IOP 480 Week 3 Leadership Assessment and 360 Feedback Example

Promoting Supervisors and Developing Managers: An Assessment Center and 360 Feedback at a Resort Company

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

IOP/480: Assessment Tools for Organizations

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The resort company, staff, exercises and results are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Assessing leaders differs from assessing frontline applicants. Leadership involves judgment, influence and handling complex situations, and decisions about leaders affect many people. This paper examines two leadership assessments at Saguaro Springs Resorts, one for promotion and one for development.

Two Needs

Saguaro Springs needs six new department managers for housekeeping, food and beverage and front office across its four Phoenix-area resorts. In the past, managers were chosen by general managers' impressions, and several promotions failed when strong supervisors could not manage budgets or other supervisors. Meanwhile, current managers want feedback; an engagement survey showed that staff felt managers rarely recognized good work. Jonah Whitaker, the HR analytics lead, designs two programs with separate purposes.

The Assessment Center

An assessment center evaluates candidates through several exercises that simulate key parts of a job, observed by trained assessors who rate defined dimensions. Jonah's half-day center for twelve supervisor candidates includes three exercises. In a role play, a trained actor plays a guest whose anniversary dinner was ruined and who wants a full refund. In an in-basket, candidates handle twenty emails and reports in ninety minutes, from a staffing shortage to a budget overrun. In a group exercise, four candidates must agree on a holiday staffing plan with limited overtime.

Four dimensions are rated across exercises: problem solving, influencing others, organizing and planning and consideration of others. Three trained managers rate each candidate in each exercise using behavior checklists, then meet to agree on final ratings.

Evidence for the Dimensions

Arthur et al. (2003) combined studies of assessment center dimensions and their relationships with job performance. When dimensions were grouped into a small set of categories, several predicted performance well, with problem solving, influencing others and organizing and planning among the strongest, and consideration and awareness of others also contributing. A combination of a few dimensions predicted performance about as well as the overall assessment rating.

Jonah's dimensions align with those categories. The research supports scoring them separately and combining them with defined weights rather than relying on assessors' overall impressions.

Multisource Feedback for Current Managers

For development, current managers receive 360-degree feedback: ratings from their manager, peers, staff and themselves on behaviors such as recognizing good work, communicating changes and developing staff. Ratings are confidential, reported only when at least three staff respond and used only for development, a promise written into the survey invitation itself.

Why Raters Disagree

Conway and Huffcutt (1997) combined studies of ratings from different sources. Agreement among raters from the same source, such as two peers, was modest, and agreement between different sources, such as supervisors and subordinates, was lower still. Self-ratings agreed least with others. The authors suggested that different sources observe different behavior and hold different perspectives, so disagreement can carry useful information rather than simply error.

A housekeeping manager at one resort rated herself highly on recognizing good work, while her staff rated her low. Her boss rated her high. The pattern suggests she recognizes good work in reports to her boss but rarely in front of her team, a specific, actionable insight.

Her boss saw a manager who praised her team; her team saw a manager who praised them only to her boss.

Does Feedback Lead to Change?

Smither et al. (2005) reviewed research on performance after multisource feedback. Average improvement was small. Improvement was more likely when feedback indicated change was needed, when recipients had a positive orientation toward feedback and believed change was possible, when they set goals and when they took action, such as discussing results with raters or working with a coach.

Jonah's program therefore includes a session with a trained coach to interpret results, a written development plan with two goals and a follow-up survey after nine months. Managers are encouraged to thank their staff for the feedback and share one change they will make, which signals that the ratings were read and matters for whether staff answer honestly next time.

Training the Assessors

Assessment center ratings are only as good as the people making them. Before the first center, the three manager-assessors spend a day practicing on recorded exercises: they learn to write down what a candidate actually said and did, sort those observations into the four dimensions and rate only after the exercise ends. Their practice ratings are compared, and disagreements are discussed until they apply the scales the same way. Assessors who know the candidates personally are assigned to other candidates to avoid bias from prior impressions.

Designing the 360 Survey

The 360 survey has twenty-four items, each describing an observable behavior, such as "Thanks team members by name for specific good work," rather than a trait, such as "Is appreciative." Behavioral items are easier for raters to judge and easier for managers to act on. Each item also has an option for raters who have not observed the behavior, so staff who rarely see a manager in meetings are not forced to guess.

Keeping Purposes Separate

Promotion decisions use the assessment center. Development uses 360 feedback. Mixing them, for example by using 360 ratings in promotion decisions, could lead raters to inflate or deflate ratings strategically and would break the confidentiality promise that encourages honest feedback.

Costs and Benefits

The assessment center costs about two days of three managers' time plus an actor's fee, modest compared with the cost of a failed manager. The 360 program uses an online survey and coaching hours. Both will be evaluated: promoted managers' performance and turnover in their departments over their first year, and changes in managers' follow-up 360 scores and staff engagement, compared with managers who join the program a season later.

Conclusion

An assessment center built on research-supported dimensions gives Saguaro Springs a structured way to choose managers, and a confidential 360 program gives current managers specific feedback. Research on rater disagreement shows why multiple perspectives matter, and research on feedback outcomes shows that goals, coaching and follow-up turn ratings into change.

References

Arthur, W., Jr., Day, E. A., McNelly, T. L., & Edens, P. S. (2003). A meta-analysis of the criterion-related validity of assessment center dimensions. Personnel Psychology, 56(1), 125-153. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2003.tb00146.x

Conway, J. M., & Huffcutt, A. I. (1997). Psychometric properties of multisource performance ratings: A meta-analysis of subordinate, supervisor, peer, and self-ratings. Human Performance, 10(4), 331-360. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327043hup1004_2

Smither, J. W., London, M., & Reilly, R. R. (2005). Does performance improve following multisource feedback? A theoretical model, meta-analysis, and review of empirical findings. Personnel Psychology, 58(1), 33-66. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.514_1.x