Discussion Board Forum
Mandarine "Mandy" Pamplemousse is vice president of human resources for Citrus Glen, a juice producer based in south Florida that supplies orange and grapefruit juice to grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, and food processors through the United States. Citrus Glen has been growing rapidly, and a constant feature of Mandy's job for the last few years has been worry about how to hire and promote enough quali?ed individuals to staff the ever-expanding array of positions within the company. One of the ways Mandy has been able to staff positions internally is by contracting with staf?ng Systems International (SSI), a management consulting ?rm based in Charlotte, North Carolina. When positions open up at Citrus Glen that are appropriate to staff internally, Mandy has sent a group of candidates for the position up to SSI to participate in their assessment center. The candidates return from SSI three days later, and a few days after that, SSI sends Mandy the results of the assessment with a recommendation. Though Mandy had never formally evaluated the accuracy of the promotions, it was her feeling that the process was pretty accurate. Of course, Mandy thought, for $5,500 per candidate, it should be accurate. A few days ago, Mandy was hosting Thanksgiving, and her brother-in-law,Vin Pomme, joined them. Vin is a doctoral student in industrial psychology at Ohio International University. After Thanksgiving dinner, while Mandy, Vin, and their family were relaxing on her lanai and enjoying the warm Floridasunshine,Mandy was talking to Vin about her dif?culties in promoting from within and the cost of SSI's assessment process. Vin quickly realized that SSI was using an assessment center. He was also aware of research suggesting that once one takes an applicant's personality and cognitive ability into account, assessment center scores may contribute little additional validity. Given the high cost of assessment centers, he reasoned, one must wonder whether this "incremental" validity (the validity that assessment centers contribute beyond the validity provided by personality and cognitive ability tests) would prove cost effective. After Vin conveyed these impressions to Mandy, she felt that after the holidays she was going to reexamine Citrus Glen's internal selection processes.
1. Drawing from concepts presented in Chapter 7 (Measurement), how could Mandy more formally evaluate SSI's assessment process, as well as the alternative presented to her by Vin?
2. Construct a scenario in which you think Mandy should continueher business relationship with SSI. On the other hand, if Mandy decides on an alternative assessment process, what would that process be? How would she evaluate whether that process was effective?
3. Citrus Hill has considered expanding their operations into the Caribbean and Latin America. One of Mandy's concerns is how to staff such positions. If Citrus Hill does expand its operations to different cultures, how should Mandy go about staf?ng such positions? Be speci?c.
Answer the 3 questions in 400 words plus the use of 1 scholarly sources.