PEOPLE’S PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR OWN COMPETENCE
Every person has their own opinion of how competent they are in a particular area, regardless of how competent they actually are. In their fascinating paper on people’s own views of themselves, Kruger and Dunning (1999) ran a series of four trials where they asked a sample of people to judge how competent they saw themselves being. The results of this work were quite surprising as it demonstrated that incompetent people tend to see themselves as more competent than they actually are, whereas more competent people tend to see themselves as less competent than they actually are. The authors summed this up quite nicely by stating
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people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. |
This is very important as it means that the incompetent will rate themselves higher, whereas competent people will rate themselves lower. One of the dangers here is that two people may each rate themselves and come to the same conclusion – that they hold a certain level of competence. The truth may be, however, that they are both at opposite ends of the competence spectrum, but that people may think that they are the same.
This can have a direct impact on an organisation, since it means that less competent people can be undertaking work for which they are not competent, possibly leading to work that is not fit for purpose and which costs the organisation both time and money to put right and, perhaps more importantly, adversely affects their reputation. Conversely, the more competent person may be given work that is below their level of competency. This also constrains the performance of an organisation, since it is not making the best use of that person.
This is a crucial reason why there is such a need for a pragmatic approach to competency assessment that can minimise the chance of these errors occurring. The assessments should be as objective as possible and, of course, the competency of the assessors themselves should be brought into question.
One of the conclusions made by the authors of this excellent paper is that incompetent people have no idea how incompetent they are, a conclusion that has been backed up by many previous studies referenced in the paper. The use of competency assessment, with a good, simple visual output may go some way to convincing incompetent people that they do not hold the lofty levels of competence that they believe that they do.