assessment Centers 3 nowadays multiple stakeholders are involved in assessment centers. These stakeholders include assessees, assessors, assessment center users, and the organization. This chapter aims to provide a contribution relative to two of these changes. More specifically, we aim to provide a better understanding of the individual and collective processes and factors that affect the quality of assessor decisions. Hereby we primarily focus on the factors and forces, which affect the capacity of assessment centers to provide construct valid estimates of individual attributes. This would seem to be most central to developmental assessment centers because such applications, by definition, need to produce 'true' and valid assessments of an assessee's strengths and weaknesses on the various dimensions. Moreover, developmental assessment centers assume that participants accept and act upon the feedback built around these assessments in the belief of their intrinsic validity (Thornton, Larsh, Layer, & Kaman, 1999). Thus, the quality of assessor decisions is at the core of acceptance of feedback and the motivation to thereby pursue developmental training activities. That said, it is also our view that the quality of assessor decisions in terms of construct measurement is also important for other applications (e.g., selection) as it gets to the heart of the method. In reviewing the recent literature, we will start with a relatively simple scheme adopted from the performance appraisal literature. Whereas we will treat it as a useful devise for organizing the studies of interest, we will go on to argue that a more complex view will be needed as a roadmap for future research-research that will lead to a deeper understanding of the assessment center method. The basis for our insight into the processes and factors affecting the quality of assessor decisions in assessment centers stems from our review of the literature published between 1990 and1999. We conducted this search for relevant studies using a number of computerized databases (i.e., PsycLit,