A Method for Capturing Context in the Assessment of Leaders: The "Too Little/Too Much" Rating Scale

In their focal article, Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants (2018) stress the importance of context in leadership assessment. For instance, they argue that senior executives work in a different context compared to lower-level managers and that this should be taken into account. A simple example is that the competency of strategic thinking is critical for executive performance but much less so, if at all, for front-line supervisors. The claim that context matters in leadership and in the assessment of leaders is easy to grasp but difficult to apply in practice.