Lessons Learned for Action Learning Research: A Case Study of Core Competency Model Development in the Comptroller General's Department

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the lessons learned from the action learning for developing the core competency model of the Comptroller General's Department (CGD). The samples consist of the executives, the middle-management officials and all operational officials in CGD. The researcher acted as a coach who guided the team responsible for the development of CDG’s core competency system by using a participation process, follow-up, issue discussion, and workshop in order to extract the essence of competency that was most relevant to the department. The results show that the understanding of the working group, the emphasis of key issues in core competency development, the flipped learning between the researcher and the working group, the role of the executive and the middle-management officials in determining the direction of the core competency model influence the design of the core competency framework that is more appropriate with the context of the department. Moreover, the model for promoting the use of competency models is based on participation of the middle-management officials. Along the participatory process, the researcher set questions to encourage the middle-management officials to think, reflect and design activities and projects to enhance core competency development. In addition, after receiving the idea from the officials, the important roles of the researcher was to provide additional guidance and connect the idea from the officials for behavioral enhancement based on the CGD’s core competency.