WORKPLACE CONTEXT AND ITS EFFECT ON INDIVIDUAL COMPETENCIES AND PERFORMANCE 

IN A WORK (PROJECT) TEAM

Chief Supervisor: Prof. C.F. Cheung (ISE)Co-supervisor: Prof. Eric Tsui (ISE)

Mikhail ROZHKOV

Hong Kong, 2014

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PURPOSE

Highly competent employees produce the best results. But how are competencies most effectively developed and supported?

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Background

• Many things impact employees’ competencies – upbringing, education, past experiences, etc. But, once a person is on a job, what are the most effective ways to improve competencies?

• This study is designed to determine how, in your company, daily behaviors are impacted by: organizational culture, team climate and manager skills. – Maybe manager assignment is the most important way to strengthen

competencies. Or, maybe belonging to a strong team is the best way. – What is the relative impact of culture, climate and manager skills to the daily

behaviors (competencies) of employees?

• The purpose of this study is to find out these questions.• The results will help your company understand how to best increase

competencies of their staff. For example, if the answer is being on a high performing team, then how can teams operate to accelerate individual competency development?

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What is “competency”?

The observed behavior

Motivation

Knowledge and skills

Personal traits

Competency

*adopted from presentation of Gregory Finkelshtein, ECOPSY Consulting

Figure 2 – What is competency?

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What competencies are studied

We have focused on seven competencies that impact success in an innovations, R&D and product development environment:

1. Achievement Orientation (ACH)2. Concern of Order and Quality (CO)3. Initiative (INT)4. Information Seeking (INFO)5. Innovation Orientation (INNOV)6. Team Working (TW)7. Team Leadership (TL)

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Pilot Study results: Best performance employees have higher scores for key competencies

Team Climate

Organizational Culture

Manager Skills (Practices)

Employee Performance

Employee Competencies

Research model

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How to participate?

1. Define teams you want to analyze competencies/improve performance.  (Team size: at least 4 employees and a manager)

2. Prepare a name list of members and manager for each team. (It will be used to prepare questionnaires)

3. Manager and team members of each team will answer 3 questionnaires in 3 phase process. (Questionnaires are in electronic form. Each includes 50-60 questions. Duration of each phase is 1 week.)

4. Feedback and description of overall results  will be prepared. (In 4 weeks after collecting data)

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Value for your company

You will receive a description of overall results and for your company. These include:1. Which of the three variables is most impactful on competencies?2. How does each variable impact competencies? (For example, for

the manager variable, what do managers do that strengthens their impact on competency improvement. What behaviors hinder that? What do teams do that impact competencies the most?)

3. What competencies are the most important drivers of performance?

4. How all these results may be applied to improve performance in your company?

Thank you!Let’s start today!

Mikhail ROZHKOVPolyU, PhD Candidate        E-mail: mnrozhkov@gmail.com+852 5414 0507

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