Identifying and Measuring Expertise in Organizations

Although organizations might know that expertise is important for their overall success, many individuals responsible for hiring and Human Resource Development (HRD) in organizations still struggle to clearly identify expertise in employees or volunteers. This chapter begins with an explanation of the term competence in relation to expertise in order for readers to compare that definition to definitions of expertise presented throughout this text. Defining competence also provides an entrance into an introduction to competency models that are useful for organizations’ attempts to identify expertise in their workforce. The next section of the chapter presents six measures designed to measure expertise across a variety of fields. These measures are: the Professional Expertise Scale (Johanna &van der Heijden, High Ability Studies, 11(1), 9–39, 2000); the Cochran-Weiss-Shanteau Index of Performance (Weiss & Shanteau, Human Factors, 45, 104–114, 2003); the Expertise Measurement (Mieg, High Ability Studies, 20, 91–115, 2009); the Generalized Expertise Measure (Germain, Development and preliminary validation of a psychometric measure of expertise: The Generalized Expertise Measure (GEM) (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Barry University, Miami Shores, FL, 2006); the Employee Expertise Development Scale (Kim, Development of the Employee Expertise Development Scale (EEDS) (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 2015); and the Adaptive Expertise Inventory (Bohle Carbonell et al., European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 25, 167–180, 2016). Methods such as these can help improve organizational understanding of the behavioral and attitudinal correlates of verifiable, objective and subjective expertise, and the management of employees’ expertise. As such, the chapter concludes by asking organizations to consider taking up methods for assessing expertise.