Approaches for Career Succession Assessment

Employee Assessment Case Study
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Employee Assessment Case Study
As leadership, creativity, and innovation continue to be among the key determinants of success in the business world, the search for and retention of talent has escalated in both public and private sectors. In this regard, career and succession planning is critical for the identification and development of high potential candidates who can take up various leadership positions. During the assessment of leadership talent, the career succession plan employed an approach that required the candidate to answer with first instinct to a set of words in different categories. Only the first responses to the word values would be considered in determining the candidate’s placement on a team. However, the candidate questioned the validity of the assessment based on its potential for bias. The candidate asserted that some of the words could be interpreted differently depending on one’s beliefs, cultural origin, and values thereby affecting the results/outcomes of the assessment. The program administrator responded by removing the weighting of the assessment which was not part of the overall assessment scoring. Based on this case, this paper advances the argument that the tools or approaches for career succession assessment should be free from any form of discrimination and bias if they are to be valid and reliable.
Although career succession assessment that requires candidates to complete a personality/behavioral tendency profile is not a new practice, there is controversy over its potential for discrimination. The debate is mostly focused on the impacts of group differences on the candidates’ chances of being promoted or placed in certain teams. In other words, a tool, no matter how precise and scientific that exposes candidates to potential bias can have major legal implications (Kanengoni, 2013). The case presented at the beginning of the paper creates an image of a multinational company that is in the process of implementing a global career succession plan. However, the approach or tool that the company is using to implement the succession plan is faulty on grounds of potential discrimination as highlighted by the candidate.
To begin with, the requirement that the candidate’s suitability for placement on a team is determined by the evaluation of responses to sets of word values is problematic. According to Highhouse & Guion (2014, p. 213), an assessment tool that creates distortions in the interpretation of response items is likely to cause systematic bias and discrimination. In the present case, the candidate has a valid discrimination concern because personal interpretations of some of the listed words would vary depending on one’s cultural origin, beliefs, and values. This means that if the candidate’s responses to some of the words were influenced differently from another candidate’s responses because of culture or beliefs, the two candidates would be evaluated differently when being placed in teams. For example, the first instinct about words such as integrity, courageous, and reliability among candidates with different belief and value systems may differ significantly to the extent of a...