I believe that executive coaches, with the pre-requisites in business and a background and affiliation to psychology, make excellent coaches. Here are my top four reasons for the benefits of the executive psychologist as a coach.
Instead of asking about validity, the real question should be “How useful is this assessment or intervention?” This leads to the more focused question of how useful this assessment or intervention is for the problem.
While data has value to solving organisational problems, it is not a solution in and of itself. This point is lost on clients who think that just by having data that the solution to problems such as retention, selection success and training evaluation will somehow reveal itself.
While not wishing to go into the history of the development of the scientific method, the applications of these principles have since been the basis for societal development.
Criterion validity is far more than the simple correlations that are found in technical manuals. Validity in this sense is more appropriately described as whether an assessment can deliver a proposed outcome in a given setting with a given group.
Very few in the industry can lay claims to being completely impartial, yours truly included. The industry at all levels has inherent biases that any critical psychologist must be mindful of.
In my previous role in the UK, I was often confronted by very complex measures of psychological traits. This included the likes of multi-faceted competency models, complex appraisal forms, and measures of engagement with more scales than a grand piano.
So often in society, obvious conclusions are drawn for complex interactions. A classic case of this is the supposed rise in violent crime and video games. Firstly the rise in crime is indeed far more a media phenomena than a reality. In many countries, crime is decreasing and certainly if looked at in a historical [...]
New Zealand’s attitude of integrating ethnicities while maintaining their identity is somewhat unique in the world. For example, in France, it is forbidden by law to collect statistics referring to ‘racial or ethnic origin’.
For my last blog on the psychological articles in the Economist, I would like to draw people’s attention away from I/O psychology and into more fundamental science. For those that don’t know, Stephen Hawkins is attempting to find a unifying theory of the universe that connects both theories of the very large (such as gravity) [...]
