By definition competence is the ability of an individual to do a job or perform a task properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviors that enables individual employees to differ from one another in terms of evaluation, skills and development. As a term competence appeared in the U.S. in 1959 by R.W. White, and it was a concept of performance motivation. Later, in 1970, Craig Lundberg & Francis Wolek defined this concept in "Planning the Executive Development Program" and took its final form in David McClelland's "Testing for Competence Rather Than for Intelligence" (1973).
The concept of competency became popular through the work of Richard Boyatzis and especially his book, "The Competent Manager". According to Boyatzis competency is “A capacity that exists in a person that leads to behavior that meets the job demands within the parameters of the organizational environment and that, in turn, brings about desired results.” (Boyatzis, 1982). The difference in the approach of Boyatzis was that he put …show more content…
These countries are among the ten most competitive nations in the world in 2014. Despite the fact that the minimum wage rate, the taxation rate etc. are high, those Nordic countries are very competitive and this is credited to the way companies in those countries are managed.
Figure 2: World competitiveness ranking for 2014 (source: World Economic Forum)
The Scandinavian manager is considered the role model for every modern manager. A typical Scandinavian manager keeps a low profile, delegate responsibilities over the employees and focuses on professionalism. Lindholm (2004) in his report “Den skandinaviske leder” (“The Scandinavian manager”) asked managers in Denmark, Norway and Sweden to characterize themselves as managers. The results are presented in the table below.
The Scandinavian