Competent organizations must be principled about managing knowledge, whether leading corporate efforts, knowledge sharing, or knowledge codification activities to grow their employees and organizational capacity and improve the dynamic business capability. Those organizations that are principled understand their responsibilities. They understand the value of resources; humans are valuable assets, and employee know-how is critical to an organization's outcome. In this chapter, necessary principles for an organization to have are discussed. These principles are the start of building a single system of performance management of integration of knowledge management and competence-based approaches, which leads to practical outcomes for businesses hoping to meet their desired performance.
TopIntroduction
There is a lack of a general understanding regarding the integration of competency models and knowledge management (Steven, 2012). This chapter begins to bridge gaps in this understanding. This chapter introduces a comprehensive framework for what the competent organization does to establish a foundation for integrating competency models and knowledge management systems to form a single performance management system. Moreover, knowledge management in the chapter emphasizes organizational responsibility as individuals' competence and reflects an organization's outcome-based upon performance or effectiveness.
Conversely, the organization has a greater responsibility than employees. An organization must influence all of its employees that their work has value towards accomplishing the business goals and objectives, whether organizational competencies directly affect them or indirectly affect them because their functional contributions are auxiliary1 or indirect. These auxiliary contributions assists the business with accomplishing business needs through employees completing their function of work. These are jobs not identified to contribute to businesses overall performance outcomes in the sense of its objectives and goals. For example, an insurance company that desires are to increase sales and acquisition of new customers. The organizational competencies for the insurance company may relate to two areas that would focus on ensuring sale revenue is grown through salespersons' efforts and through the acquisition of customers who purchase the business products and services. The conditioned competencies would likely target the employees who have the most significant chances at influencing sales and revenue directly. That would be the salespeople. The organization, in turn, may be large enough to have its own ombudsman office. Ombudsman offices traditionally have nothing to do with sales but support organizations in investigating complaints and finding resolutions between employees, customers, and institutions. However, their ombudsman person vs. salesperson functions is different. Ombudsman workers work indirectly supports the organization and employees whose organizational competencies are conditioned by the organization. The ombudsman workers' efforts maintain orderly functionality for the business to operate to achieve its objectives and goals.
The propositions made in this chapter identify what a competent organization must do as its steps toward the development of a robust competency-based performance management system incorporating a knowledge management component that is suitable for individuals and employers' use. To include, but are not limited to, employee sharing of knowledge and the codification of know-how of the employee by the employee and managers, the conditioning of organizational competencies by the organization, the active creation of corporate activities by the organization and executive leaders, and the discipline to be principled in establishing a system of knowledge management that can operate within other methods of managing or within the mechanism of a competency-based framework.
A competent organization considers the creation of value-added competencies, which allows for greater predictability for achieving positive business outcomes. This chapter will further discuss the development of competencies, which are vertically and horizontally integrated and implemented as the starting point framing the eventual creation of a competency model that begins at the firm level and directly connect to the employees at the skill and activity levels cutting through organizational layers and creating direct linkages.2
Advantageously, businesses in all sectors keep pace competitively, whether a company responsive to constituents or private sector businesses responsive to stakeholders. A competency-based approach for developing people and their talents in an organization strategy, a strategic approach is vital for achieving desired business outcomes (Harper, 2018; Ogrean et al., 2009; Richards, 2008; Warsaw, 2014).
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A competent organization understands that it is responsible for the management of knowledge.
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As the manager of knowledge, a competent organization can develop a competency-based performance system with the ability it uses and controls. It sees knowledge, knowledge sharing, and knowledge management as value-added propositions.