Assessing Managerial Skills with the "Management Effectiveness Profile System"

Abstract

The Management Effectiveness Profile System (MEPS) provides managers with feedback on fifteen different task skills (e.g., decision making, planning), people skills (e.g., managing conflict, developing subordinates), and personal factors (e.g., time management, commitment level) hypothesized to be related to their overall job performance. Self-descriptions are profiled against descriptions by others along the 90 items comprising the instrument as well as the fifteen categories. Data on 404 managers who recently received such feedback were used to assess the reliability and validity of the Profile System. The results indicate that the internal consistency reliability of the scales is fairly high, though many of the items correlate with other scales almost as strongly as they do with their own. Inter-rater agreement among the other people describing each manager is acceptable and, for many scales, is greater than the agreement between the others' and the managers' own reports. The criterion-related validity of the instrument is supported by a small but significant relation between the task skills and personal factors and an independent measure of the managers' effectiveness. It is concluded that the instrument is useful for identifying relevant areas for self-development, but that managers should focus on item-level as well as scale results and should be sensitive to discrepancies between their self reports and the descriptions by others.