Note on Prediction of Managerial Effectiveness from the California Psychological Inventory

Abstract

It is generally agreed that managerial success or failure depends to a large extent on personality factors that are determined early in one's life ( 1). However, recent reviews have concluded that few attempts to isolate such factors have been successful ( 3 ) . The present study is an attempt to establish the validity of one such attempt that may prove to be the exception, the 206-item managerial key of the California Psychological Inventory, developed by Goodstein and Schrader ( 2 ) . Two equivalent forms of the inventory were completed by a sample of 62 managers holding relatively senior positions in large public companies in South Africa In addition, the inventory was completed by a control sample of 124 nonmanagerial employees drawn at random from the same companies. The over-all performance of each subject in the managerial sample was rated at the same time by their immediate superiors on a 7-point raring scale, ranging from 1 (very ineffective) to 7 (very effective). The managerial sample obtained a significantly higher ( P < .01) mean score ( M = 608.7, SD = 19.7) than did the nonmanagerial sample ( M = 542.9, SD = 21.7). The correlation between inventory scores and performance ratings among the managerial sample was significantly positive ( 7 = .27, P < .05). The equivalent.forrn reliabiliries of the inventory were .74 for the rnanzgerial sample and .71 for the nonmanager~al sample. These results suggest that the managerial key of the California Psycholog~cal Inventory may be capable in some circumstances of identifying managerial potential. However, it should be noted these resulu suggest that only 10% of the variation in performance ratings can be ascribed to differences in the managerial keyed scores. Also, that the results may not generalize to groups of managers who are very different from those in the present study.