Reciprocity in Conduct- Uniting an Intersubjective with a Subjective Interpretational Approach in Ascertaining Employees ’ Perceptions of Competence Development

In today’s HRM research, an organizational perspective of competence development dominates. We were eager to alter this by approaching the concept from an individual stance. The aim of our study is to investigate how the employees ’ subjective apprehension of their immediate work situation, framed by the organization, affects their perception of competence and competence development. In order to accomplish our purpose we united a subjective with an intersubjective approach, conducting interviews and observations in addition to an extensive survey. In this respect we contrasted our findings from our case company with data derived from a more comprehensive study including six Swedish organizations. Competence development is a vast area, in order to study its elements we had to carefully depict and interpret its denotations. We discovered that the perception of competence development is indeed affected by the individually interpreted work situation. Further, we found that a gap exists between individual apprehension and organizational measures regarding competence development. Employees have different needs depending on what stage they are positioned in regarding their career progression; consequently diverse measures ought to be regarded attaining individual development. In short, we suggest a shift in attention away from the collective viewpoint of competence development acknowledging the individuals ’ needs