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

1. WORKPLACE CONTEXT AND ITS EFFECT ON
INDIVIDUAL COMPETENCIES AND PERFORMANCE
IN A WORK (PROJECT) TEAM
Mikhail ROZHKOV
Chief Supervisor: Prof. C.F. Cheung (ISE)
Co-supervisor:
Prof. Eric Tsui (ISE)
Hong Kong, 2014

2. PURPOSE
Highly competent employees produce the best
results. But how are competencies most effectively
developed and supported?
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3. 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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4. What is “competency”?
Knowledge
and skills
Personal
traits
Motivation
Competency
The
observed
behavior
Figure 2 – What is competency?
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*adopted from presentation of Gregory Finkelshtein, ECOPSY Consulting

5. 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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6. Pilot Study results: Best performance employees have higher
scores for key competencies
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7. Research model
Organizational
Culture
Manager Skills
(Practices)
Employee
Competencies
Team Climate
Employee
Performance

8. 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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9. 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?
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10. Thank you!
Let’s start today!
Mikhail ROZHKOV
PolyU, PhD Candidate
E-mail: mnrozhkov@gmail.com
+852 5414 0507
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