The highly competitive global business environment is currently suffering a severe skills shortage. As a result, according to Vance Kearney, the UK vice-president of human resources at Oracle, companies need to be excellent at recruitment and quick to respond to market changes.
Large and successful organisations tend to either operate in or aspire to global markets. And in these companies there is a growing awareness that people are a key resource who increasingly to be found in international circles.
The person in particular demand in the global environment is the global manager, but to find him or her requires companies to look outside their normal recruitment territory. In order to employ and develop these staff globally, successful bench-marking of interviewed candidates is an imperative because companies need consistent standards of assessment.
But bench-marking is problematic. Traditional assessment techniques such as the interview are inevitably subjective, and biases are even more difficult in cross-national recruitment where national stereotypes come more into play. Subjective assessment bias also occurs in more recently developed 'assessment centre' approaches such as group discussion exercises, in-tray tasks and presentations.
In comparing managers across cultures there is a need for good-quality objective personality measures to enable comparison of like with like. Using English as an international assessment medium does not work, neither does simple translation. One of the errors is personality profiles which do not so much measure an individual as reflect national differences.
For the last three years, PA Consulting Group has been tackling some of these issues by redesigning PAPI (PA Preference Inventory) a personality measure that has been used internationally by PA's clients for several years. The redesign work began with translation and back-translation of questions from English. This process is standard but can only partly achieve cultural equivalence.
For example consider the statement: 'I work hard'. In PA's research, data showed that although this concept was meaningful to British managers, French managers did not identify with this as a work concept and almost universally disagreed with it. The reason seems to be that 'hard work' in France is seen as 'toiling' and therefore lower level work.
The hypothesis was then explored that the notion of 'effort' might be more culturally acceptable. When tested, this change in translation changed the efficiency of items from the 'hard work' scale, and produced more effective equivalent measurement.
Finnish managers tended to reject statements that suggested a need for rules and direction much more than did the English. When Finns considered the statement: 'I like to have directions for doing things', it transpired that words such as 'rules', 'instructions' and 'directions' were likely to be viewed by Finnish managers as evidence of authoritarianism. The use of the alternative terms 'guidelines' and 'framework' produced a similar effect to the British version.
PA's approach has been to start with the assumption that most cultural and gender differences displayed in scores from personality questionnaires can be removed by adaptation and tests. In the countries where PAPI has been adopted, three or four successive adaptations and data trials have been required to reduce bias to negligible levels.
The assumption underlying the work is that the personality make-up of a Norwegian or a French manager is no different, although the way that personality is expressed in thought and behaviour will be affected by linguistic and cultural differences as well as prevailing values in the country in question. Equally the view has been taken that, while broad gender differences in personality almost certainly exist at some level, sex-linked aspects of personality questionnaires can distort assessments.
While setting objective benchmarks in cross-cultural assessment and recruitment is difficult, and requires considerable data-driven work and analysis, it has been shown, at least for personality questionnaires, some level of cultural equivalence is achievable.
