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| L to R; Back row: Scott Cassidy, Patricia Grabarek, Shin-I Shih, Lily Cushenbery, Christian Thoroughgood; Front row: Amie Skattebo, Katina Sawyer, Rachel Hoult, Joshua Fairchild |
TIP-TOPics: Practicing Science:
The Penn State Leadership Assessment Center
Patricia Ewa Grabarek*
Pennsylvannia State University
*Patricia Grabarek (peg128@psu.edu), a graduate of UCLA, is a 3rd year doctoral student in I-O psychology at Penn State. She is the current director of the Schreyer Honors College Leadership Assessment Center. She is also currently doing research on emotional labor training, with additional interests in selection, feedback, and assessment centers.
In graduate school, it is important to not only learn how to conduct research and integrate theory but also how to apply it. This merging of science and practice helps in developing well-rounded I-O psychologists. It is also important to give back to the community while promoting our field. In this issue of TIP-Topics, I discuss a developmental leadership assessment center created for undergraduate students by our graduate students and faculty as a wonderful example of merging science and practice. I participated last year as an assessor in preparation for my current role as the director of the center, in collaboration with Dr. Rick Jacobs and Dr. Greg Lovisky.
Assessment centers have been used for several decades and can trace their origins back to military officer selection in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, England, and Australia (Lance, 2008; Thornton & Byham, 1982). They are typically used in selection and promotion or in the development of employees by diagnosing individuals’ strengths and weaknesses in terms of competencies relevant to organizational effectiveness. An important feature of assessment centers is the use of multiple exercises tapping multiple competencies observed by multiple assessors (Thornton & Rupp, 2006). These exercises, ranging from oral presentations to written reports, allow assessors to observe specific behaviors. The information garnered from these exercises result in competency-level and overall evaluations of each assessee, either through statistical aggregation methods or consensus from assessor discussions. The evaluations are used for personnel decisions and/or for providing specific developmental feedback to participants.
Assessment centers take a great deal of time, energy, and financial resources to develop and implement. However, these expenses have big pay-offs for individuals and organizations alike (Thornton & Rupp, 2006). Assessment centers are widely used and well respected in the business community. In the sections below, I will briefly describe the assessment center process we have developed at Penn State, the benefits for both graduate and undergraduate students, how this center is a living example of the scientist–practitioner model, and how we are communicating our value to the broader community.
The Penn State Leadership Assessment Center
The Leadership Assessment Center simulates a work day in a simulated organization. Students face several challenges, need to make decisions, and must communicate their ideas. Approximately a week before the assessment day, students participate in an orientation that describes the schedule for the day, the activities, and the goals of the assessment center. Students are then e-mailed a self-report survey, a personality assessment instrument, and information concerning the leadership position they will be placed in the day of the center. On the day of the assessment, students participate in several hours of simulated individual and collaborative exercises, which are all part of a single, integrated problem and are assessed relative to Bartram’s (2005) great eight competencies. Table 1 shows the competency by exercise matrix. An “x” signifies which competencies are tapped in each exercise.
Students are observed and evaluated by a team of assessors that includes prominent alumni and psychology graduate students. The assessors arrive at the center before the students to receive training in observing and classifying behaviors. The training includes information about the exercises they will be observing, the competencies that are being rated, education on common rating issues and biases, and methods to decrease these errors. Training is important because it ensures consistency, guides assessors to maintain objectivity, helps develop shared standards among assessors, builds assessor skills, and ensures that all assessors understand each exercise thoroughly (Thornton & Rupp, 2006).
Throughout the day, assessors observe the candidates in teams of two or three while individually taking notes on candidate behaviors. After each exercise, the assessors individually complete ratings before meeting with their assessor team and coming to a consensus on the ratings. The assessor teams also take detailed notes on behaviors to include in developmental feedback for the students. At the end of the assessment day, all of the assessors meet to integrate information on each assessee and assign final dimension ratings. The assessors discuss each student and provide behavioral examples to justify each rating. The information gathered in this integration session is then used to develop a feedback report for each student.
Approximately 10 days following the assessment center, students meet with one of the graduate assessors to receive written and oral feedback. This feedback includes an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses identified in the center. A personalized development plan is created with each student at this session.
Benefits of the Assessment Center
Both graduate and undergraduate students can benefit from the opportunities provided by the assessment center. Undergraduate students can learn their strengths and weaknesses in a nonthreatening format. Undergraduate participation is purely voluntary, there are no grades or credit given, and the information provided is to be used at their discretion. Furthermore, during this experience, the students have the opportunity to network with prominent alumni, receive feedback from them, and create a concrete development plan to improve in areas in which they struggle. In addition, students can use what they have learned in the center when interviewing with future employers. For example, many interviewers ask applicants about their strengths and weaknesses. In this situation, the assessment center participants can discuss what they have learned about their strengths and weaknesses through the assessment center process and how they used this information to work on developing their weaknesses. Moreover, students learn the vocabulary of competencies. They learn the language that will be used when being evaluated in their future organizations. In addition, two undergraduates work as research assistants for the center and gain experience running an assessment center and assisting in the development of our materials. Not only are they invaluable to the team by providing an undergraduate perspective, but they also benefit by learning more about practice in the field.
Graduate students also benefit from this program in multiple ways. First, running this center allows us to directly apply science to practice. For example, many of the students are taking a graduate seminar about assessment centers and are able to apply what we read and learn in creating new exercises, helping improve the feedback reports, and by participating as assessors at the center. Working on a project like this allows graduate students to see the value of what we are learning and how what we are reading can actually translate to the practical world. Concretely, in this center, we can see an application of the great eight competency model created by Bartram (2005) in the behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS) for assessing these competencies. In addition, participating as assessors gives graduate students an opportunity to work alongside distinguished alumni from various backgrounds, which allows us to see other perspectives on our type of work.
Furthermore, a few students, like me, get the valuable opportunity to lead the team tasked with running the center. This experience has allowed me to put my organizational skills to use and develop my skills as a practitioner in an educational setting. In other words, I can learn important practitioner skills, such as how to implement and administer assessments without the pressures of an applied setting and with the added benefit of working under experienced and knowledgeable faculty who guide me through the process. This experience has also taught me how to communicate the value of what we do to others outside of the I-O field. I have to explain the importance and the process of assessment centers to both undergraduate students and alumni who have never encountered our work before. Our program emphasizes the importance of this skill, and I believe that working with the assessment center has helped me to develop in this critical competency. In addition, I am learning how to increase interest and raise money for the center by participating in multiple events with potential donors and watching an experienced faculty member sell the center. This is an invaluable skill for any I-O psychologist because we typically have to sell what we do.
Science Meets Practice
The scientist–practitioner model focuses on developing sound practices based on science. Science is used to inform the best methods in the real world, whereas practice helps identify needs in research. Again, I would like to emphasize how valuable the experiences gained in this assessment center are in merging science and practice. Our graduate students get the opportunity to participate in and develop an assessment center while learning about the best approaches in this area. This project allows students to understand how an assessment center works, and through this experience, they can identify areas that still need improvement.
Communicating Our Value
The assessment center is also an important way that our department has been able to promote the field and give back to the larger community. Our efforts to make our contributions visible help not only our program but also the field of I-O as a whole (Ryan, 2003). First, to create this assessment center, we had to find a college on campus to house it in. Even the colleges that did not actively support our idea were exposed to what I-O has to offer through our discussions with them. Once we established that we would be working with Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, we were able to build a strong relationship with a college that we did not have any real contact with before. The honors college is now familiar with our field and what we have to offer. In addition, as word has spread about our center, other colleges and individual departments/programs across campus are taking an interest in what we are doing and hoping to elicit our help in the future.
The center brings together a wide array of alumni as assessors who are interested in helping to develop undergraduate students. Not only do we provide them with that opportunity, but we also are able to demonstrate our knowledge and contributions to these prominent members of our society. These alumni find what we do to be valuable and many of them choose to participate for this reason. We have had some alumni discuss implementing assessment centers in their own organizations, something we plan to pursue as the current center matures.
Most importantly, our assessment center allows us to give back to our community. We are creating new opportunities for the students at Penn State to develop as leaders and make them more marketable once they leave the university. We are sharing our knowledge and expertise to benefit others in our community. In an academic environment, it is important to share our knowledge with others, whether it is in interdisciplinary research or in providing others with opportunities, such as the assessment center.
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, we must remember the importance of combining science with practice and to communicate the value of I-O to the broader community. I have used the Leadership Assessment Center at Penn State as a model of a creative way to achieve both of these valuable outcomes. In graduate school, it is important to develop as well-rounded I-O psychologists that understand how to live the scientist–practitioner model, how to communicate the value of I-O, and how to share our knowledge to benefit others in our broader community.
References
Bartram, D. (2005). The great eight competencies: A criterion-centric approach to validation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(6), 1185–1203.
Lance, C. E. (2008). Why assessment centers do not work the way they are supposed to. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 84–97.
Ryan, A. M. (2003). Defining ourselves: I-O psychology’s identity question. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 41, 21–33.
Thornton, G. C. III, & Byham, W. C. (1982). Assessment centers and managerial performance. New York: Academic.
Thornton, G. C., III, & Rupp, D. E. (2006). Assessment centers in human resource management: Strategies for prediction, diagnosis, and development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.