Page 75 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

54 debis career development center
debis Information Technology (IT) Services divisions. The Financial Services company
is mainly focused on product-related financing, and the IT Services company deals with a
wide-ranging array of IT services, including IT consulting, adjusting standard software,
and operating and maintaining computing centers and networks. The IT company has
been growing at a faster rate than the field of IT as a whole; therefore the company appears
to offer some relative advantages that have spurred its growth. Thus, the revenue of the
IT Services branch alone increased by approximately 31% to 2.9 billion Euro in 1999
(debis’s overall revenue stood at 13 billion euros), a trend that continues at present. debis
IT Services employs approximately 20,000 employees. In light of its rapid growth and the
sheer numbers in its workforce, debis decentralizes its business activities by maintain-
ing small independent divisions and companies. The development process that we will
present was implemented in debis IT Services as a pilot test; the process of implementing
debis Financial Services divisions in the NAFTA region has just begun.
The Department for Corporate Leadership Development, a corporate function within
debis AG, has developed a general process for the professional management develop-
ment of all of the organization’s members, regardless of their present career stage in
the organization. Individual departments stay in close contact and cooperation with the
more decentralized HR senior managers and HR developers. Compared with past man-
agerial development structures, this new structure represents a clear improvement for
the employees and the company. Steps of the process—and measures for assessing the
quality of those steps—incorporate all areas within the organization, from marketing and
recruiting up to their top executive program. The debis Career Development Center is
devoted to a holistic concept of management development (MD), focusing on the entire
career development and career progression process, from line management up through
senior management (cf. Deller & Schoop, 2000).
We use the debis Career Development Center’s MD system as an example of a process-
oriented system for the modern service sector business. It represents a new and important
part of debis’s system for promoting up-and-coming managers, and in general serves as
one example that points out some of the issues raised when creating an MD system.
The debis selection system begins long before the assessment center, which serves as
a realistic job preview for employees who begin undertaking responsible leadership
positions just before receiving department manager appointments. For debis as a whole,
the system’s aim is to create an effective, structured process that diagnoses employees’
career progress and career potential, with the intended long-term effect of developing
and retaining high-potential managers.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE NEW MANAGEMENT
DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM

Many criteria allow for a multi-faceted, detailed evaluation of an MD system: (1) gaug-
ing the extent of management and organizational acceptance (e.g., whether the system
adopts a practice/applied orientation); (2) the economy of the system (e.g., whether
the time, labor, and money expended are worth the return on investment); and (3) its
criterion-related validity across different criteria, samples, and organizational settings of
interest. It is a continuous challenge to develop criteria along these three axes while incor-
porating scientific accuracy and theoretical appropriateness alongside business-related