Assessment Center Methods

The assessment center is a methodology used to select, promote, and develop people, usually managers, in an organization. From the earliest efforts in the 1930s and 1940s in the military, aimed at selecting officers and key operatives for highly sensitive missions, to the first systematic application in the organizational setting in the 1950s, the assessment center has become a familiar tool for skills evaluation.

A defining feature of the assessment center methodology is that it comprises a battery of tests. Further, the tests must represent a multiplicity of types. No single instrument or single type of instrument is sufficient to qualify a skills assessment process as an assessment center, by that name, according to the International Task Force on Assessment Center Guidelines.

The earliest iterations of the assessment center methodology focused to a significant extent on individual-differences assessment. The American military application, for the selection of spy operatives in World War II, was influenced strongly by the work of Harvard psychologist and noted personality theorist Henry Murray and included a good deal of personality profiling. It is still common today for personality assessment to be incorporated into an overall battery of assessment center instruments. With the development of the five-factor model of personality, the NEO tests have become an increasingly familiar part of the overall assessment center process. There are recent data suggesting that scores on the conscientiousness and extraversion scales, in particular, may generally correlate with overall assessment center scores. At any rate, especially where the focus is more on development and less on near-term selection, personality feedback is commonly part of the assessment process.

Tests of general cognitive ability are also sometimes included as a collateral part of the assessment center process. Much like personality tests, cognitive abilities tests represent a source of additional feedback to the assessee, as well as potential predictors of future work success. Cognitive ability scores do correlate significantly with overall assessment center scores, which in turn are broadly predictive of job success.

Interviews are another familiar support tool of the assessment center methodology. The interviews may be very general, unstructured ones, aimed at identifying the assessee's background, interests, career goals, and so forth. Or they may be more structured, even situational, in which case they may form integral parts of the assessment process. A typical situational interview would describe a scenario of the sort an incumbent might experience at work—say, problems with an upset customer, a conflict between sales and operations, or an employee not following safety procedures. After specifying the situation in detail, interviewers would ask the assessee how he or she would handle the situation. The assessee's answers would then be rated in terms of the underlying competencies being assessed (e.g., relationship management, communication, problem solving).

Beyond personality or intelligence assessment and interviews, the heart of the assessment center methodology is a series of individual and group activities in which candidates, working individually or in various groupings, handle work-related problems and issues. Many of these individual and group exercises were pioneered in the earliest applications of the methodology and continue to be centerpieces of the assessment center process. Included in this mix of classical methods are the venerable in-basket, leaderless group discussions, and role plays.

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