Assessing self-awareness: some issues and methods

Multi-source processes have been increasingly adopted by organisations in recent years and most projections suggest this trend will continue. As a developmental technique, one underlying rationale to such systems is their potential impact on target managers' self-awareness; increasing self awareness is thought to enhance performance. The main theme of this paper relates to the potential of 360-degree assessment for yielding measures of self-awareness and the different ways of deriving indices of this variable. The relationship between self-awareness indices and measures of performance are discussed in light of research findings. It is concluded that different self-awareness measures used in the research literature are not equivalent, and may have differential relationships to performance. It is argued that self-awareness should be assessed in selection and other settings using a variety of methods, not necessarily utilizing the kinds of measures typically associated with multi-source feedback systems.