ITM Master 1. Sem.
8007: Social competence development
           We 15.45 - 17.15 h, H 03

  INTRODUCTION

 Some ideas about SoCo:

 Industrial age: »The big are eating the small«

 Service age: »The fast are beating the slow«

 Knowledge age: »Socially competent companies win against socially incompetent companies«

Social competence important in life of a person AND in life of a company.

Jozef Vyrost, Marek Dobes (2004):

Social cohesion grows up from natural small groups. Family, classroom, working team etc. are real life “stadiums” of social competence. Natural small social group settings thus facilitate (or hinder) effective interaction of an individual and society and in this sense form a complement to traditional knowledge in a knowledge-based society.

The term competence became popular in developmental psychology in connection with the need to define the criteria of cognitive, emotional etc. maturity in adolescence.

The adjective social has stressed the requirements that the ”essence” could not be seen just inside the individual, but mainly in his/her skills to accommodate effectively the demands of environment. Social competence (SoCo) refers to the social, emotional, and cognitive skills and behaviours that people need for successful social adaptation.

In the last decades the social competence concept has become popular, which was supported by: 

• Tendency to apply the criteria of effectiveness of social behaviour (in the sense of social acceptability and assertivity) to all periods of human development
• Striving to express the multidimensionality of the concept (identification of different social skills as components of SoCo or distinguishing inside SoCo the cognitive, emotional, social, personal etc. competence).

Social competence has been defined first in terms of social skills. For example Sarason (1981) discussed the dimensions of social competence that she believed were essential to socially competent functioning; this list included problem solving behaviour, perspective taking, and person perception. In the second approach to defining social competence, more emphasis has been placed on the social outcome and social competence is defined as the ability to be effective in the realization of social goals (e.g. Anderson, Messick, 1974). 

Next scheme visualises chain of causal interactions between an individual and his/her social world. Social competence serves as an important mediator in both the situations when an individual attempts to influence his/her social environment and also in the situations when a person is required to cope with demands of society.

Social competence manifested its potential in explanation of a paradox that people highly competent in one type of cultural setting, one life domain or situation could have serious problems in different social context (e.g. a little Indian in Paris or his dad in tribe). Social competence for these reasons could be seen sometimes as an elusive concept, because the skills and behaviours required for healthy social development vary with age, gender, status etc. and with demands of particular situation.

Mentioned elusiveness or trans-situational variability of social competence opens up the question of normative determination of any social behaviour. (Referee’s whistling on the whistle, as a tool of management people’s activity could be fully accepted as competent on a football stadium but probably totally unacceptable in his family life, because norms and rules in these settings are different.)

To sum up, social competence is highly dependent on social environment and on situation. Same behaviour may be highly competent in some cultures (sub-cultures, groups) and situations and incompetent in others.

One of effective ways how to deal with social context relativity is to operationalise cultural settings with the use of norms. Table 1 shows criteria used to evaluate success of social competence:

Table 1: The criteria used in the processes of evaluation of social competence

A useful way how to deal with situational context relativity is to adopt so-called person-by-situation approach (see e.g. Magnusson, 1981). This approach takes into consideration mutual interference of personality traits and other psychological characteristics and situational characteristics in producing resulting behaviour.

In spite of relativity of context in which social competence is used, there still may be identified a larger number of “factors” and social skills, social awareness, self – confidence, self-esteem etc. are mostly between them.

Table 2: Psychological antecendents of social competence 

 Leadership Qualities: Authentic, self-confident, holistically competent

Personality competence

Self-management

Communicative competence

Conflict competence

Which competence deficits do you personally perceive?

How do you want to shape the course?

30 h face-to-face 90 h own work.

Three project presentations per participant.

  Contact: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Georg Arlt, Study Program Director
Bachelor and Master Program International Tourism Management
arlt@fh-westkueste.de, Office 2.018, Tel. 0481 8555-513
Consultation hours (during lecture period): Wednesday 11.00 - 12.00 h