Jörgen sandberg. Stockholm School of Economics. A classic managerial problem, страница 3

Proponents of the multimethod-oriented approaches also stipulate that competence is constituted by a specific set of attributes. What distinguishes the multimethod approaches from the others is their more comprehensive approach to competence. More specifically, their advocates attempt to avoid the criticisms raised against the worker- and work-oriented approaches by drawing on both of those approaches. For example, Veres and colleagues (1990) adopted a multimethodoriented approach to identify competence in the work of police lieutenants. Their description consisted of 46 worker attributes expressed in the form ofKSAs that corresponded to 23 police activities. The work activities and the attributes were then quanti- fied in percentage terms relating to police work.

To sum up, although the rationalistic approaches differ in the ways they identify competence, they provide similar theories of competence at work: they all regard competence as an attribute-based phenomenon. More specifically, within the ratio- nalistic approaches, human competence is described as constituted by a specific set of attributes that workers use to accomplish their work. Hence, those who perform their particular work more competently than others are regarded as possessing a superior set of attributes. Furthermore, attributes are primarily seen as context-independent. That is, a specific attribute, such as communication skills, is regarded as having a fixed meaning in itself; it is viewed as independent of context and thus as able to be adopted in a range of work activities.

A Critical Evaluation of the Rationalistic

Approaches to Competence

Although the rationalistic approaches have continued to contribute to understanding of competence, their view of competence as a set of attributes has been criticized as problematic for identifying and describing competence at work. According to Attewell (1990), Norris (1991), and Sandberg (1991, 1994), the rationalistic "operationalizations" of attributes into quantitative measures often result in abstract and overly narrow and simplified descriptions that may not adequately represent the complexity of competence in work performance. Yukl (1994) came to a similar conclusion. He found that the abstract nature of the categories of competence used in most leadership studies tended to limit their utility. Moreover, the use of KSAs and other general models of competence within the rationalistic approaches tends to predefine what constitutes competence. As I argued in earlier work (Sandberg, 1994), such predefinitions of competence may confirm a researcher's own model of competence, rather than capture workers' competence. The strongest concern, however, is that the descriptions of competence produced by the rationalistic approaches are indirect. That is, the sets of KSAs or competencies do not illuminate what constitutes competence in accomplishing work. Rather, an identified set of attributes specifies central prerequisites for performing particular work competently. But such descriptions demonstrate neither whether the workers use these attributes, nor how they use them in accomplishing their work. For example, two workers may be identified as possessing identical attributes but may accomplish work differently, depending upon which attributes they use and how they use them.

Why direct descriptions of human competence are not forthcoming is not immediately apparent in the rationalistic theories ana methods themselves. Instead, these reasons emerge when one examines assumptions underlying these theories at the metatheoretical level, ontological and epistemological assumptions in particular. In a general sense, the rationalistic researchers invoke a dualistic ontology, assuming that person and world are distinct entities, and an objectivistic epistemology, assuming the existence of an objective reality independent of and beyond the human mind (Bernstein, 1983; Husserl, 1970/1936; Rorty, 1979; Schön, 1983; Searle, 1992; Shotter, 1992; Winograd & Flores, 1986). The dualistic ontology underlies division of the phenomenon of competence into two separate entities, namely, worker and work. The objectivistic epistemology implies objective, knowable work that is beyond workers and leads to descriptions of work activities that are independent of the workers who accomplish them. Taking this objective, dualistic perspective, advocates of rationalistic approaches identify and describe human competence indirectly, viewing it as consisting of two independent entities—prerequisite worker attributes and work activities.