Consulting Psychology Journal, Vol 76(4), Dec 2024, 348-366; doi:10.1037/cpb0000285
In leadership development, 360 assessments are multirater instruments in which leaders rate themselves on leadership competencies and are assessed by several raters (e.g., peers, direct reports, bosses). Such assessment methods afford valuable opportunities for both leaders and practitioners alike; however, they also present thorny challenges, including those related to scoring. We propose a Latent Approximation Method (LAM) for scoring 360s that is based on recent modeling advances for multirater data and provide a preliminary empirical evaluation of that method. To an international sample of nearly 17,000 leaders and nearly 150,000 raters, we applied LAM scoring to a 360 measure of several leadership competencies. We examined associations among LAM scores, explored associations between LAM scores and standard averaged scores, and evaluated the incremental predictive utility that LAM scores bring (beyond standard scores) to the prediction of criterion variables. Replicating across subsamples, results revealed considerable overlap between LAM scores and standard scores. Moreover, LAM scores provided significant but small incremental predictive power over Standard Averaging Method scores. These results indicate limited value of LAM scoring for practitioners, and we discuss the implications of these findings for both research and applications using 360 assessments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)