Duration
May 2008 to October 2009

Description
A growing number of employees in the OECD countries are no longer involved in generating defined results by means of defined operations, but they have to solve more or less complex area-specific problems. Different inquiries in the fields of their job profiles, their necessary qualifications, and their competence levels are suggestive of this ongoing change. We call employees doing such jobs requiring area-specific knowledge "experts".

The following challenges for the management of these experts arise - since it is evident that traditional management approaches, according to whom the results, operations, and resources are planed and controlled by "dispositive factors" and are carried out by the factor "operative work", no longer fits by implication to this new kind of employee.
1. Up to now it is largely unexplained where the actual management challenges are. Sociological findings refer to tensions between the professionals and bureaucratic organization, however, economic ones gear to the problem of identification, assessment, improvement and diffusion of knowledge. It's noticeable how sparsely the different academic disciplines take care of their reciprocal findings.
2. Which correcting means are after all available for managers of experts?
3. And finally, the efficacy of such correcting means has to be assessed