HR In-basket Testing And Validity: An Implicit Assessment Strategy Perspective

Personnel selection and assessment is a tool for competitive advantage in human resource. During human resource development, personnel selection and assessment played an important role in career planning and developing, human resource integration, and person-job fit. As one of situational simulations, in-basket testing is an important assessment technique in personnel selection and assessment. It was widely used in selection, training and promotion decisions of middle-level managers or senior managers. Early empirical studies have proved that the in-basket test had moderate evidence for criterion-related validity. More recently, questions have arisen not so much to whether in-basket tests work, but rather why they work. In particular, what the in-basket test actually measure has been a question. With the development of managerial competence research, the concept of competence has been more widely used in management function, so is the in-basket testing. At the same time, more researchers are interested in the process of in-basket testing. However, there were few studies exploring the process of in-basket testing. In addition, a few domestic studies had explored the construct validity of in-basket test whereas validation studies and theory-based hypotheses were needed.With the perspective of implicit assessment strategy, the present study, attempted to examine the trait-activation potential of in-basket, individual cognitive process strategies, and assessor's implicit framework of evaluation, construct and incremental validity. The results were shown as follows.First, by the idea of trait-activation potential and competence, we proposed four dimensions of in-basket test as a main framework, including thinking competence, managerial function competence, interpersonal competence, and drive for results. And trait-activation questionnaire was used to test these four dimensions. The results showed thinking competence, managerial function competence, and drive for results could be captured by in-basket test. In addition, thinking and managerial function competence was mostly used in the in-basket test.Based on trait-activation potential research, a confirmatory factor analysis supported the hypothesis that in-basket test measured thinking competence and managerial function competence.The results indicated in-basket testing had moderate criterion-related validity, and had higher correlation with task performance, stress adaptability, learning adaptability. Moreover, the in-basket test could predict adaptive performance better than task-contextual performance model. By using hierarchical regression analyses, the result showed in-basket had good incremental validity over cognitive test. Combined in-basket test with cognitive test, we found the total R2 would be become larger.Using content analysis and cluster analysis, we found there were three types of cognitive process strategies among assessees. And most assessees used combined cognitive process strategy. The result also indicated cognitive process strategies influenced the in-basket validity, especially influence the relationship between decision making and performance. Cognitive process strategies have been a component of construct. Moreover, task characteristic would moderate the relationship between cognitive process strategies and in-basket testing. Specifically, assessess who used integrative analysis cognitive process strategy would get best score in the problem-solving task; according to different task characteristic, there was different relationship between cognitive process strategies and in-basket validity.Compared behavioral checklists with frame of reference (FOR) scoring method, we found FOR scoring method had higher interrater reliability, but there was no difference about validity between two scoring methods. Using factor analysis, there were two implicit frameworks of evaluation among assessors. The one framework consisted of two dimensions that called thinking competence and managerial function competence, another one called manag...