ABSTRACT
Psychologists tend to think about individuals in term of ability, motives and traits. Differential psychology is supported by the twin pillars of those interested in power and preference tests (see Chapter 1). Human resource specialists, on the other hand, talk about individual differences in terms of capability, competency, experience, know-how, potential and proficiency. Most organisations now have competency frameworks that are used to help human resource specialists make decisions about appraisal, recruitment, selection and training. They often spend years trying to decide on a definitive and parsimonious list of competencies that apply to their specific organisation. Though these are often described in great detail, it is unclear how the individual difference competencies originate, how trainable/malleable they are, and whether they change over time. Organisations spend a great deal of effort deciding on their “unique” competencies though the list from one organisation looks very much like that from another. Indeed, trait theorists might argue that these lists are intuitive taxonomies in modern business language that represent the Big Five personality factors lexically. On the other hand, many claim that well-designed, behaviourally anchored competencies relating to certain families of jobs provide very useful data for practitioners trying to both understand and select for certain jobs.
