Expertise At Work

A Special Issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

Schmidt-Brasse, Sabine Sonnentag, Peter Herriot

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000149869
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

Employees' expertise and competence are among the important success factors of today's work organizations. This special issue focuses on expertise and excellent performance within work settings, addressing questions such as: How do excellent performers proceed when accomplishing work tasks? Which strategies do they use? Which aspects of knowledge and behaviour are crucial for excellent work performance? How can you identify, select, and train excellent performers? Expertise at Work combines empirical studies and practitioners' approaches to these challenging issues. In addition, open peer commentaries are provided by academics and practitioners from a number of European countries.

Competencies for Work Domains in Business Computer Science

Peter T. van den Berg Tilburg University, The Netherlands

In order to relate expertise in business computer science to multiple criteria, the importance of competencies, as elements of expertise, for the performance of tasks and roles were investigated. Seventy-five information technology professionals (nine women and sixty-six men) from twenty-one organizations rated the importance of thirty-four competencies for the performance of eighty-six tasks and seven roles. In accordance with previous studies, knowledge of information technology, working methodically, and analytic ability were rated as important competencies for most types of tasks, and social skills were especially important for tasks related to interaction with the environment and leadership roles. By means of cluster analysis, four work domains were discerned: technique-oriented, organization-oriented, leadership-oriented, and user-support-oriented domains. It is argued that relating competencies to work domains has theoretical and practical relevance.

More and more organizations realize that their most important competitive advantage is the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their employees. Because of the globalization of the world economy, everything can be produced nearly everywhere. The only things that are difficult to imitate or to transfer are the characteristics of the people who are important for organization's success. In this context, expertise is potentially an important concept for organizations.

As stated in the Introduction to this issue, expertise is defined in terms of "what distinguishes outstanding individuals in a domain from less outstanding individuals in that domain, as well as from people in general" (Ericsson & Smith, 1991, p. 2). This should be developed further to enhance scientific understanding and to make it more applicable to human resource management of modern organizations. Therefore, the work domain to which expertise is related should be defined more clearly. Several methods are used for identifying experts, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Expertise at Work: Research Perspectives and Practical Interventions for Ensuring Excellent Performance at the Workplace
• Planning and Allocating: Strategies for Managing Priorities in Complex Jobs
• Commentary
• Analysis and Training of Diagnostic Expertise in Complex Technical Domains
• Commentary
• Identifying High Performers: Do Peer Nominations Suffer from a Likeability Bias
• Commentary
• Competencies for Work Domains in Business Computer Science
• Commentary
• Exploring the Nature of Human Resource Developers’ Expertise
• Commentary
• Reaching Business Excellence Through Sound People Management
• Commentary
• Training Supervisors’ Assessment Skills—A Crucial Step In High Potential Selection
• Commentary
• Commentary
• Removing Limits to Growth: Implementing Knowledge Sharing Loops between Operators and Engineers
• Commentary
• Book Review
• Professional News Section
• European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Volume 7, 1998, Contents
• European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Volume 7, 1998 Author Index