Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(4), pp 795–813 December 2016. Copyright © 2016 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. doi:10.1017/iop.2016.87 Commentary Don’t Give Up on the Self Too Quickly Scott N. Taylor Babson College Bracken, Rose, and Church (2016) call for less self- versus other research. They say that self-ratings versus non-self-ratings research (often referred to as self–other agreement research, or SOA) is not particularly helpful and that self-ratings’ primary purpose is to serve as a “refection point for individuals receiving feedback” (Bracken, Rose, & Church, p. 785). It is true that SOA research has played a dominant role with 360° feedback for many years (for a review, see Fleenor, Smither, Atwater, Braddy, & Sturm, 2010), but the value we can draw from the self through 360° feedback remains terrain largely unexplored. Scholar and practitioner interest in SOA is understandable because SOA has been shown to predict important outcomes. For example, researchers and practitioners have frequently used SOA to predict managerial success and efectiveness (e.g., Fletcher, 1999), leader behavior and performance (e.g., Atwater & Yammarino, 1992), and interpersonal efectiveness (e.g., Brutus, Fleenor, & Tisak, 1999) and to distinguish between high and average performing managers (e.g., Church, 1997). On the other hand, it is bafing to see how researchers and practition- ers have become so enamored with SOA. For decades we have had com- pelling evidence that self-assessment, self-rating, and self-evaluation in gen- eral tend to be infated, biased, and unreliable regarding a person’s ability to assess his or her own behavior, skills, or personality traits (e.g., Dunning, 2005; Leary, 2004; Podsakof & Organ, 1986). Sedikides (1993) found that among the three major motivations for self-evaluation (i.e., self-assessment, self-enhancement, and self-verifcation), the self-enhancement motive was shown to be the most powerful determinant of the self-evaluation process. As Taylor (2014) points out, these biases call into question the accuracy and validity of using self-ratings at all given their simplistic treatment of the complex self. Scott N. Taylor, Management Division, Babson College. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Scott N. Taylor, Manage- ment Division, Babson College, Tomasso Hall, Number 229, 231 Forest Street, Babson Park, MA 02457. E-mail: staylor@babson.edu 795 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2016.87 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.92.146.72, on 02 Mar 2022 at 19:08:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at