Book contents
21 - Expertise in the Management of People: A New Frontier for Research on Expert Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Summary
Charged with the assignment of reflecting on the conference and volume as a whole, and following the contributions of so many other distinguished discussants, I have chosen to step back for a broader perspective and comment on what is not well represented in this volume or in the research from which it draws: expertise in the management of people. Expertise of this type is critical to the military services and to civilian society, in contexts ranging from school classrooms to large commercial organizations. Most studies of expertise focus on some form of technical expertise in an individual. It is rare to study expertise that involves a complex social context and interaction with many other people. In this volume several chapters discuss experts leading their teams, while commanding a military combat unit (Shadrick & Lussier, Chapter 13), conducting surgery (Ericsson, Chapter 18), or teaching introductory physics (VanLehn & van de Sande, Chapter 16). Only the chapter by Mumford, Friedrich, Caughron, and Antes (Chapter 4), focuses directly upon these issues. The reason that the conference and the associated book emphasized individual expert performance is that this is the type of superior objective performance that has been confirmed. Mumford et al.(Chapter 4) report that studies with demonstrations of leaders' influence on their teams' objective performance, such as productivity, are very rare and have conflicting results. The current research base on expertise in the management of people is minimal.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Development of Professional ExpertiseToward Measurement of Expert Performance and Design of Optimal Learning Environments, pp. 470 - 494Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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