Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences and Humanities

Year: 2019

DOI:

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A Study of Assessment Centre Practices of Multinational Enterprises operating in India—An Empirical Study of Private Sector Companies

Andrew Dutta

ABSTRACT: 

Assessment of competencies is relatively a new practice in the field of human resource management in India. Historically it is not the first choice of talent assessment due to high costs of design and deployment of Assessment Centres (henceforth AC) (Thornton, Rupp and Hoffman, 2015) and due to business education curriculum still lacking Assessment Center (AC) practices as course offerings. While systematic studies are reported from developed countries Spychalski, et al., (1997), Thornton III & Rupp (2006), Hirose (2016) and from developing countries (Krause et.al, 2011), there are almost no studies reported from India on the spectrum of AC characteristics and practices. This study is an attempt to fill that gap. The study was conducted across N = 213 multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in private sector (non-federal), chosen based on market capitalization across fifteen industrial sectors, to understand the AC practice spectrum based on the International Taskforce on Assessment Center Guidelines (2015), USA. Commissioned as a self-funded research, the insights from the study reveal that 46 % of the MNEs do not conduct any systematic talent assessment in India through AC processes. The reasons range from lack of trained in-house assessors to “lack of faith” in the process of an AC. Of the remaining 54% MNEs reporting AC practices, heterogeneity was found across various AC parameters such as job design, assessee groups, quality of assessors, assessment tools, AC characteristics, integration of data, assessee feedback processes and diagnostic methods to name a few. The finding of this study would help practitioners and decision makers to adopt suitable talent assessment strategies while operating businesses in India. It also builds a foundation to revisit extant theoretical literature on assessment centre from the developing country perspective.

Keywords: Assessment Center, human resource management, talent assessment, multinational enterprises in India, competency assessment.