Ethical leaders are those who exemplify moral behavior personally, as well as those who facilitate follower ethical behavior. Although recent attention has been given to the ethical leadership construct, there remains a lack of innovation regarding the assessment and development of ethical leaders in organizations. To address these issues, a pilot study was conducted to examine the convergent validity of an ethical leadership assessment center, as well as the efficacy of using assessment center feedback to foster ethical leadership. Assessees completed a battery of pre tests, a virtual business simulation with a novel exercise, and a set of post tests. Half of the assessees were randomly assigned to a feedback condition, whereas the other half did not receive feedback until after the post tests were completed. Due to low statistical power, quantitative results were inconclusive. Nevertheless, qualitative insights were gained that point to implications for validating assessment center methodologies when assessing and developing ethical leadership.

This study generates new insights on the role of initial impressions in assessment centers. Drawing from the “thin slices” of behavior paradigm in personality and social psychology, we investigate to what extent initial impressions of assessees—based on different slices of assessment center exercises (i.e., two minutes at the beginning, middle, and end of AC exercises)—are consistent across and within AC exercises, and are relevant for predicting assessment center performance and job performance. Employed individuals (N = 223) participated in three interactive assessment center exercises, while being observed and evaluated by trained assessors. Based upon video-recordings of all assessment center exercises, a different, untrained group of raters subsequently provided ratings of their general initial impressions of assessees for the beginning, middle, and end of each exercise. As criterion measure, supervisors rated assessees’ job performance. Results show that initial impressions in assessment centers are (a) relatively stable, (b) consistently predict assessment center performance across different slices of behavior (i.e., across the three time points and exercises), and (c) mostly relate to job performance.