Assessment of Social Competence for Pilot Selection

To ensure that pilots possess the necessary skills for effective teamwork during line operation, airlines have introduced various diagnostic methods into their selection procedures that are designed to assess the social competence of pilot applicants prior to employment. A validation study with N = 292 ab initio pilots for a major European airline is described, in which assessment center (AC) methods have been compared with questionnaires on social competence and personality. Results show moderate to high correlations between 2 social competence questionnaires and certain personality dimensions, although only 1 social competence questionnaire (the Social Skills Inventory [SSI]) confirms systematic common variance with the behavior-oriented assessments of related concepts in the AC. In addition to traditional selection procedures, the SSI could neither improve the prediction of applicants’ overall performance in pilot selection nor did it show substantial intercorrelations with an external criterion in the pilot training. Therefore, social competence and personality questionnaires could serve as an additional component in the preselection, but might not replace the AC, which provides information about the behavioral component of social competence in real social interactions.