Assessing the Behavioral Flexibility of Managers

Lindberg, J.T. & Kaiser, R.B. (2004, April). Assessing the Behavioral Flexibility of Managers: A Comparison of Methods. Poster session presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Chicago, IL.

Despite keen interest, several questions remain about the flexibility of managers: How best to define the construct? How to measure it? How to help managers develop it? We analyzed three different methods for assessing managerial flexibility in the context of developmental feedback. Our results indicate that the way flexibility is typically assessed in practice—as a global trait-like tendency to vary behavior—is severely deficient. However, more complex models that represent the paradoxes confronting managers show promise. Specifically, measures that represent flexibility as a mastery of specific and opposing behaviors in both the social/interpersonal domain and the functional/business domain demonstrate construct validity evidence and are highly predictive of ratings of overall effectiveness.

Download paper at: AssessingFlexibility(Lindberg&Kaiser2004).pdf

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