Leadership and Self-Assessment Organizational Behavior

An Analysis of how Self-Evaluation and Self-Assessment relates to Leadership Today

The modern organizational environment must keep pace with changes that are occurring at a historically unprecedented rate. Many of these changes are driven by technology and require that leaders continually learn new skills in order to stay abreast of needed skill requirements. It is often the case that a leader will have difficulty getting performance feedback from their superiors because they generally do not work in close contact with supervisors and in some case may not even have one at all. Therefore a leader must rely on self-assessments primarily to further develop the skill set that will allow them to help their organization create or maintain a competitive advantage.

360 Degree Feedback and Self-Evaluation

Evaluation is an important component of any organization. The use of an evaluation program has been shown to be able to reduce employees' levels of stress and an employee's reduce their intentions to quit and turnover rate (Avey, et al., 2009). However, it is difficult to offer effective evaluations to many members of the organization, especially leaders. The top down approach to feedback has been shown to be inadequate for leaders in many circumstances because many leaders operate with substantial autonomy. For example, the supervisor for many leadership positions many not actually spend much time working with their subordinate and thus cannot generally offer only a limited amount of insightful information that can be used for effective feedback.

Many researchers have tried to address this problem...

The feedback that a leader can gain in this system is far more comprehensive that the traditional model. Not only does the leader receive the same top-down evaluation in the more traditional systems, but they also can receive evaluations from their peers as wells as from subordinates, customers, or whoever else can provide offer a perspective on the leaders performance. This feedback can then be used as the basis of a self-evaluation is also commonly included in the system. The system works by providing feedback from the people who surround the individual on an organizational chart which can be thought of as a circle and hence the term "360-degree" was applied to the systems name.
An effective evaluation system that can provide opportunities for career development can serve as a valuable tool in regards to attraction, retention, and motivation (Becker, et al., 2011). Many people in leadership positions are actively seeking to develop their careers and receiving timely and appropriate feedback can help to further employees in their own personal ambitions. Since the feedback comes from all angles, it also provides and incentive to maintain performance in all situations as it is possible that they are being evaluated. It also provides more depth in regards to feedback because leaders can get a sense of how they are viewed from different perspectives. This feedback can serve as a foundation for a self-evaluation that considers many viewpoints including one's own.

One of the major drawbacks for a leader to implement a 360 degree feedback system is that it is time consuming,…