Objective: Managerial assessment centers are multidimensional systems for collecting, integrating, and interpreting behavioral evidence to support decisions concerning managerial selection, appointment, succession planning, and development. The quality of assessment center functioning does not depend solely on the characteristics of a particular instrument or the accuracy of an individual assessor; rather, it is shaped by the interaction among the professional competence of key actors, design architecture, measurement quality, policy and oversight mechanisms, and the organizational logic governing the use of assessment results. Despite the growing use of assessment centers across Iranian organizations and industries, much of the existing research has examined specific components of the process—such as competency models, assessor training, psychometric properties, or selected implementation problems—in isolation. Relatively limited attention has been devoted to organizing these challenges within an integrated multilevel framework. Accordingly, the present study aimed to identify and organize the challenges facing managerial assessment centers and to develop a conceptual framework explaining the multilevel structure of these challenges across Iranian industries.

Method: This study employed a qualitative research design using thematic analysis. Participants comprised 13 managers, designers, and head of assessors with extensive direct experience in the design, management, and implementation of assessment centers across various industries. They were selected through criterion-based purposive sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase approach to thematic analysis. The analysis began with a predominantly data-driven orientation and proceeded through repeated reading of interview transcripts, coding of meaning units, constant comparison of codes, development of subthemes, review of conceptual boundaries, and abstraction of overarching themes. At the integrative stage, the resulting themes were reorganized according to the level of the assessment center system to which they referred, forming the basis of the study’s multilevel conceptual framework. To enhance the traceability of the analytical process, the inferential chain from raw data to codes, subthemes, themes, and analytical levels was systematically documented. The robustness of the findings was further strengthened through repeated engagement with the data, expert review, limited member checking, and contextual description of the sample.



Findings: Analysis of the interviews yielded 31 initial codes and 15 subthemes, which were organized into five overarching themes: assessor competence, professionalism, and alignment; assessment center design and architecture; psychometrics and measurement infrastructure; policy, oversight, and institutional maturity; and professional culture and the organizational logic of assessment center utilization. Higher-order analysis indicated that the identified challenges could be organized into five distinct but interrelated analytical levels. At the cultural–organizational context level, professional culture and the logic governing the use of assessment centers were prominent. At the institutional level, policy-making, standard-setting, and oversight emerged as key concerns. At the design level, assessment center architecture, competency models, exercises, and resource adequacy were emphasized. At the measurement level, psychometric quality, assessment instruments, norms, and the infrastructure required for administration and interpretation were highlighted. Finally, at the professional actor level, assessor competence, training, and calibration were identified as critical. The resulting framework indicates that, in experts’ experiences, the challenges facing assessment centers are not confined to isolated or independent problems but are distributed across multiple levels of the assessment system. The data also revealed patterns of conceptual association and co-occurrence among these levels, although the present study did not test these associations as causal relationships.



Conclusion: The conceptual framework developed in this study represents managerial assessment centers as multilevel systems whose quality emerges through the interaction of cultural–organizational context, institutional mechanisms, design architecture, measurement infrastructure, and the competence of professional actors. The findings indicate that focusing on the improvement of a single component—such as increasing the number of exercises, introducing a new assessment instrument, providing short-term assessor training, or developing a procedural guideline—does not, by itself, address the full range of challenges identified in the data. Accordingly, improving the quality of assessment centers appears more feasible when clarity of purpose and utilization logic, the quality of competency models and behavioral exercise design, the adequacy of psychometric evidence, assessor competence and calibration, and the effectiveness of standard-setting and oversight mechanisms are addressed in a coordinated manner. Without claiming to establish causal relationships among the identified levels, the proposed framework provides an integrated structure for understanding the challenges facing managerial assessment centers in Iranian industries and may serve as a foundation for future research, the development of assessment center quality indicators, and the design of interventions tailored to each analytical level.