Centres of Excellence? Assessment and Development Centres, Managerial Competence, and Human Resource Strategies

SUMMARY The use of assessment centres for the selection of staff and for the identification of long‐term potential seems to be growing in popularity. The paper reviews research on their predictive validity and fairness and explores some reservations revealed by recent research in relation to such areas as construct and content validity, the processes of assessor decision‐making, the roles of exercises and criteria and the value of the assessors' conference. Increasingly, assessment centres have been also used for the purpose of diagnosing development needs, and the paper reviews recent empirical research on the effects of such ‘development centres’. More recently assessment and development centres have come to play a significant role in managing strategic change and in supporting programmes of culture change. This paper examines two recent case studies which illustrate the key roles that assessment and development centres may play as part of an organization's overall human resource strategy.