Experts and Expertise in Organizations: An Integrative Review on Individual Expertise

Abstract

Experts and expertise contribute to consequential organizational decisions from recruitment to CEO succession, but these constructs are inconsistently operationalized and poorly understood. To better explicate how experts and expertise function in organizations, we first conduct an integrative review of the general literature to describe what is known about these phenomena in cognitive science, psychology, and the clinical and technical professions. This review of the general literature indicates that expertise represents domain-specific hierarchical knowledge structures developed by an individual over time. The quality of the individual's domain-related education, training, and opportunities for practice and learning affect the level of expertise acquired. We then review what is known about experts and expertise in organizations. Many organizational studies on expertise focus on an individual's years of experience rather than the nature of that experience or its contribution to expertise. Conflating expertise with years of experience generally leads to less consistent effects on performance than operationalizing expertise in terms of individual cognitive processes, knowledge, and capabilities. Findings from organizational studies that do assess expertise are in line with the general literature, indicating that the quality of practice and learning experiences are particularly important to developing expertise. We then offer ways for scholars to better study how expertise functions in organizations and conclude by developing implications for practice.