Historical Development of the Concept of Competency

Historical Development of the Concept of Competency

  • Submitted By: adityanaik
  • Date Submitted: 01/24/2009 10:53 AM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 2341
  • Page: 10
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COMPETENCY MAPPING

Section A, Group 5

Aditya Naik (08P005)

Amit Jha (08P009)

Deepak Sarda (08P016)

Parth Joshi (08P033)

Tanmay Sharma (08P038)

Vineet Jain (08P056)

Competency Mapping

Historical development of the Concept of Competency

The Work of David McClelland. The movement was originally propelled by dissatisfaction among researchers about the value of personality traits tests in predicting job performance. For instance, Ghiselli (1966) and Mischel (1968) found that testable personality traits have little correlations with job performance, and consequently research on these variables was of questionable value.

Simultaneously, an increasing number of studies were published which showed that traditional academic aptitude and knowledge content test, as well as school grades and credentials did not predict job performance; and were often biased against women and persons from lower socioeconomic strata.

These findings led McClelland (1973) to conduct research in order to identify “competency” variables which did predict job performance and which were not biased by sex or socioeconomic factors.

The most important of these principles were:
• Use of criterion sample: compare people who are clearly successful in jobs with less successful persons to identify those characteristics with success
• Identification of operant thoughts (knowledge) and behaviours causally related to these successful outcomes. That is, competency measures should involve open-ended situations in which individual has to generate behaviour.

By using Flanagan’s critical incident method and behavioral event interview to distinguish successful and unsuccessful performers, McClelland attempted to identify characteristics which differed between the two samples, generally behavior shown by superior performers and not shown by average performers.

The essence of McClelland’s radical departure in approach to job analysis is that where traditional job...

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