What are the pros and cons of global criterion measures for managerial success?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Because of the widespread use of such global criterion measures, let us pause to examine them critically. First, the good news. Global measures such as supervisory rankings of total managerial effectiveness, salary, and organizational level (statistically corrected for age or length of time in the organization) have several advantages. In the case of ranking, because each supervisor usually ranks no more than about 10 subordinate managers, test–retest and interrater reliabilities tend to be high. In addition, such rankings probably encompass a broad sampling of behaviors over time, and the manager himself or herself probably is being judged rather than organizational factors beyond her control. Finally, the manager is compared directly to her peers; this standard of comparison is appropriate, because all probably are responsible for optimizing similar amounts of resources.
On the other hand, overall measures or ratings of success include multiple factors (Dunnette, 1963a; Hanser, Arabian, & Wise, 1985). Hence, such measures often serve to obscure more than they reveal about the behavioral bases for managerial success. We cannot know with certainty what portion of a global rating or administrative criterion (such as level changes or salary) is based on actual job behaviors and what portion is due to other factors such as luck, education, “having a guardian angel at the top,” differential opportunities, political savvy, and so forth. Such measures suffer from both deficiency and contamination--that is, they measure only a small portion of the variance due to individual managerial behavior, and variations in these measures depend on many job-irrelevant factors that are not under the direct control of the manager.
Such global measures may also be contaminated by biases against members of certain groups (e.g., women). For example, there is a large body of literature showing that, due to the operation of gender-based stereotypes, women are often perceived as not “having what it takes” to become top managers (Lyness & Heilman, 2006). Specifically, women are usually expected to behave in a more indirect and unassertive manner as compared to men, which is detrimental to women because directness and assertiveness are traits that people associate with successful managers (Aguinis & Adams, 1998). The incongruence between stereotypes of women’s behavior and perceptions of traits of successful managers may explain why women occupy fewer than 5% of the most coveted top-management positions in large, publicly traded corporations.
In short, global or administrative criteria tell us where a manager is on the “success” continuum, but almost nothing about how he or she got there.