It's depressing to realize how few of the teams in our lives use their human capital and opportunities well, when it comes to sustaining performance,… - Richard Boyatzis

A threshold competency is a person's generic knowledge, motive, trait, self image, social role, or skill which is essential to performing a job, but is not causally related to superior job performance.

A job competency is an underlying characteristic of a person in that it may be a motive, trait, skill, aspect of one’s self-image or social role, or a body of knowledge which he/she uses. The existence and possession of these characteristics may or not be known to the person. In this sense, the characteristics may be unconscious aspects of the person. Because job competencies are underlying characteristics, they can be said to be generic. A generic characteristic may be apparent in many forms of behaviour, or a wide variety of different actions.

The result of a job element analysis is a weighted list of characteristics that managers perceive as important in distinguishing superior from average performers, and those characteristics required by anyone in the job.