Defining the Characteristics of an Expert in a Social Context Through Subjective Evaluation
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Defining the Characteristics of an Expert in a Social Context Through Subjective Evaluation Halvor Holtskog 1
Received: 1 September 2015 / Accepted: 23 September 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Organizations are dealing with increasing demands for innovative and sustainable products and services at the same time as they have to maintain and improve quality and efficiency. This reality calls for a better understanding of the knowledge worker. This paper seeks to highlight some of the personality or personal characteristics of an expert or knowledge worker and to gain a deeper understanding of expert behavior in an organization or a project. The study is conducted as a survey directed to highly educated people engaged in product development on the global stage. This subjective self-assessment gives valuable results and brings about new knowledge in aligning characteristics of an expert to the traditional definition of craftsmen—emphasizing skills, commitment, and judgment. Such insight will have significant value for leaders when organizing and following up work done and driven by experts. Keywords Expert . Organization . Characteristics . Craftsmen
Introduction Peter Drucker said that knowledge worker productivity is one of the biggest management challenges of the twenty-first century (Drucker 2008). This statement spurs a set of questions that both from an academic and a practitioner’s point of view should bring interesting answers. First, we would like to pose the question: what is an expert? Second, what characterizes an expert? And third, are the identified characteristics sufficient to enable us to tell an expert from a non-expert? When introducing the term Bexpert,^ it is important to make a distinction between the relatively broad term Bknowledge worker^ and the more specific notion of an individual who holds exceptional knowledge within a domain. Ericsson defines an expert as someone widely
* Halvor Holtskog [email protected] 1
Gjovik University College, Teknologiveien 22, 2815 Gjovik, Norway
J Knowl Econ
recognized as a reliable source of knowledge, technique, or skill whose judgment is accorded authority and status by the public or his or her peers (Ericsson 2006). Hence, an expert must be said to belong to the group of knowledge workers, but with the additional ability to consistently exhibit superior performance—as determined by other experts or knowledge workers. Traditionally, there are two main approaches to the study of the characteristics of experts (Chi 2006). The absolute approach studies truly exceptional people and their performance within formal domains, often domains linked to academia and intellectual games, and informal domains such as sewing and cooking. In contrast, the relative approach tries to better understand how novices can achieve expert status through training and experience (Dreyfus et al. 1986). In this paper, we will not claim to strictly follow either of these two approaches. Rather, we focus on how experts excel in their natural conte
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