MSG Team's other articles

9739 Why HR Managers Must Treat the Exit Interviews as Feedback and Learning Experiences

The Importance of Exit Interviews Despite being treated as chores and unavoidable components of the organizational processes, Exit Interviews are indeed important and can serve as sources of valuable feedback and provide inputs for learning and improvement within the organizations. Exit Interviews, as the name implies are conducted when employees leave organizations and are used […]

9895 Increasing use of Contract Staff and Temp Workers in the Corporate World

Hiring Temps and Contract Staff Of late, a trend that has been noticeable in the corporate world pertains to the increasing use of contract staff and temporary workers or temps as part of the organization’s operations. The trend that started a couple of decades earlier has now accelerated into a phenomenon where nearly 25 to […]

9685 What Should Companies do to Actualize Collective Knowledge Management

The Internal Dilemma of Employees Unwilling to Share Knowledge Managing the accumulated and discrete knowledge in an organization can be tricky. For instance, organizations might have knowledge about processes and projects that are distributed across the organization and not collated and centralized in one repository. This is where an effective knowledge management that centralizes and […]

9124 Employee Behaviour Standards

Every organization has certain codes of conduct and every employee needs to follow the same in order to maintain the decorum. Employees need to be aware of the rules and regulations as well as behaviour standards and what is expected of them in the organization. Do not behave irrationally at workplace. Managers need to make […]

11562 Time Management Tips at Workplace

Time management is one of the most essential skills contributing to the success of an employee as well as organization. An employee needs to manage his/her time well to complete assignments within the stipulated time frame and deliver results on time. Employees often complain of not being able to spend quality time with family members […]

Search with tags

  • No tags available.

Competence has been long understood as a person’s ability or capacity to do a job. It was devised in the 1970s by the US Company McBer to identify the specific personal characteristics which resulted in effective and/or superior performance.

So, what exactly is the idea behind competencies ?

  1. Every job has a requirement of specific set of competencies to undertake it efficiently, and the individuals who would perform the job need to be laced with those competencies. One of the interesting and worth mentioning aspect of this term is that it focuses not on what a person can do but on what a person can learn. This forward looking approach makes it quite popular amongst training providers and recruitment experts.

  2. Competencies with their specific behavioral indicators facilitate the demonstration of appropriate skills and behaviors, it is not a set of tasks performed like a robot neither it is an underlying capacity which is never demonstrated.

  3. Competency also includes motivation and self-knowledge, a desire and willingness to demonstrate effective performance

So, with this information we can proceed to defining Competency:

  1. A set of individual performance behaviors which are observable, measurable and critical to successful individual and company performance

  2. Individual characteristics of a person which result in an effective and superior performance in a job

Competency includes the following elements:

Competency Elements

There has been a lot of debate on the aspect that whether competencies are unique to a particular job or they are generic in nature. A little example would help the understanding, does ‘Management’ require the same set of behaviors to be demonstrated across the organization, job function, location etc by the managers or they differ across organizations, cultures, functions and settings

According to the MCBer research apart from identifying 12 characteristics related to managerial effectiveness, seven were found to be threshold competencies.

It is worth to spare a few minutes understanding what a threshold competency is:

It is summarized as a quality that a person needs in order to do a job; it might be as simple as being able to speak in the native language. It is different from the competency in a manner that it does not offer any aid in distinguishing superior performance from average and poor performance.

So, every job at any level in the organization would have a threshold competency, the bare minimum required to perform the job.

To gather a better understanding of competencies, it would be interesting to have a look at the work of some of the pioneers of the field. To begin one can always resort to the exemplary work done by McBer and the competency dictionary developed by him. Some of the generic competencies that were included in the list were:

  • Achievement Orientation
  • Analytical Thinking
  • Conceptual Thinking
  • Customer Service Orientation
  • Developing Others
  • Defectiveness
  • Flexibility
  • Impact and Influence
  • Information Seeking
  • Initiative Integrity
  • Interpersonal Understanding

There are several more, but looking at the above list, one can notice that these competencies are applicable across businesses and functions and hence called generic competencies.

The above leads to an obvious conclusion that there might be specific types of competencies as well, and surely competencies are also categorized into:

Leadership Competencies: Are managerial and cognitive competencies. E.g. analysis and problem solving, managing execution, adapt and learn etc.

Functional Competencies: Are those which are required within specific functions. E.g. knowledge of products, labor laws, inventory distribution systems, local food safety and handling regulations

The development of a competence is quite a comprehensive job involving several steps. It would be interesting to have a look at the basic structure regarding the development of a competence as given by Training Enterprise and Education Directorate of the UK Employment Department

Competency Development

So, with competencies becoming an integral part of Human Resource Management, it has helped the HR practitioners to create and share the understanding of factors leading to superior performance at the workplace. For the job incumbents, it creates a better understanding of their own roles and desired performance which in turn helps them to plan their own learning and growth.

Article Written by

MSG Team

An insightful writer passionate about sharing expertise, trends, and tips, dedicated to inspiring and informing readers through engaging and thoughtful content.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

The Process of Competency Based Assessment

MSG Team

Ethical Considerations in Competency based Assessments

MSG Team

What is Competency Based Assessment – Meaning and Important Concepts

MSG Team