Jörgen sandberg. Stockholm School of Economics. A classic managerial problem, страница 2

Current Rationalistic Approaches to Competence

Today, the dominant approaches used within management to identify competence do not consist of time and motion studies but of job analysis (Armstrong, 1991; Cascio, 1995; Ferris, Rowland, & Buckley, 1990; Gael, 1988). However, they are essentially based on the scientific principles of the rationalistic research tradition. Three main approaches can be distinguished: the worker-oriented, the work-oriented, and the multimethod-oriented (Sandberg, 1994; Veres, Locklear, & Sims, 1990).

Within the worker-oriented approaches, competence is primarily seen as constituted by attributes possessed by workers, typically represented as knowledge, skills, abilities (KSAs) and personal traits required for effective work performance (Veres et al., 1990: 87). For example, a commonly used worker-oriented approach is the job element method (Veres et al., 1990). The relevant attributes are captured through use of a group of job incumbents and supervisors. The attributes identified are organized into predefined categories, such as KSAs. The attributes are then rated to allow quantitative measurement of the correlation between success in accomplishing the work and possession of the designated attributes.

More recently, researchers have used the term competencies to further stress the importance of attending to worker attributes that are strictly workrelated (Armstrong, 1991; Boyatzis, 1982; Kolb, 1984; McClelland, 1973; Morgan, 1988; Nordhaug,

1993; Woodruffe, 1990). For instance, Boyatzis (1982) described a job competency as "an underlying characteristic of a person in that it may be a motive, trait, skill, aspect of one's self-image or social role, or a body of knowledge he or she uses" (1982: 21; emphasis in original). Furthermore, Boyatzis argued that "because job competencies are underlying characteristics, they can be said to be generic" (1982: 21; emphasis added). The generic, context-independent nature of job competencies means that they can appear in many different work activities. For example, drawing on Boyatzis's approach, Spencer and Spencer (1993) investigated which competencies superior performers were using in more than 200 different jobs. Their findings show that superior performance at work is usually a result of specific sets of competencies combined in a particular way. However, the worker-oriented approaches have been criticized for producing descriptions of competence that are too general and abstract. For instance, Jacobs (1989) questioned Boyatzis's (1982) generic model of competence in management, which has been widely applied in Britain and the United States. In a study of more than 500 organizations in the United Kingdom that have used Boyatzis's method, Jacobs found that different managerial jobs required different competencies. From those findings, he concluded that the use of the Boyatzis method tended to produce descriptions of competence that are too generic and abstract and therefore of limited value as a basis for competence development.

In the work-oriented approaches, competence is also regarded as a specific set of attributes. However, although advocates of the worker-oriented approaches take the worker as the point of departure, advocates of the work-oriented approaches take the work as the point of departure (Fine, 1988; Flanagan, 1954). More specifically, they first identify activities that are central for accomplishing specific work and then transform those activities into personal attributes. By doing so, they are able to generate more concrete and detailed descriptions of what constitutes competence and, thus, largely overcome the problem of generating descriptions of competence that are too general. One basic criticism of the work-oriented approaches is that a list of work activities does not sufficiently indicate the attributes required to accomplish those activities efficiently (Raven, 1994).