MGMT 8725M Week 7 Selection Critique Example

Five Filters Nobody Chose on Purpose: A Selection Critique Following a Grocery Chain's High-Potential Identification Process Stage by Stage, Recording Whom Each Stage Removes and Ranking the Stages by the Store Leadership Capability They Cost

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8725M: Human Resource Talent Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Five Filters Nobody Chose on Purpose: A Selection Critique Following a Grocery Chain's High-Potential Identification Process Stage by Stage, Recording Whom Each Stage Removes and Ranking the Stages by the Store Leadership Capability They Cost

The Process as Written

Fenwick Markets identifies high-potential assistant store managers once a year. According to its talent review guide, the process runs in five stages: the district manager nominates candidates; nominees must hold an "exceeds expectations" rating in each of the last two annual reviews; they must sign a statement that they will relocate anywhere in Fenwick's four-state territory within six weeks; a panel of two regional directors interviews them; and a calibration meeting of regional vice presidents sets the final list. In 2025, 41 of 194 assistants were nominated, and 6 were added to the list.

Intent and Actual Screen

[after]

The "plausibly removes" column is drawn from the process design and from Fenwick's 2025 data, which show, for example, that 9 of 22 districts nominated no one at all.

Table 1

Fenwick's Identification Process: What Each Stage Is Meant to Detect, What It Screens On and Whom It Removes

Nomination and Resemblance

Kanter (1977), studying a large industrial corporation, described how managers under uncertainty tended to select people socially similar to themselves, a pattern she called homosocial reproduction. Fenwick's nomination stage invites that pattern: district managers nominate assistants they know and trust, which in practice means those who work the same daytime hours they do and resemble the managers who were nominated before them. Assistants who run night stocking or weekend shifts, where much store leadership happens, are rarely seen.

Performance Ratings and Potential

The rating stage assumes that excellent performance as an assistant predicts excellent performance as a store manager. Benson et al. (2019), using data on sales workers at 131 firms, found that firms gave heavy weight to current sales performance when promoting, and that the strongest salespeople, once promoted, tended to be weaker managers, as measured by the sales of the teams they led. They estimated the costs of these mismatched promotions to be high. Their setting differs from grocery, but the logic carries: the skills of a strong assistant, such as executing a manager's plan, are not the same as the skills of running a store. Silzer and Church (2009) made a related point, arguing that organizations often treat strong current performance as if it were evidence of potential for larger roles.

The Relocation Filter

The relocation statement removes people for reasons unrelated to capability. Fenwick's own records show that, in 2025, 14 of the 41 nominees declined to sign it, and 11 of those 14 cited family care. Yet most store manager vacancies Fenwick filled over the last three years were within 50 miles of the new manager's existing store.

Ranking the Stages

Ranked by the capability they remove, the relocation statement comes first: it removes a third of nominees who had already passed two filters, for a requirement most appointments do not need. Nomination comes second, since it removes the whole population of assistants who are never seen, an unknown but possibly large group. The rating threshold comes third, because it removes some capable people but also screens out some who are not. The panel and calibration stages remove fewer and are harder to evaluate without data, although the 9 districts with no nominee at all suggest that calibration rarely hears about candidates from districts whose managers stay quiet.

One Change to the Worst Stage

Replace the relocation statement with a question asking which stores within a stated radius the assistant could serve, and match vacancies to that answer. Fenwick would lose some flexibility for its rare long-distance placements but would keep the 14 nominees who now fall out at that stage.

Limits

The critique cannot count how many capable assistants are never nominated. A one-time review in which every assistant, not only nominees, completes the panel exercise would measure it.

References

Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085-2134. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz022

Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. Basic Books.

Silzer, R., & Church, A. H. (2009). The pearls and perils of identifying potential. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2(4), 377-412. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2009.01163.x