Competence (human resources)

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Competence is a standardized requirement for an individual to properly perform a specific job. It encompasses a combination of knowledge, skills and behavior utilised to improve performance. More generally, competence is the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified, having the ability to perform a specific role.

For instance, management competency includes the traits of systems thinking and emotional intelligence, and skills in influence and negotiation. A person possesses a competence as long as the skills, abilities, and knowledge that constitute that competence are a part of him, enabling the person to perform effective action within a certain workplace environment. Therefore, one might not lose knowledge, a skill, or an ability, but still lose a competence if what is needed to do a job well changes.

[edit] Occupational Competence

The Occupational Competence movement was initiated by David McClelland in the 1960s with a view to moving away from traditional attempts to describe competence in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes and to focus instead on the specific self-image, values, traits, and motive dispositions (i.e. relatively enduring characteristics of people) that are found to consistently distinguish outstanding from typical performance in a given job or role. It should be noted that different competencies predict outstanding performance in different roles, and that there is a limited number of competencies that predict outstanding performance in any given job or role. Thus, a trait that is a 'competence' for one job might not predict outstanding performance in a different role.

McClelland argued (McClelland, 1974)^{[citation needed]} that these competencies could neither be identified nor assessed using traditional procedures. The fundamental problem is that high level competencies such as initiative and the ability to understand and intervene in organizational processes are difficult and demanding activities that no one will engage in unless they very much care about the activity in which they are engaged – or unless they find these activities intrinsically satisfying (here is the link to McClelland's work on social motives)^{[citation needed]}. Such qualities will, therefore, most often only be developed and displayed while people are undertaking activities they care about. Furthermore, success in undertaking them depends on bringing to bear a range of cognitive, affective, and conative components of competence, such as thinking about what is to be achieved and how it is to be achieved, turning one’s emotions into the task, and persisting over a long period of time. Note, again, that these components of competence cannot be assessed except in relation to activities people care about, i.e. they cannot be assessed through the processes favored by traditional psychometricians. Hence their neglect in conventional studies of occupational competence based upon traditional tests – and especially tests of “academic” knowledge - knowledge of content.

As it happens, McClelland and his colleagues had developed an alternative framework for thinking about and assessing high level competencies but, unfortunately, presented it as a way of thinking about motivation. And, because it is at loggerheads with conventional thinking in psychometrics, it has been widely misunderstood. Over time, it became clear that the high level competencies differentiating effective from ineffective performance in occupational roles could be identified using detailed Behavioral Event Interviews because these interviews do capture thoughts and behavior in situations in which the interviewee is more or less fully engaged, as the interviewee normally has free choice of the situations to describe. These studies revealed the importance of a wide range of previously neglected competencies.

By the time Lyle and Signe Spencer sought to bring them together in their book “Competence at Work”^[1] there were about 800 such studies. Unfortunately, a significant part of the multi-billion dollar international competence based education and training movement which followed largely corrupted the orientation of the program back into the very framework that McClelland had tried so hard to replace. Recent work has re-emphasized the connection between competences and outstanding performance on the job. However, it must be emphasized that while generic competencies, as found in "Competence at Work"^[1] provide a useful 'rough cut' of the competencies most relevant to a common range of roles, it is also the case that many of the competencies that are linked to outstanding performance are unique to those roles. The more different a role is from those described in Competence at Work,^[1] the more different the competencies are likely to be from those listed in that book.

Nevertheless, as can be seen from Raven and Stephenson,^[2] there have been important developments in research relating to the nature, development, and assessment of high-level competencies in homes, schools, and workplaces.

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b ^c Spencer, L. M., & Spencer, S. M. (1993). Competence at Work. New York: Wiley.
^ Raven, J., & Stephenson, J. (Eds.). (2001). Competence in the Learning Society. New York: Peter Lang.