Abstract:

To streamline their organisational culture towards performance, during their performance management cycle, many organisations chose to assess teams and individuals not just on achievement of their objectives, but also on the display of competencies that reflect the desired behaviours across the organisation and for individual roles. The development of customised competency frameworks requires a long and complex process that most of the time involves job analysis and in-depth understanding of the strategy of the company and the industry.

This article presents the results of the second phase of a research that investigates several competency frameworks to identify similarities and differences. The methodology consists in a structure analysis, a construct analysis, followed by two comparisons, one of frameworks from different geographical regions, and one of frameworks from different industries. The analysis was conducted in 53 organisations from both private and public sectors from 17 countries and 18 industries.

The results of our study showed that even though there are competencies considered important for most organisations from all the investigated regions or industries, there are competencies that are present more in some regions or industries than in others. Considering that competencies are cascaded from the values of the organisation and that they shape and reflect in the same time the organisational culture, we could understand by studying the competency frameworks how the organisational culture varies across geographical regions or industries.