Abstract

Current competency research in Asia mostly aims at building competency models for a certain job, or studies the relationship between competency and personal / organizational performance. However, ambiguities exist for the definitions and measurements of competency, while the lack of “context” in the definition so as to distinguish competency from traditional job qualifications is a serious flaw. This study takes into account the context-dependent (or situational) nature of competency, as the work role played or as conceived by an HR account manager (which serves as the “context”) influences his/her work competency. Through in-depth interviews with a semiconductor foundry’s human resource (HR) account managers based in Taiwan, as well as our extensive literature review on job competency, we propose a framework and confirm that managers with higher competency tend to take a more open, comprehensive and customer-oriented approach that emphasizes interacting with people, while managers with lower competency see work as a number of separate steps focused on the input of parameters and result output, and tend to take a closed, partial and mechanical view of their job roles.

Key words: Job competency, human resources account manager, systems theory,contextual factor, semiconductor industry.