By Tom Stone, SIOP Blogger
Hello, I’m Tom Stone, Professor of Management at Oklahoma State University.
Competency modeling (CM) has fascinated me for several years although my initial reactions were skeptical. Indeed, when I first learned about CM, I thought it might be the latest example of Marv Dunnette’s classic article, “Fads, fashions and folderol in psychology”, American Psychologist, 1966. However, CM appears to be well beyond a fad and may be challenging traditional job analysis (TJA) as the most preferred method of work analysis.
If CM is still a fuzzy concept for you, as it was for me for some time, I’d recommend two articles and one chapter. 
In my opinion, one of the best recent articles summarizing the current state of CM is the Campion, et al. 2011 article in Personnel Psychology, “Doing competencies well: Best practices in competency modeling.” Second, Juan Sanchez and Ed Levine’s “What is (or should be) the difference between competency modeling and traditional job analysis?” Human Resource Management Review, 2009 offers insightful ideas for integration of CM and TJA. Jeffrey Schippmann’s 2010 chapter, “Competencies, job analysis, and the next generation of modeling” in J. Scott & D. Reynolds (Eds.), Handbook of Workplace Assessment provides an excellent history of CM as well as thoughts on the future of CM.
My purpose is not to inform you about CM, but rather to share a couple of issues influencing my current interests and research. The first is a rather basic one, namely, just how prevalent is CM? To what degree is it supplanting TJA? My second question is how effective are competency models? One unpublished survey found over one third of CM adopters were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their CM experiences. There is very little published research within the past decade addressing these questions. I have a short survey on Survey Monkey, https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DPY8FNN and a grant proposal for another survey and have conducted some interviews seeking answers to these questions and others. I have many other questions related to CM, but this may be a good start.
Finally, I am very interested in your experiences and questions regarding competency modeling. Please feel free to contact me at tom.stone@okstate.edu. Thanks and hope your holidays are warm and joyous.
-Tom
My purpose is not to inform you about CM, but rather to share a couple of issues influencing my current interests and research. The first is a rather basic one, namely, just how prevalent is CM? To what degree is it supplanting TJA? My second question is how effective are competency models? One unpublished survey found over one third of CM adopters were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their CM experiences. There is very little published research within the past decade addressing these questions. I have a short survey on Survey Monkey, https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DPY8FNN and a grant proposal for another survey and have conducted some interviews seeking answers to these questions and others. I have many other questions related to CM, but this may be a good start.
Finally, I am very interested in your experiences and questions regarding competency modeling. Please feel free to contact me at tom.stone@okstate.edu. Thanks and hope your holidays are warm and joyous.
-Tom
In my experience, most organizations are using competencies as an organization-wide framework rather than job-specific. However, I think often they allow managers/employees to determine which organizational competencies align with their job most closely for development and evaluation purposes.
Posted by: Nicole Sud | March 12, 2013 at 03:28 PM