Employees' Competence and Job Performance

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the two dimensions of competence and employee performance. Drawn upon the systems theory, employee competence is expected to be related to job performance, which in turn contributes to organizational performance. The cross-sectional data for this study were collected via a survey of 277 employees working at the HRM departments in the Palestinian National Authority ministries. Multiple regressions were used to test the hypotheses. Results indicate that employee competence, both hard and soft, have significant and positive effect on performance. This study highlights the importance of employee competence in public authority, and provides evidence about how this construct is linked to employee performance. It further reveals that these two dimensions of competence term are important for employee performance, and hence contributes to the HRM literature.