Assessing Political Skill for Management Selection

Political skill has been described as using human resources and manipulating social exchanges to influence group outcomes (Mintzberg, 1983). Researchers have found that political skill has significant relationships with constructs such as contextual performance, career satisfaction and leadership. Based on these empirical findings it may be beneficial to include a measure of political skill as part of a selection process. In this study, different methods were explored for measuring political skill that may be appropriate for administrative purposes such as the self-rated questionnaire called the Political Skill Inventory (PSI), a situational judgment test (SJT) and the structured interview. A sample of 100 graduate business students, most of whom had extensive managerial experience, completed the previously mentioned measures in exchange for feedback on their assessments. The participants were subsequently rated on political skill by their coworkers. The only significant association with the coworker scores was the PSI; neither the SJT nor the structured interview showed a significant relationship with the peer ratings of political skill. However, there were unforeseen technical limits to the measures that might explain the negative findings. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving the measures prior to a follow-up study.