Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [410]
At many companies, applicants for managerial positions undergo a rigorous evaluation procedure known as assessment. Henry Murray, of TAT fame, and others developed assessment during World War II as a means of selecting intelligence agents for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA). OSS assessment, as we saw in an earlier chapter, relies on personality tests and observations of the candidates in several artfully contrived situations. After the war, some of the psychologists who had worked in the OSS assessment project adapted the method to other purposes at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research in Berkeley. Abandoning the qualifications of spies for more mundane concerns, they developed assessment protocols for dozens of specialties ranging from law school student to Mount Everest climber and from M.B.A. candidate to mathematician.36
But it was Douglas Bray, a psychologist at AT&T, who worked out the method of personnel assessment that became the model for American business and industry. Bray, born in Massachusetts, had made his way as far as graduate school at Clark University, where he earned a master’s in psychology before being drafted in 1941. He was assigned to the Air Corps’s aviation psychology program, where he helped create paper-and-pencil tests, psychomotor skills tests, and simulations to screen candidates for training as pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and aerial gunners.37
The work gave Bray an abiding interest in assessment. After the war he earned a doctorate in social psychology at Yale and taught for some years, but in 1955 he had the lucky break that started him on the real work of his life. A former professor recommended him to AT&T, which needed a psychologist to conduct a long-term study on selecting people who could become highly effective managers. At the time, AT&T was hiring as many as six thousand college graduates a year and promoting thousands more from vocational jobs to management jobs; knowing how to pick winners would be of immense value.
In Bray, it had picked a winner before having a method for doing so. Within a year he had assembled a staff, devised an assessment protocol, and begun using it in an “assessment center” in the headquarters of Michigan Bell in St. Clair. (Michigan Bell was the first company in the AT&T system to participate in the managerial-career study.) At the assessment center, twelve management candidates at a time would spend three days undergoing interviews, completing a battery of cognitive tests, personality inventories, attitude scales, and projective tests, and taking part in three major behavioral simulations—leaderless group discussion, a business game, and “In-Basket,” an individual exercise in which each participant was handed a sheaf of memos, letters, and requests, and had to make decisions, write replies, and take other appropriate actions. Eight assessors, chiefly psychologists, spent a week observing and evaluating the participants in each group.38
As in all longitudinal research, the hardest part for Bray was waiting to gather evidence that the assessment method was valid. Eight years and again twenty years after each participant’s assessment Bray conducted reassessments. The results strongly validated his method. After twenty years, 43 percent of the college graduates who had been rated the most promising had reached the fourth (of six) level or higher of management, as against only 20 percent of those judged less promising. Of non-college men, 58 percent of those highly rated by the assessment had made it to the third level or higher, but only 22 percent of those not highly rated had risen that far.39
Bray’s assessment center and method did not catch on for some