Competency under the magnifying glass: Applications from the principle

of problematization and multi-level theory

Vincent CassarPhD(Lond)., CPsychol., CSci

“Coping in this organization means that I need to be competent at my work. Unfortunately, too many constraints exist to impede my progress and I am seriously considering of leaving!”

“I honestly believe that a high level of competency is needed to drive me forward and to ensure that I perform as effectively as possible. I often ask how clear my company is about this though”

“I consider myself very qualified in my job. However, part of the merit goes also to my department who realise that we need to complement what we are good at and this leaves an impact round here”

“I’m competent in my work but cannot understand how it will make a difference to the company’s profits”

“I hope that our style of managing will remain adequate even after the change”

Argument line

• What is competency??• What is the principle of problematization??• What is multi-level theory?• What have problematization and multi-

level theory applications to do with competency?

• What are the applied implications??

What is competency??• Boyatzis (1982): an underlying characteristic of a person

which results in effective and / or superior performance”• Jacobs (1989): “an observable skills or ability to

complete a managerial task successfully”• Woodruffe (1992): “a competency is the set of behaviour

patterns that the incumbent needs to bring to a position in order to perform its tasks and functions”

• Bartram (2002): “sets of behaviours that are instrumental in the delivery of desired results”

• Bartram, Robertsons, Callinan (2002): “sets of behaviours that are instrumental in the delivery of desired results or outcomes”

Job Competency Models

• Several exist• Typical competency models will contain

– Competency factors

– Competency dimension

– Competency indicator

Example from OPQ 32

• Leading & Deciding– Deciding and initiating action

• Place a very high emphasis on achieving difficult targets

• Has a slight tendency to go along with the group consensus

– Leading and supervising• Is unlikely to trust, and thus empower, others

A note on “Theory”• Scientists versus practitioners

– Myth: Theory is for academics; applications are for practitioners• A theory is nothing else but a rational explanation of a

phenomenon and which is derived from systematic observations and tests in different conditions

• Bacharach (1989): a statement of relations among concepts within a boundary set of assumptions and constraints. It is no more than a linguistic devise used to organize a complex empirical world…the purpose of a theoretical statement is twofold: to organize (parsimoniously) and to communicate (clearly)

• Theory = good and evidence-based practice

Problematization

• Alvesson & Sandberg (2011): an attempt to identify assumptions, evaluate them, develop alternative assumptions and test them.

• A way to progress in the organizational sciences and hence to advance in best practice

• A whole lot of assumptions have been recently challenged and re-tested

Problematization

• E.g. stability versus change• The normal way of reasoning is that both

qualities must “balance”: a company needs enough stability to maintain its position but enough change to enable its growth

• Too much stability and the organization will loose out on new opportunities; too much change and the company will loose out on learning from past experiences.

Problematization

• However, Farjoun (2010) writing in the Academy of Management Review does not think it this way!

• He views stability and change, while conceptually distinct, as no longer separate but rather interdependent and potentially compatible.

Q1: Stability

Q4: ChangeQ3: Stability enables

change

Q2: Change enables stability

Oppositional

Complementary

Problematization

Q 1: “Control reduces variation”Q 4: “Doubt stimulates discovery and

change”Q2: “Doubt and mindfulness foster security

and continuity”Q3: “Control enables design and invention”

Problematization

“By stressing stability and change as interrelated, mutually enabling and overlapping in space and time, such solutions enable organizations to retain some of the benefits of bureaucracy and anarchy without committing to all their liabilities and they foster renewal while limiting the pains of comprehensive change” (p. 219)

Multi-level theory• Klein & Kozlowski (2000)• Micro (psychological perspective) versus macro

approaches (sociological perspectives)• “The macro perspective neglects the means by

which individual behaviours, perceptions, affect and interactions give rise to higher-level phenomena; In contrast, the micro perspective has been guilty of neglecting contextual factors that can significantly constrain the effects of individual differences that lead to collective responses” (p. 7)

• Organizations as socio-technical systems

Xo

Yi

YgXg

Yo

Xi

Multi-level phenomena• E.g. Turnover• Allen, Bryant, & Vardaman (2010) in the

Academy of Management Perspectives• Misconceptions:

– People quit because of pay– People quit because they are dissatisfied with their

jobs– There is little managers can do to directly influence

turnover decisions– A simple one-size-fits-all retention strategy is most

effective

Multi-level phenomena• Meta-analytical relationships with turnover

– ON-Boarding• Weighted application blanks .31• Socialization tactics -.14• Realistic job previews -.06

– Job characteristics• Role clarity -.24• Role conflict .22• Promotion opportunities -.16• Job scope -.14• Role overload .12• Routinization .11• Pay -.11• Pay satisfaction -.08

– Leadership and relationships• Leader-member exchanges -.25• Work-group cohesion -.13

Multi-level phenomena

• Stress is often studied and assumed to be a micro-level phenomenon and most studies investigate it at the individual level.

• However, increasing number of researchers are appreciating its multi-level realities

• E.g. van VELDHOVEN et al (2002) studied the relationship between psychosocial job conditions and job-related stress

This cross-sectional questionnaire study presents a multi-level analysis on 2565 workers in 188 departments in 36 organizations in the Netherlands. A three-level model is used in which individual workers are nested within departments, which in turn are nested within organizations. Research questions concern (1) the amount and distribution of variance in job-related stress explained for the three levels in the study (individuals, departments, organizations), and (2) the specificity of relationships between psychosocial job demands and job-related stress in the three-level model. Well-being showed slightly more raw variance to be explained at supra-individual levels than strain. The full regression model explained about 35% of the total variance in both work-related strain and well-being. Psychosocial job conditions did not exceed the expected amount of 10 to 15% contribution to this explained variance. These results do not differ from comparable studies that do not use multi-level analysis. The variance distribution in the full model, however, showed unexplained variance to be located at the individual level for both strain and well-being, and at the departmental level only for well-being. This last finding shows a direction for possible improvement of work stress models. Specificity of relationships was also shown: psychological job demands were more strongly related to strain, whereas job content variables (i.e. job variety, job control ) were more strongly related to well-being. Results also suggested that social support was more strongly associated with well-being than with strain. Well-being appeared to have a more widely varying range of predictors than strain.

Back to Competency-Revisiting definitions

• Boyatzis (1982): an underlying characteristic of a person which results in effective and / or superior performance”

• Jacobs (1989): “an observable skills or ability to complete a managerial task successfully”

• Woodruffe (1992): “a competency is the set of behaviour patterns that the incumbent needs to bring to a position in order to perform its tasks and functions”

• Bartram (2002): “sets of behaviours that are instrumental in the delivery of desired results”

• Bartram, Robertsons, Callinan (2002): “sets of behaviours that are instrumental in the delivery of desired results or outcomes”

Prediction…

• People who lack competencies relevant to the job are unfit in their employment (job)

• People who are unfit in their job, are likely to be less fit within the larger organization but the “misfit” is likely to be much less as a consequence of the indirect impact

• Applying problematization principles and multi-level explanations, is this the case??

JS Comm TO Perf

P-J .56 .47 -.46 .20

P-G .31 .19 -.22 .19

P-S(L) .44 .09 .09 (Ten)

.07

P-O .44 .51 -.35 .07

Kristoff-Brown, A.L.Zimmerman, R.D.& Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individual’s fit at work: A meta-analysis of PJ, PO, PG and PS fit. Personnel Psychology, 58, 281-342.

Competency – A micro level construct?

• Kozlowski & Klein use the term “emergence” and describe it as: “a phenomenon is emergent when it originates in the cognition, affect, behaviours, or other characteristics of individuals, is amplified by their interactions, and manifests as a higher-level collective phenomenon” (p. 55)

A multi-level Model of Human Capital Resource Emergence

• Ployhart & Moliterno (2011) in the Academy of Management Review:– “Yet despite the prominence of the human capital

construct in both micro level and macro level scholarship, and despite great theoretical and methodological sophistication within both disciplines and levels, there is little understanding about how human capital manifests across organizational levels. If one defines “multilevel” as theory that speaks to the connection that integrates two or more levels, then there is no fully articulated multilevel theory describing how the human capital resource is created and transformed across organizational levels” (p. 127).

Potential multi-level fallacies

• Cross-level fallacy: assuming individual level findings generalize to the firm level

• Contextual fallacy: ignoring macro findings showing that the value of human phenomena is context specific

• Misspecification fallacy: neglecting to consider how individual level variables emerge to form a new unit-level phenomenon

Unit-level human capital resource

Context generic Context specific

Individual difference KSAO characteristics

Cognitive vs non-cognitive

Context generic vs context specific

Emergence enabling process

Simple Complexity of task environment

Complex

Emergence enabling states

Behavioral, cognitive, affective

Unit-level

outcomesSustainable

competitive

advantage

Propositions• Prop 1: The origins of human capital resources exist in the full range

of KSAOs of employees within the unit• Prop 2: The content of human capital resources may be cognitive or

non-cognitive and context generic or non-context generic• Prop 3: Human capital resources and individual KSAOs are partially

isomorphic because they have different antecedents• Prop 4: Unit task complexity influences the types of behavioral

emergence enabling states manifested in the unit. As task complexity increases, human capital resources are more likely to emerge if the unit manifests appropriate behavioral states

• Prop 5: Unit task complexity influences the types of cognitive emergence enabling states manifested in the unit. As task complexity increase, human capital resources are more likely to emerge if the unit manifests a shared climate and learning and memory structures appropriate for the task (either shared or distributed)

Propositions• Prop 6: Unit task complexity influences the types of affective

emergence enabling states manifested in the unit. As task complexity increases, human capital resources are more likely to emerge if the unit manifests greater cohesion, trust, and more positive mood.

• Prop 7: As task complexity increases, the interrelationships among behavioral, cognitive, and affective emergence enabling states become stronger.

• Prop 8: Behavioral emergence enabling states influence the manifestation of cognitive and affective emergence enabling states.

• Prop 9: Context-generic KSAOs become context specific human capital resources as a function of a unit-specific emergence enabling process.

• Prop 10: Context-generic human capital resources lead to the development of context-specific human capital resources

Implications using problematization and multi-level reasoning

• Are current ways of selecting and measuring people at work adequate enough?• Should we assume that individual level competencies will impact directly firm

performance? • How does this impact factor translate into unit-performance and firm performance?• What impact factor does every individual in the organization have on his/her unit task

performance?• Should we assume to measure fit more than misfit? If no, what measures do we have

to measure misfit? • How do competencies complement each other / interrelate in a group?• When are specific competencies desirable and when are they a liability? • Should we construct competency models or understand how competency models

emerge from the unit/ firm structure, climate and strategy?• How is recruitment, selection and performance management systems impacted by a

multi-level perspective of competency models• In view that competency sets evolve, emerge a a function of the context etc, how

should we structure HR policies and employment law regulation? Should we keep assuming that these are separate worlds?

• How often should we re-assess corporate competency sets?

The bottom-line• Practitioners should avoid making assumptions but

should approach organizational phenomena with a critical eye and with an open mind– Jonah Lehrer (The New Yorker Magazine December 2010)

stated: “Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies” (in the article The Truth Wears Off)

• Practitioners should consider organizational phenomena as part of a wider system and that components can have ripple effects on other macro level dynamics.

• Hence, competency development, training and evaluation should be embraced within the wider organizational realties!

Thank you