Building-up collective competences in organizations: a road towards fairness at work and team efficiency

‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts', says Aristotle (Metaphysics), and this whole feeds off the parts and has a feedback effect on them, adds Edgar Morin (1977). At an organisational level, this relationship between the whole and the parts, and between the parts and the whole, is a first step towards understanding the collective dimension of competence. Understanding collective competence means understanding how the performance of a team and the well-being of its members are built together - two fundamental issues for management. The aim of this article is to present a grid for practitioners, with a view to understanding how collective competence is formalised and how it can be induced within groups. The concept of collective competence in management began to take shape in the 1990s to provide a response to that ‘something' (Jankélévitch, 1980; Michaud, 2009) which transcends the sum of individual competences (Picq, 2008; Bataille, 2001; Leplat, 2000; Permatin, 1999). It is defined as a common ground built around acting together (Dupuich, 2011) that enables a collective to coordinate in order to solve complex problems. The development of collective competence is based on the essential elements of interaction between the members of a collective, the identity of that collective and the creation of meaning within that collective (Bitencourt and Bonotto, 2010). It provides collective operational capabilities that are inseparable from individual capabilities, based on a jointly constructed frame of reference, a shared language, a collective memory and a subjective commitment (Retour and Krohmer, 2006). Collective competence also acts synergistically on individual competencies, thereby increasing a team's operational performance (Brulhart, Favoreu and Loufrani-Fedida, 2019). Collective competence provides a group with a sense of purpose and values of fairness, solidarity, sharing and cooperation (Charles-Pauvers and Schieb-Bienfait, 2009). Collective competence therefore seems to offer a way forward for organisations wishing to improve both the working conditions and the performance of their employees. However, despite all these benefits, HRM practitioners do not seem to be interested in how collective competence emerges (Picq 2008), no doubt due to its complex nature. The aim of this article is therefore to provide some food for thought in this area by reporting on the initial results of an exploratory survey in the form of a research-intervention conducted with a group of continuing vocational training entrepreneurs in France. The emergence of collective competence and its reinforcement within the collective was identified using a processual analysis (Mendez, 2010), 16 semi-structured interviews, 33 days of observation and 10 focus groups. Based on the data collected, the article discusses the state of the art with a view to proposing an operational framework for HRM practitioners. The aim is, on the one hand, to enable practitioners to recognise what collective competence is and, on the other hand, to provide them with the conceptual tools that enable collective competence to emerge within groups and achieve fairness at work.