Dynamic Capabilities and the Development of Organizational Competencies

The recent discussion in the field of strategic management broadly favours the idea of a dynamization of organizational compotencies in order to overcome dysfunctions and rigidities of organizational competence building. The major question adressed in this paper is wether, how and to what extent it is possible to re-conceptualize organizational competencies to become a dynamic construct. After a brief recapitulation of the distinguishing features of organziational competence, two basic approaches of dynamic capabilities are identified and presented. By reconstructing the argumentation logic of both it will be shown that both approaches offer solutions that in the final analysis are likely to destroy the idea of organizational competence building. The last section of this paper aims to develop an alternative approach which preserves the advantages of competence building and tries to solve the rigidity issue, not by integrating adynamic dimension into the compentence construct but rather by establishing a dual mechanism. This two tier solution is called competence monitoring.