Leadership for Intelligence Professionals   

Reviewing Van Wart’s “Reanalysis” of Data from an OPM Survey

Definitions

Montgomery Van Wart says that “One important set of distinctions is among traits, skills, behaviors and competencies.  The difference between traits, skills, and behaviors is largely one of degree.”

-Traits are  “relatively innate or long–term dispositions”

-Skills are “broadly applied, learned characteristics of leader performance”. “Skills are similar to traits in that they are broad; they are similar to behaviors in that they are generally more directly observable than traits.

-Behaviors are “concrete actions that are done in performing work.” “They can be thought of as types of skills but they are more narrow in concept and specific in usage.”

-“For ease, traits, skills, and behaviors can all be called competencies.” “Job competencies are the traits, skills and behaviors most important for a specific position or class of positions.” [For example in this course Leadership]. Montgomery Van Wart, Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice, Chapter 5 “Skills that Contribute to Leader Effectiveness” p 128.

Van Wart’s “Reanalysis” of OPM Data

Van Wart believed that:

Although it is useful to understand the traits and skills that leaders use in a variety of contexts, the study of leadership is woefully incomplete without an examination of the discrete types of actions [i.e., behaviors, see above] that leaders practice—well or badly.

Like traits and skills, behaviors [all are “competencies”, see above] can be very broadly defined so there are few categories, or they can be very discretely defined with hundreds of items.

Van Wart did it both ways very broadly and also discretely.  He undertook a “reanalysis of data generated by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)” in 1997 and did “a content analysis on 150 narrowly defined competencies that supervisors, managers, and executives in the federal government identified as being crucial or very important” and used that to determine the “priorities of public managers”.  For “contrast and simplicity” he correlated data from 1,763 executives and 3,516 supervisors because “mangers fall between these two classes in 90 percent of all cases, and the exceptions were relatively minor.” He said that “High priorities are captured by looking at the top 20 discrete competency preferences; medium priority by looking at the top 100….” He then grouped those competencies into three categories and indicated the percentage of the top 20 or top 100 that fell into each category.

                                                              Top 20 Competencies                         Top 100 Competencies

                                                            Supervisors   Executives                     Supervisors   Executives

Task-Oriented Competencies                     44              35                                      34               31

People-Oriented Competencies                 39              26                                      26               22

Organization-Oriented Competencies       17              39                                      40               47

Reviewing this data, Van Wart notes that:

Supervisors divide the bulk of their high priority attention relatively equally between people (39%) and tasks (44%); organization-oriented activities get a scant 17 percent.  This focus shifts significantly when the top 100 competencies are analyzed.  Supervisors attention becomes quite balanced, with task oriented behaviors (34%) now following slightly behind organization-oriented behaviors (40%), and slightly ahead of people-oriented ones (26%).

The profile is quite different for executives.  Their top priority attention goes to organization oriented behaviors (39%), followed closely by task oriented behaviors (35%); relatively speaking they give scant attention to people-oriented behaviors.  Unlike supervisors whose priorities even out as the competency listing becomes expansive, executives’ focus on organization-oriented behaviors actually increases (47%), task-oriented-behaviors decline to 31 percent, and people oriented behaviors decrease to 22 percent.

Montgomery Van Wart Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice, Chapter 6: “Task Oriented Behaviors”, Exhibit 6.1 and pg. 158.