Practice and research with senior leaders can be rewarding but also challenging and risky for industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists; the fact that much of the work with these populations is difficult to access elevates these concerns. In this article we summarize work presented by prominent researchers and practitioners at a symposium organized to share common practices and challenges associated with work at higher levels of organizational management. We review implications for research and practice with senior leaders by examining how assessments are applied at senior levels, how assessments and development practices can be linked, and the challenges associated with research and evaluation conducted with these leaders. Also, we offer suggestions for advancing research and practice at senior levels.

High fidelity measures have proven to be powerful tools for measuring a broad range of competencies and their validity is well documented. However, their high-touch nature is often a deterrent to their use due to the cost and time required to develop and implement them. In addition, given the increased reliance on technology to screen and evaluate job candidates, organizations are continuing to search for more efficient ways to gather the information they need about one's capabilities. This chapter describes how innovative, interactive rich-media simulations that incorporate branching technology have been used in several real-world applications. The main focus is on describing the nature of these assessments and highlighting potential solutions to the unique measurement challenges associated with these types of assessments.

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Job simulations have proven to be powerful tools for measuring a broad range of competencies; however, organizations are often reluctant to administer these types of assessments given the cost, time, and personnel required to develop and implement the measures. Given these constraints, organizations have taken the principles of job simulations a step further by using animation or video (i.e., rich media) to create interactive, online assessments that incorporate branching technology to facilitate realism. This chapter describes this novel approach and addresses how to handle the measurement challenges with sufficient rigor so that high-stakes personnel decisions can be made based on the resulting scores. Although additional research is needed to clearly understand these new innovative assessments, the initial psychometric properties and validity results offer strong support for these measures.