Managerial Competence Based Situational Assessment And Validity Research In Human Resource Management

Personnel selection and assessment are important research fields in human resource management. With the development of managerial competence research, more and more researchers are interested in managerial competence based situational assessment. As one of the most promising managerial competence situational assessment methods, situational judgment test has increased in popularity over the past decade. Recent empirical researches have indicated that situational judgment test had high criterion-related validity. This study wants to validate managerial competence based situational judgment tests, and discusses some critical problems in situational assessment methods. In situational judgment test research, construct-oriented test development becomes a new perspective. However, few studies tested the construct validity and scarcely explored the situational judgment processes. In domestic, there were few published situational judgment test empirical researches. As mentioned above, situational judgment test validation and processes research have important theoretical and practical implications.This study verified the validity of situational judgment test, and adopted the perspective of human problem solving to explore situational judgment processes. Finally, we proposed the validity mechanism of situational judgment tests.Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the hypothesis that situational judgment test measured interpersonal competence, integrity competence and problem-solving competence. Multitrait-multimethod matrix between situational judgment test and self-reported competence questionnaire demonstrated that situational judgment test had moderate convergent validity. Further, this study tested criterion-related validity: research results provided favorable criterion-validity evidence (.43 in development sample; .31 in similar cross validation sample and .18 in heterogeneous cross validation sample). Criterion-related validity of situational judgment test based on homogeneous scaling was a bit higher than empirical keying based situational judgment test.Results indicated that managerial competence was contingent to individual and job characteristics. Individual and job characteristic would moderate the relationship between managerial competence components and performance. Moreover, competence components were related to different performance dimensions. Specifically, problem-solving competence could predict task performance and interpersonal facilitation; integrity competence could predict job dedication; and interpersonal competence could predict contextual and adaptive performance.With nonequivalent control group design, this study compared differences among situational judgment problem solving strategies. The results indicated that more subjects took heuristic-searching strategy in situational judgment test, but in behavioral judgment test half of subjects took behavioral-activation strategy. Independent-samples T test showed: Managers taken heuristic-searching strategy had favorite situational judgment test performance than managers' taken behavioral-activation or hypothesis-testing strategies; but no differences existed among three problem solving strategies in behavioral judgment test.Compared with the sources of validity about situational judgment and behavioral judgment test, we found that both situational judgment test and behavioral judgment test had moderate validities; validity of behavioral judgment test was a bit higher than behavioral judgment test. Research results showed there were some differences in the sources of validity: criterion-related validity sources of situational judgment test came from better predicting to job dedication and interpersonal facilitation performance dimensions, but the validity of behavioral judgment test came from better predicting to task performance and adaptive performance.Three theoretical implications of this study were discussed. Firstly, multi-dimension constructs of situational judgment test were confirmed, and construct-oriented situational asses...