Two factors of expertise? Excellence and professionalism of environmental experts

Abstract

The aim of this article is to empirically clarify factors and conditions of expertise. In addition to the core concept of expertise as excellence, a second factor needs to be taken into account: professionalism, or professional engagement. This hypothesis was tested and confirmed using data obtained from a survey on Swiss environmental professionals (n = 3514). The empirical test was based on factor analyses (Study 1) and a structural equation model (Study 2). The expertise scale consisted of nine items for self‐assessed perceived expertise amongst professional peers (α = .78). Excellence turned out to be a logarithmic function of years of practice (Study 3). Professionalism prevailed in domains where standards for best practices still needed to be established (Study 4).

Keywords:

• expertise
• excellence
• professionalism
• professional engagement
• key competencies
• environmental experts

Notes

1. I would to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped to clarify and improve this paper. Furthermore, I would like to thank the Hans‐Sauer Foundation, Munich, that kindly supports my work, thereby providing the opportunity to complete this paper.

2. Self‐assessments such as in the expertise scale used for this study are open to many biases such as “above‐affects effects” (cf. Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004). For instance, Zenger (1992) reported that in studies with employed engineers more than 32% claimed to be among the top 5%. The expertise scale contained a similar question: “My colleagues would tell about me that I am among the top 10% performers in my discipline” (Item 1). However, in the 2001 survey, only 4.7% of the environmental professionals definitely claimed to be among the top 10%. This could be interpreted as an understatement bias but also the result of an under‐representation of top performers in the survey data.

3. It seemed very difficult to find experts who could judge both aspects – risk and best practice – in 10 fields. The main reason was that the risk concepts differed between science and practice. Therefore there had been two series of experts, four experts from “practice” for the assessment of established vs. new best practice and four academic experts for the assessment of risk levels. Another reason was the limited number of experts who had an overview on all 10 fields of professional environmental activities. Fortunately, there were two “perfect” experts, the one (Yves Leuzinger) being the president of the Swiss Association of Environmental Professional who had initiated the fusion process of Swiss environmental association. The other expert (Michael Siegrist) was an environmental psychologist who had a research focus on risk in the various domains of life and work. The three additional experts from practice were the director of the Swiss Federal Office of Environment, the director of the Swiss federal commission on qualifications (“Berufsregister”) in the field of environmental services, and the director of the one and only nonuniversity professional school for environmental professionals (SANU). The three additional academic experts came from the Environmental Science Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. To derive values for the risk levels (for established vs. new best practices), the mean of the ratings by the additional experts was added to the rating of the core experts. Thus the rating by the core experts (Leuzinger, Siegrist) had the weight 1/2, the rating by any additional expert had the weight 1/6. As expected, the inter‐rater reliability was low and not significant (Kendall's w = .161 for the best practice rating, w = .364 for the risk rating). However, the correlation between the level of Δ and established vs. new best practice would be also significant if we used exclusively the ratings by the core expert Leuzinger (Spearman's ρ = 0.603, p<.05); the correlation between the level of Δ and the level of risk would be somewhat higher but still nonsignificant if we used exclusively the ratings by the core expert Siegrist (Spearman's ρ = 0.406, ns).