Page 87 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

66 debis career development center
The next step in the continuing development process of the debis Career Development
Center will be its validation. Validation efforts will recognize and include different
perspectives, such as the assessors, participants, work council, members of the board of
management, and HR managers. It is also important to validate a shorter (more time-
and cost-efficient) version of the diagnostic instrument. Can the same quality of results
be achieved with less time investment?
The assessment center needs to be closely integrated with viable development plans,
lest we regress toward individuals receiving only brief behavioral recommendations and
vague agreements about the future training they will receive. Structured examples for
development plans are necessary to make the consequences and subsequent steps after
participation in the assessment center clearer and more understandable, and to commu-
nicate more clearly development plans internally as well.
Future work on the debis managerial potential system should address a further ques-
tion: How can the individual development portfolios provided in this complex procedure
be more standardized, and therefore more interpretable and meaningful? One possible
modification is to refine the dimensionality of the general ‘managerial potential’ concept,
for example, by incorporating some aspects of achievement. Thus individual develop-
ment portfolios can be more sensitively and sensibly used across different contexts.
However, greater multi-dimensionality may increase certain problems and biases; in the
present example, we would have to ensure that observers and evaluating supervisors
could reliably and accurately differentiate achievement and potential.
Whether even to implement an assessment center procedure at all is a decision point
worth discussing. Many alternatives are in the repertoire of today’s management de-
velopment systems: 360 feedback, management appraisals, management reviews, or
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competency reviews are a few of those applied procedures. Traditional assessment cen-
ters have been criticized as reflecting the assessment methods more stably than the
underlying psychological constructs they are intended to tap (Sackett & Dreher, 1982;
Sackett & Harris, 1988). However, assessment centers differ greatly across organiza-
tions and many ACs have shown criterion-related validity levels that are in line with
other predictors of managerial performance (Gaugler, Rosenthal, Thornton, & Bentson,
1987). In the particular case of the debis Career Development Center, the targeted group
is young employees prior to their promotion in managerial positions—a relevant sample
where development-oriented assessment center is demonstrated to be a good realistic
instrument for detecting managerial potential.
After this initial development of the process for the German-based information tech-
nology division of debis, the entire process will now be expanded to the group’s finan-
cial services companies, which are located predominantly in the USA. The process will
be comparable internationally, and the expansion of the process will lead to new per-
spectives on the adequacy of the dCDC process within different business and country
cultures. Critical aspects in transferring the system across cultures exist: using a new
language (English instead of German); accepting different assessment center elements
that are culture-bound; accepting the personality scales used (a parallel version of the
European OPQ); and planning assessment centers that include native and non-native
English speakers.
Altogether, it can be said that the debis Career Development Center is a promising
system for the internal promotion of debis employees showing managerial potential.