Integrating trust and competency management to improve learning

Nowadays, the importance of knowledge management is well understood by managers in the organizations and, at the same time, the great significance of trust, in enabling effective knowledge sharing, is emerging. Presence or lack of trust can have serious implications for organizations with respect to the quality and of their business processes. Several scientific works have confirmed the direct correlation between social-cognitive capital, in terms of competencies and experiences, and a feeling of trust in both learning and working collaborative environments. On the other hand, Competency-Based Management allows organizations to link human resources processes to competencies in order to shape its workforce capabilities and to achieve better results. Typically, employees' competencies (and proficiency levels) are stored and used by specific enterprise software, whereas the trust is not considered or left to managers' feeling. This work proposes an approach to the improvement of collaborative learning activities by refining and allowing (at workers' level) competency-finding processes through the social calculus of trust-in- competencies degree. © 2011 IEEE.