Jörgen sandberg. Stockholm School of Economics. A classic managerial problem, страница 15

Moreover, the results also challenge the traditional view of competence development as a stepby-step process from novice to expert status (e.g., Benner, 1984; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). Clearly, when a worker has no work experience, he or she is a novice. After some time, the novice acquires the status of advanced beginner, and other stages follow later. However, my findings suggest that a move from one level to another in the novice-toexpert hierarchy does not necessarily mean a shift from one conception to another. An optimizer expressing the conception, optimizing separate qualities, may progress from novice to advanced beginner without changing the way he conceives the work. Hence, a change in conceptions of work appears to be more fundamental to developing competence than the linear progression from novice to expert that has traditionally been proposed. In conclusion, the proposed understanding of competence presented here provides an alternative answer to the question of why some perform better than others. The variation in performance is not first and foremost related to a specific set of attributes possessed by those who are regarded as the most competent. Instead, why some people perform particular work better than others is related to variation in ways of conceiving of that work.

Implications for Competence Development

The understanding that the conception of work constitutes competence has major implications for managing competence development in organizations. The most basic implication concerns how to identify and describe competence as a starting point for training and development activities. The findings of the present study suggest a major shift in how managers might identify and describe competence at work, a shift from attributes to workers' conceptions of their work. Taking workers' conceptions as one's point of departure makes it possible to more fully describe how attributes are formed, devéloped, and organized into distinctive structures of competence in work performance. Hence, using such descriptions as a starting point may increase managers' chances of achieving the de sired development of the competence in question.

Moreover, seeing changing conceptions of work as the most fundamental form of developing competence has major implications for designing and conducting training and development activities. In the rationalistic approaches, the primary aim of competence development is to transfer important attributes, such as knowledge and skills, to workers who do not possess them (Dall'Alba & Sandberg, 1996). Depending on the attributes, various activities such as classroom teaching, on-the-job training, and job rotation are used. However, if managers take attributes as the point of departure, they are unable to encourage development of a particular conception of work. Moreover, transferring attributes may encourage less desirable conceptions of work, through simply reinforcing those ways of conceiving of the work in question.

The present findings suggest some guiding principles that may facilitate the development of competence through changing conceptions of work. The most fundamental guiding principle is to take workers' conceptions of their work as the point of departure. Doing this does not mean that development activities such as classroom teaching, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and job rotation should be abandoned, but rather, that they need to be designed and conducted in a way that actively promotes changes in workers' conceptions of their work. For instance, to enable an optimizer whose conception is optimizing interacting qualities to achieve the conception of optimizing from the customers' perspective, the basis of development activities should be the optimizers' present conception. If he does not reflect on his present way of conceiving the work, such an optimizer will be unlikely to achieve the targeted, more comprehensive conception. If, instead, the targeted conception is the point of departure, the only development likely to take place is a transformation of attributes of the targeted way into the present way of conceiving the work. The worker would then continue to accomplish optimization in much the same way as he had done previously.