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Psychological assessment refers to the process whereby different methods and techniques are used to test hypotheses about people and their psychological characteristics. Understanding employees' psychological makeup is key to allow effective human resource management, from hiring to retirement. However, the gap between scientific evidence and organizational practices dealing with psychological assessment is still great.

General review along with case study

This paper shows the differences between research and practice, i.e. between what scientific evidence suggests to assess people from a psychological point of view reliably and what practitioners do when they want to reach the same goal.

At the end of the article, two examples of integration between research and practice are presented. We discuss how methods and techniques of psychological assessment can be developed to both respect scientific criteria and meet specific organizational needs.

The way in which managers differ when confronted with risky options or when evaluating different alternatives constitutes a fundamental part of organizational risk management. This study aims to investigate how managerial risk-taking attitudes (i.e. ethical and financial risk-taking as a trade-off between benefit and riskiness) change over time and based on gender.

The authors conducted a cross-sectional study on a sample of Italian executives and measured their perceptions of risk-taking, risk perception and risk-benefit, all referring to the company they worked for in the ethical and financial domain. The study also collected demographic data to gather information on age and gender. The authors analyzed data collected using multilevel analysis.

The results show that perceived benefits are the main drivers of risk-taking attitudes in both domains. Age and gender are not significant direct predictors of risk, but interactions with domains reveal insightful patterns.

Overall, this study highlights the need to assess the whole pattern of relationships emerging from the range of situational variables characterizing a specific population. Concerning the organizational context, it means addressing the role of organizational variables in influencing risk-taking so as to determine the extent to which organizational policies are indeed effective in fostering efficient organizational risk management.

The construct of meaningful work is a relevant topic for the managerial literature interested in job design, employees’ motivation, and job performance. The current research seeks to improve our knowledge on meaningful work by exploring the processes by which a workday is experienced as meaningful.

Adopting the lens of the Job Demands-Resources model and Self-Determination theory, we argue that work conditions and psychological conditions are associated with the experience of meaningful work on a daily basis. Moreover, we propose that the experience of meaningful work on a long-term basis (i.e. the evaluation of one’s own work as holding significance per se) intensifies the associations between daily conditions and the experience of meaningful work. We collected data via an event-based longitudinal diary study for a total sample of N = 114 employees from six organizations and N = 545 observations.

Results of the multilevel analysis showed that competence and task significance led to the experience of meaningful work during working days. Moreover, cross-level analyses revealed that these associations are stronger for employees who experience their work to be meaningful in the long-term.

The novelty of the present study lies in highlighting the role of specific factors contributing to the experience of meaningful work during a workday. These findings help specify targets and organizational and individual dimensions to be addressed by managerial interventions to ensure employees' meaningful work experience.

This study aims to test the effectiveness of a training intervention based on the psychology of perception, delivered to young Italian workers and employees, with low education, hired with an apprenticeship contract and involved in a compulsory training course (duration 32 h; the training intervention reported in the paper covers the first 8 h) whose aim was to let them develop such relational competencies as communication and cooperation with others.

By making use of optical-geometric illusions and ambiguous figures, participants were accompanied through a training intervention with the dual purpose of undermining their naive certainties about why they see what they see and increasing their awareness of how the perceptual processes work. At the beginning of the intervention, at the end of the 32 h (that is, after about a month) and after about one year from the end of the course, participants were administered a questionnaire to monitor the results of the training course by measuring their “perception awareness”.

“Perception awareness” increased from the beginning to the end of the course and still scored higher after one year. “Perception awareness” was positively related to communication and cooperation.

Although the literature is full of training courses delivered to improve communication and cooperation with others, little research has been carried out on perception-based training interventions delivered to young adults with low education hired with an apprenticeship contract for which this kind of training is compulsory.

Decision-making competence (DMC) of entrepreneurs and managers is a longstanding topic in this increasingly globalized world. These figures operate in conditions not within their own control, and good levels of DMC are often considered to be desirable for the flourishing of business and society. This paper reports an empirical investigation on the DMC of entrepreneurs and managers, in an attempt to inform about their tendencies to incur in risky and costly choices.

Three cognitive biases associated with operational strategies and individual characteristics of entrepreneurs and managers, namely under/overconfidence (UOC, i.e. self-confidence in taking decisions), resistance to sunk costs (RSC, i.e. propensity to take cost investments) and consistency in risk perception (CRP, i.e. how well individuals understand probability rules) were considered . Cognitive biases measures were used in a cross-sectional study on a sample of n = 639 entrepreneurs and n = 512 managers. Data collected via online survey were analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics to determine differences among entrepreneurs and managers DMC.

Analyses reveal that entrepreneurs exhibit higher levels of UOC compared to managers with a marked presence of UOC among entrepreneurs at younger ages. Conversely, performance regarding RSC improves with higher education levels while age and RSC are positively correlated only for managers, regardless of education. Lastly, entrepreneurs and managers resulted as not being affected by CRP. This study discusses these results to provide initial insights for further avenues of research and practice.

The study offers an innovative, evidence-based viewpoint on how entrepreneurs and managers deal with risky and costly decisions. It offers an initial understanding of the role of UOC, RSC and CRP, that is specific cognitive biases associated with operational strategies and individual characteristics, in the DMC of these working figures. The study forwards avenues of scrutiny of quick-witted entrepreneurs and systematic managers.

Given the instability and volatility of the labour market and the global talent scarcity, placing more attention on job employability is fundamental. In this context, the literature has already extensively examined employability as a crucial individual aspect, identifying some significant antecedents, including the applicability of training on the job. The present study aims to examine the impact that teaching employees to craft their job may have on the levels of applicability of training and if, in turn, this improves self-perceived employability.

The authors involved three private organizations that followed three workshops on job crafting behaviour. To empirically assess the intervention, the authors asked participants of the workshop to complete four quantitative diaries on a weekly basis, i.e. one per week, one before the intervention and three after the intervention. The diaries comprised measures of job crafting behaviours, applicability of training and self-perceived employability.

Multi-level analysis of data collected provided support to the positive associations between job crafting behaviour and self-perceived employability with the mediating effect of applicability of training. Notably, the applicability of training improves when individuals search for challenges, which indirectly affects perceived employability in terms of organizational sense.

In the present study, no control group was used with which the results of our intervention could be compared. However, this does not affect the overall results, given the amount of intraindividual variability.

The paper proposes initial avenues for promoting employability at work via the use of behavioural job crafting intervention.

This study aims to provide an overview of the past two decades of lifelong learning (LLL) policies for enhancing employability and reduce social exclusion in young people of European countries through the development of the so-called LLL key-competences.

Built on a quasi-systematic review, this contribution explores traditional and new methods for promoting the LLL transition, and then employability, in young adults (e.g. apprenticeship, vocational training, e-learning, etc.).

It argues the need to identify all the possible approaches able to support policymakers, as they can differently impact key-competence development.

Finally, based on the consolidated EU policy experience, we propose a strategy of implementation of the LLL programmes that facilitates the institutions’ decision processes for policy-making through the use of decisional support system.