Competence-based management and corporate culture: Two theories with common flaws

There are a number of issues that researchers in the newly emerging perspective of competence-based management (CBM) could consider from the experiences of culture theory, which was hailed in the 1980s as the definitive answer to managing strategically. However, for three main reasons, culture theory is not as useful to practising managers as the hype in the early 1980s led us to believe it would be and it has therefore failed as a good prescriptive management theory. To learn from culture theory, CBM researchers could look at culture's strengths and avoid its weaknesses: its strengths being the recognition that organisations are made up of people with complex motives for their actions, that organisations include many "intangibles" that cannot be measured, and its attention to the role of the leader in developing skills and in guiding competence building; its relevant weaknesses being the imprecise definition of terms, the use of other models as a theoretical basis, and the paucity of empirical evidence to support its premises. Consideration of these issues may make people aware of some of the pitfalls that await a relatively new management perspective. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.