The Competence System in Perfromance Improvement: A Reference Framework

Over the past decade, many best practises have become available which have, little by little, been incorporated into the management practises of excellent firms. Reality has shown, however, that applying these practises tout court without careful planning or without selecting and adapting them to meet the specific requirements of the firm does not always give the sought after results: improvements in the firms competitivity. In particular, implementing improvement initiatives often come up against either a lack of internal consistency or a lack of external coherence. This paper seeks to offer a contribution to help overcome these problems by proposing, firstly, a reference model which identifies and links the competitive advantage of the firm to performances achieved and to the individual and organisational competencies which already exist within the firm. The model proposed here is based on integration of the concepts drawn from specific theoretical approaches, such as OM, Competence Based Competition and the Resource Based View. The paper also reports the results of both an empirical test done using the model and the tools derived from it and summarises the ways in which it was used, in practise, in 55 Italian and British firms.