Posted by Our research and implementation interests focus on employee competencies and how to use them to manage a university. Management by competencies is a popular method for managing teams and entire companies in business, but it is still little known in academia. As part of our Interdisciplinary Centre for Staff Development, we decided to change this and promote competence management as an effective method of university management.
What are competencies?
Definitions of competencies are constantly evolving, so we briefly present the views on competencies that have emerged in recent years. Competencies are discussed by management practitioners, but also by scholars working on the subject. For the sake of illustration, we can cite definitions that, due to the components present in them, their interconnectedness, multidimensionality, the way they are described or framed, have proven to be particularly relevant in the course of building a competency model for research and support staff.
The main reason for the discussion of the definition of competence is the way of capturing the qualities of employees, necessary for successful performance of professional activities (Jablonska-Woloszyn, 2004). Levy-Leboyer emphasizes (1997) that competence refers to “the integrated use of abilities, personality traits, as well as acquired knowledge and skills to bring about the successful execution of the established mission within the enterprise” (Lovy-Leboyer, 1997, p. 26). Among the definitions of competencies that accurately reflect the mission of the research cadre, highlighting the components and their interactions to achieve the goals of the processes by researchers in their journey to build scientific output, is Boyatzic’s (1982) definition.
Boyatzic’s concept refers to competence as “the potential that exists in a person, leading to the kind of behavior that contributes to satisfying the requirements of the job, within the parameters of the organization’s environment, which in turn produces the desired results” (Boyatzic, 1982). Another definition says that competencies can be defined as the knowledge, skills, behaviors, qualities and attitudes that distinguish those who achieve superior performance at work (Gick & Tarczynska, 1999).
Bearing in mind the goals and activities that research personnel undertake, it is important to emphasize and appreciate the importance of the components of the definition of competence, which speaks of “a fixed set of knowledge and know-how […] standard procedures, types of reasoning that can be implemented without new learning of them” (Lamri, 2021, p. 80). Given the goal of scientific research, which is to solve research problems, it is worth quoting the definition of competence, which says that competence is the ability to solve a problem in a given context.
As you can see, the management-by-competence approach offers great opportunities in active team management and helps improve the efficiency of a team, in this case a research team.
In the next post we will show more approaches to competencies and the reasons why they are so important in managing a research team.
Jabłońska-Wołoszyn, M. (2004). Oblicza kompetencji w teorii i praktyce. In: M. Juchnowicz (Ed.), Kapitał Ludzki a kształtowanie przedsiębiorczości (pp. 245-254), Warszawa, Polska: Poltex.
Lovy-Leboyer, C. (1997). Kierowanie kompetencjami, bilanse doświadczeń zawodowych. Warszawa, Polska: Poltex.
Boyatzis, R. (1982). The Competence Manager. New York, USA: John Wiely& Sons.
Gick, M & Tarczyńska, M. (1999). Motywowanie pracowników. Warszawa, Polska: PWE.
Lamri, J. (2021). Kompetencje XXI wieku. Warszawa, Polska: Wydawnictwo Wolters Kluwer Polska.