Hi Members,

Somebody asked this query a week ago. It seems to have plopped. Here's how I see it:

KSAs are akin to competencies. The competency "iceberg", from the deepest level up, comprises of motives --> Traits --> Self Concept -- > Knowledge --> Skills.

Attitude towards work ("a consistent way of thinking about it") could be another (which is fuzzier?) way to look at those first three levels.

However, there does not seem to be a neat way to break competencies down along the lines of K,S and A. I have seen KSA lists at one organization. The process of working them out seemed rather unscientific - HR, the incumbent and the incumbent's superior put in their opinions, and that's it. I'm not aware of anyone who has tried any other approach.

In Competency Modelling, you avoid such splitting up into K and S. You look at competencies, so to speak, from the outside. What it looks like when it's present. And, depending on how well the competency is developed along different dimensions, you have the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) Scales, which are so vivid (unlike when things are split up as K and S, not to speak of the A's, which are far worse).

Also, the process of arriving at the model has been made quite rigorous by McClelland, Boyatzis, the Spencers and the rest at the Case Western Reserve (btw, Goleman, is close to this set. I believe he too has done a damn good job of behaviour description in his niche). The Behavioural Event Interview (and the process of ensuring that those events are interpreted the same way by all the researchers), and all the other methods that are used to cull out the competencies required at a given position, make the process much less prone to biases.

Best of all, while working out the model for a given position / function, you have available competency dictionaries, published data from lots of competency studies on similar positions done worldwide. So, you get to compare notes at a global level.

What does all this mean to an organization which has been using ratings on KSAs? Well, some (for instance, Elliot Jacques) believe that even the competency theory isn't robust. So, good old "common sense" is tops (yet again!). If you believe that the KSA system is serving your organization well and is not leading to problems such as:

1. inaccurate profiling
2. stressing on the wrong K's and S's then I don't see why one must undertake significant studies to get competency models in place.

The downside of rigour is expense - of time and money. So, I believe that even when an organization goes in for competency models, it makes no sense to go about profiling the competencies for every position in the organization. I believe that people at levels 1, 2 and 3 (with the first level being defined as those who report to the CEO, the second as those who report to the first level, and so on) should be mapped. For the rest, a progressively less rigorous process can be adopted (say, just expert panels, with may be just a few behavioural event interviews to check that the panels are not going haywire).

However, I believe that the take away from the competency theory that is applicable to every organization is that it is imperative to conduct backyard research periodically to validate the hypotheses on which it runs its business: You believe that good salespeople need to have skills A, B, C, D and E. What if I study the ten most successful (whatever we agree that word to mean) salesmen in recent years and find that they are low on C and high on F?

Without such studies, such dangers will never even come to light, and then, some time in the future, you will be left wondering what happened.

Hope these thoughts were helpful.

Warm wishes,

Dipankar