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.