Essays on The implications of incompetence at the workplace

The truth is we face incompetence not only at the workplace; it is a widely spread problem everywhere. Of course, the blame for incompetence can be entirely put on the employee who lacks knowledge and other necessary qualities. On the one hand, it is sometimes really difficult to evaluate the person’s competence at the start, but still it is more the problem of the employer, not the employee. The matter is the employees are often not aware of their incompetence at all. This fact has been proved by the research of Professor Dunning at Cornell. “People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well,” Erica Goode (2000, p. 15) reports. The paradox is that very often to recognize competence you need the same skills as for the required competence itself. In the tests held to check the statement the biggest overestimation of self-performance came from those who were the poorest in logic, English grammar and humor. “The lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates,” Erica Goode (2000, p. 15) underlines.

Another provoking problem is the so-called “skilled incompetence”. This means that highly educated managers skillfully avoid conflicts and disputes and silently follow the strategies preferred by the top management. The vice president, for instance, stays satisfied, and nobody should know he can be wrong. A person who will dispute his respect and competence will suffer problems.

“Thus what results is a seemingly-smooth and harmonious loop of communication that is actually rooted in suspicion and ignorance,” Chris Argyris (1993, 60) states. Agreeing with superiors, providing information without creating a conflict and without changing the course of behavior become the leading values. “Skilled incompetence is a hothouse for breeding mixed messages, which are in turn convenient for several levels of the organization,” Argyris (1993, 60) follows, and inability to clarify these discomforting requests from different managers inevitable brings to poor performance. And just like people are often unaware of their incompetence, they can be easily unaware of their skilled incompetence. Defensive routines are simply applied to prevent surprise, embarrassment, threat and other uncomfortable situations. And these defensive routines do prevent the organizational managers from successful solving of the corporate problems, so the overall goal is to overcome these defensive routines.

Incompetence as a managerial problem

Hence, the task to estimate one’s competence correctly as well as the function of its successful application becomes the task of the employer and human resources department. As Sarita Chawla and John Renesch (2006, 92) investigate, “When there is no awareness of incompetence, motivation to learn in that area is missing.” They explain that to learn something new or to master some skill a person should be aware of the fact he is missing it and, what is more, he should be driven by curiosity first of all. That’s why the goal of managers in overcoming the incompetence of employees they see in “converting their relationship to the subject of learning from one of denial and defensiveness to one of curiosity” (Chawla and Renesch 2006, 92). In other words, the way out is to turn the employees from the state of unconscious incompetence (revealed in certainty, conservatism, righteousness, impenitence, delusional thinking and denial) to conscious incompetence through exposure and exploration of their limitations in their thinking and behavior patterns. As Robinson (2010, 43) shows, the problem of incompetence is often tightly connected with over work, lack of motivation and other motivational issues at the workplace. There are different ways to improve the performance of an employee, but in any event the first step is usually to find out the reason of the problem. And as we see, many studies see the routes in motivational problems. “Once people begin to be curious – if they are in a well structured learning environment – they will then begin genuinely and honestly to experiment with new possibilities,” Chawla and Renesch (2006, 92) conclude. Hereof we turn to the motivational theory. How can it be helpful in coping with incompetence?

Approaches to understating of motivation

(1997, 116) says. It goes without saying that there are different approaches to motivation. In the simplest words, it is a driving force through which human beings achieve their goals. Actually, there is always a gap between the current state of a person and some desired state one wants to reach. If this person is an employee, a good manager tries to do his best to reduce this gap. Psychologists divide these forces into intrinsic (coming from within the individual) and extrinsic (coming from the outside) motivation. Desire and ambition refer to the first type, while competition, rewards and cheering refer to the second type. The interesting moment is that, according to the self-determination theory, extrinsic motivation can be internalized when the task from outside coincides with his or her own values and views. The expectation of basic psychological needs to be satisfied is the most general way for motivation to appear. As Jane Thomas (2004, 25) regards, “Drives and desires can be described as a deficiency or need that activates behavior that is aimed at a goal or an incentive.”

According to the Incentive Theory, motivation appears if there is an association between the action and the reward either tangible or intangible received for this action. When the reward can be received immediately, the effect grows and, if repeated, the action can become a habit. There can be also negative reinforcement, which means the removal of stimulus. Thus the person is motivated to escape this removal. Behavioral psychologists like B. F. Skinner put an accent on social ramifications of all the human actions. Meanwhile, according to the Drive Reduction Theory, the strength of the drive grows if it is stays unsatisfied, but secondary “reinforcers” reduce drive (Weightman 2008, 113). Further, Leon Festinger has proposed the cognitive dissonance theory, according to which motivation is a desire to reduce the dissonance (the conflict) between two cognitions and thus to reduce psychological discomfort.