Endless Lists of Competency Lists

Talking to a friend recently who is in the midst of a massive exercise to determine the competencies required of a large population of leaders. It left me speculating whether companies might all do better spending less time investing in individual research projects on this subject, many of which are based on rather flimsy research methodologies and end up with long lists of characteristics against which managers then have to determine performance ratings (adding another layer of subjectivity to the whole process).

Instead, if a meta analysis was done to compare what different companies come up with as the set of core characteristics they are looking for and that was compared to a core list derived from a similar analysis of the academic literature, my hunch is that they would have a huge overlap once you put labeling differences to one side. Would it not be better to focus on the characteristics that make the differences between cultures or companies, rather than reinventing the long list over and over again?