Managing Competences

Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues

Benoit Grasser, Sabrina Loufrani-Fedida, Ewan Oiry, Benoit Grasser, Sabrina Loufrani-Fedida, Ewan Oiry

• Éditeur: Taylor & Francis
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000203646
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Human Resource Management

Managing Competences: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues draws together theoretical and practical research in competence management. It provides a wealth of knowledge concerning emerging and contemporary issues, such as the multilevel approach to competence, the development of collective competence, the strategies of competence management, and the tools for managing competences as well as the organizational dynamics of competences. Moreover, the book provides a critical approach to research and practitioners' continued engagement in competence management research and practice.

Research in competence management has more recently entered an era more open to doubt and questioning: Is there a solid theoretical foundation that supports the concept of competence? What is the contribution of research on employees' competences to human resources management in particular, and more generally to management? Is there not a risk of diluting the concept of competence by considering it at the individual, collective, organizational, and strategic levels? Today, is it still possible to manage competences in a world where the boundaries of the organizations are more and more porous? These questions, and many others, probably explain why a field that seemed well-identified and well-structured yesterday, has given way today to new, highly diverse analyses of competences by researchers and practitioners.

This contributed volume seeks to answer these pressing issues and is a collective means for responding to them. The book brings together multiple streams of research in the field about emerging and contemporary issues, including multidimensional HRM systems, the rise of forms of collaborative management, the intensification of the use of digital and robotic technologies, the rise of the regime of remote and networked operations, the increasing heterogeneity of the status of workers, and changes in regulations concerning work and its recognition.

Chapter 1

The Conceptual Travel of Competence: Building a Bridge between North American and European Approaches

Benoît Grasser, Sabrina Loufrani-Fedida, and Ewan Oiry

Contents

1.1 Introduction

1.2 The Focus on Individual and Strategic Levels of Competence in the United States

1.2.1 Competence at the Individual Level

1.2.2 Competence at the Strategic Level

1.3 From the United States to Europe: A Contextualized Perspective on the Individual and Strategic Levels of Competence and the Emergence of Collective and Inter-Organizational Competences

1.3.1 A Contextualized Perspective on Individual and Strategic Competences

1.3.1.1 A Contextualized Perspective on Individual Competence

1.3.1.2 A Contextualized Perspective on Strategic Competence

1.3.2 Emergence of Collective and Inter-Organizational Levels of Competence

1.3.2.1 The New Concept of Collective Competence

1.3.2.2 The New Concept of Competence at the Inter-Organizational Level

1.4 Conclusion

References

1.1 Introduction

Due to its cross-cutting nature, the concept of competence has been studied extensively in management sciences since the mid-1990s (Sanchez et al., 1996; Nordhaug, 1998; Drejer, 2001; Delamare Le Deist and Winterton, 2005; Capaldo et al., 2006; Håland and Tjora, 2006; Sandberg and Pinnington, 2009; Lindberg and Rantatalo, 2015). Many contributions were produced both in terms of competence management and in terms of the design of human resource (HR) tools and the management of organizations, as well as more societal contributions about the recognition of work or even about the limits of this kind of management. More recently, however, research in competence management has entered an era more open to doubt, reflecting on a series of questions: Is there actually a solid theoretical foundation that supports the concept of competence? What is the contribution of research on employee’s competences to human resource management (HRM) specifically and, more generally, to management? Is there not a risk of diluting the concept of competence by considering it at the individual, collective, organizational, and strategic levels? Can we and should we still talk about competence when the notions of talent and human capital are more and more present in the literature? Is it still possible today to manage competences in a world where the boundaries of organizations are more and more porous? Should we even continue to manage competences when the progression of knowledge and innovations quickly make obsolete any attempt at formalization? These questions, and many others, probably explain why, in a field which seemed well identified and well structured yesterday, analyses of competences today are very diffused, both for researchers and for practitioners.

These observations, however, suggest a kind of paradox, as the questions surrounding competences are experiencing a sharp rise in attention, as evidenced by the growing dissatisfaction of companies with the traditional tools of competence management or the many questions raised by international institutions concerning labor competences for the future (OECD, 2017; WTO & ILO, 2017), in relation to employability (Loufrani-Fedida et al., 2015; France Stratégie, 2017) and innovation (Toner, 2011).

Concerning specifically the concept of competence, it has often been criticized for being fuzzy and catchall (Chen and Chang, 2010; Delamare Le Deist and Winterton, 2005). In particular, for Delamare Le Deist and Winterton (2005), there is considerable confusion surrounding the term “competence,” including a confusion of concept with neighboring but distinct concepts and incoherent uses. Some authors use the singular (“competence” and “competency”) and the plural (“competences” and “competencies”). Elkin (1990) associates the term “competences” with the micro level of competence (job competences and individual competences, which are centered on the individual) and the term “competencies” at a macro level (managerial/management competencies for the future). Others use “competency” when they refer to professional competence, while others still treat the terms as all being synonymous. Burgoyne (1988), for example, distinguished “being competent” (meeting the job demands) from “having competencies” (having the attributes necessary to produce a performance with competence). In this Handbook, we have chosen to use the terms of competence in the singular and competences in the plural, to be coherent with our analysis of the travels of competence as a concept from the United States to Europe and back again to the United States (“competence” being the term most used in the United States).

In our opinion, two main reasons explain this diversity in the concept of competence. Firstly, the concept is multidisciplinary. Indeed, it is increasingly successful in fields as diverse as linguistics, work psychology, ergonomics, education, and training sciences, as well as sociology (all disciplines that have integrated competence as an essential dimension of humans at work). But it is also used in the fields of economics (mainly through the evolutionary theory of the firm or, more recently, the territorial economy) and management (in which competence finds a particular resonance in the field of research in strategy). Secondly, competence may be seen at different levels of analysis: individual, collective, organizational, and inter-organizational. Indeed, the concept of competence has found its place “naturally” within the company context, first by positioning itself in three levels of analysis: the individual (with individual competences), the organization (with organizational competences, some of which are considered as strategic), and then the team (with collective competences). But with the opening of organizational boundaries and strategies of vertical disintegration (or outsourcing of activities), a fourth level has emerged, namely that of inter-organizational competence (some of which is territorial). Accordingly, the researcher in management sciences is often asked whether he/she should opt for an observation at the individual or collective level, or whether he/she would prefer another unit of analysis such as the organization as a whole, inside or outside its borders.

This chapter is organized into two parts. Part I identifies how American scientific research has produced two different streams of literature in management sciences. Following the seminal work of McClelland (1973), the first perspective considers competence as a personality trait that explains the high performance of certain employees. The second perspective is based on a conceptual framework that comes from strategic management, with the resource-based view (RBV) (Wernerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1991) which has deeply influenced the research in the field of strategic HRM (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2009). Part II shows how in Europe different literatures from Great Britain, Scandinavia, Austria/Germany, and France (often independent of each other) have developed a perspective on competence that is quite different and which pays much more attention to the context in which competence is built. We believe that this perspective has allowed us to enrich the American literature on competence and to propose new concepts such as collective competence and inter-organizational competence.

1.2 The Focus on Individual and Strategic Levels of Competence in the United States

1.2.1 Competence at the Individual Level

In American scientific research, McClelland’s article (1973) is rightly considered to be a founding contribution in understanding the concept of competence in human resource management (HRM). However, he was not the first to address the issue. White’s (1963) work on the “meaning of competence” contains many of the elements that McClelland (1976, 1998) later mobilized. McClelland’s article (1973) has an unusual form in scientific journals, and has been particularly controversial. It is written in the form of a sharp criticism of the intelligence tests that he proposes to replace with competence assessments. It ends with lengthy proposals for managers, HR managers, and even executives on what they should do to go beyond the limits of intelligence testing in their recruitment practices, by adopting competences assessment tools. In this article, McClelland has a dual, scientific and social, agenda. At the scientific level, the article intends to found the concept of competence theoretically. At the social level, it intends to fight against racial discrimination. In his article, McClelland (1973) points out that the so-called intelligence tests actually measure mainly the knowledge that is acquired at school. Since access to schooling is very strongly influenced by social origins and, particularly in the United States, racial origins, he proposes replacing the tests of intelligence/knowledge acquired at school by tests of competence, competence being for him innate and therefore not socially determined. This article immediately positioned competence as a subject of debate, involving researchers, practitioners, and social actors, which has been the case ever since (Boyatzis, 1982; Spencer and Spencer, 1993).

Despite its unusual form, McClelland’s article founded a whole stream of research on competence. This involved considering competence only at the individual level, and the field of research on individual competences has been the subject of much debate. For example, McClelland positioned competence as the characteristic that distinguishes the best performers from other employees. Others criticized this position by considering that all employees can be competent, even if these skills can be of very different kinds. This debate is also reflected in the literature on the concept of talent: Gallardo-Gallardo et al. (2013) discuss whether talent characterizes best performers (exclusive vision) or whether all employees of an organization can be considered as the repository of a form of talent (inclusive vision).

Another debate on the innate or learned origin of competence has also strongly structured this current of research. On this point too, McClelland adopted a clear position. Competence is similar to personality traits, and so it is pretty innate. On the other hand, other authors rather supported the idea that competences are built and acquired: through training and on-the-job training, or by the observation of other employees. For example, Bandura (1986) talks about vicarious learning, i.e., learning that takes place by observing co-workers. Spencer and Spencer’s (1993) proposal to distinguish the “hard and soft” dimensions of competence has helped to build a certain consensus in this debate: the “soft” dimensions of competence are similar to personality traits and are therefore rather innate, while the “hard” dimensions of competence are more constructed and can therefore be the subject of learning. The image of the iceberg is now widely used to reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of resources that, when combined, make up competence. In this metaphor, the hidden part of the iceberg corresponds to soft skills (motives, traits, self-image, and social role) while the emerged part corresponds to hard skills (skills and knowledge).

This line of research, which positions competence only at the in...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors
• List of Contributors
• Introduction to the Handbook
• 1 The Conceptual Travel of Competence: Building a Bridge between North American and European Approaches
• 2 Competence Management Tools: A Paradoxical Longevity
• 3 Competence as a Revelator of Blind Spots in the Talent Management Literature
• 4 Developing Soft Skills through Social Learning: A Model Implemented at a Canadian Business School
• 5 Competences-Based Assessment of Employability: How to Deconstruct a Variety of Interpretations and Articulations?
• 6 Together, Do We Go Further? The Dynamic between Rules and Collective Competence
• 7 The Development of Collective Competence within an Inter-Organizational Group: A Proximity Perspective
• 8 How to Organize Territorial Competence Management?
• 9 Market for Competences: When Attractiveness Drives Competitiveness
• 10 From the Transmission of Skills to the Concept of Competence: Lessons from a Case Study in the Aerospace Industry
• 11 Competences and Work Contexts: Learning from the French Ergonomic Approach
• 12 Situated Individual Competences, Practices, and Institutional Logics: Identification of Blended Practices among Front-Line Employees in a Railway Company
• 13 Social Innovation Processes and Collective Entrepreneurial Competence: The Case of the Jardins de Cocagne (Cocagne Gardens)
• 14 Contextualizing Intercultural Competences: Genesis, Concepts, and Research Agenda
• Conclusion to the Handbook: Toward a Multilevel and Contextualized Approach of Managing Competences
• Index