Area and Multi-Site Manager Judgment Assessment for Retail, Food Service and Branch NetworksEight sites, one of you, and a week that will not stretch.

Methodology: Thirty-eight original exercises across six formats: sixteen graded situations - of which six form one fixed-state week - plus six select-every-that-applies exercises, five binary claims, four most-and-least forced choices, four matching exercises and three ordering exercises. One response instruction is declared for the whole instrument and it is a BEHAVIOURAL-TENDENCY instruction: what you are most likely to do, never what a manager should do. Construct statement: it measures judgment in a role run at a distance - where the week goes across eight sites, when the standard is enforced and when a deviation is treated as evidence, what can and cannot be read from a weekly pack, and what gets done through a site manager rather than instead of one. It does not measure retail or hospitality product knowledge, any company's operating manual, financial accounting, whether somebody would be a good site manager, or how long they have done the job. Scoring is a path-value trajectory with recovery credit. Each rung of the week is scored as the value of the chosen move against the best and worst moves AVAILABLE FROM THAT RUNG, so the best available move from a poor position scores full marks at that rung; without that normalisation an early error propagates and the instrument has measured rung one six times, which is a mechanical artefact of the design rather than a fact about the respondent. Later rungs carry more weight than earlier ones because the decision space narrows. The trajectory is chance-corrected against the same authored per-option answer prior at every rung, so the correction cannot itself create a slope. The twenty-two standalone exercises are scored and reported apart from the week and corrected against their own priors. Reliability is McDonald's omega estimated from item count and a stated assumed inter-item correlation, printed with what it permits; where a part will not carry a number it carries a three-way classification instead and the refusal is printed. Every reported figure carries its standard error band. Constructs and sources: the multi-unit manager's role as a shift from operational control to working through unit managers (Umbreit 1989; Rivera, DiPietro, Murphy and Muller 2008); the plural form and the standing tension between chain uniformity and local adaptation, which is why a deviation is evidence before it is a compliance matter (Bradach 1997); process conformance as the thing that decides how much a departure costs a unit (Ton and Huckman 2008); span of control and the empirical manager effect inside a real retail chain (Siebert and Zubanov 2010; Meier and Bohte 2003); situational judgment tests and their operational validity, and the finding that behavioural-tendency instructions resist faking better than instructed-behaviour ones (McDaniel et al. 2001; McDaniel, Hartman, Whetzel and Grubb 2007); graded partial credit and the distractor doctrine (Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez 2002); path-value scoring with recovery credit; the standard-error band and the rule that a band which crosses a boundary is reported as a boundary rather than as a level (Crocker and Algina 1986); and the Barnum effect (Forer 1949). All items are original works. No commercial multi-unit programme, behavioural-style instrument, competency vocabulary or report layout is reproduced or implied, and no affiliation with any retailer, franchisor, training provider or assessment publisher exists or is claimed.