A fuzzy agent-based approach to trust-based competency management

In an era in which organizations increasingly consider the competencies of their employees as a crucial resource, human management becomes a key activity for improving staff and business performances. Important is also knowing who knows what inside the organization, so that project teams are assembled as the right mix of skill, knowledge and workforce abilities. At the same time, trust, an essential component, related to understanding interpersonal and group behavior, is an indisputable prerequisite for organizational effectiveness, in terms of social-cognitive capital, global competency as well as economic exchange and social and political stability. This paper defines an approach to support competency-based management by providing recommendations about the reliability of a worker in terms of trust information and own competencies. The approach lies on an agent-based architecture which supervises the Human Resources Management (HRM). Task-oriented agents monitor the employees' profiles and capabilities by maintaining update the competencies and the trusts in the organizational social network. Particularly an agent endowed by fuzzy reasoning capabilities provides recommendation about workers' competencies in HRM decision-making processes.