Abstract: Despite of the long-standing tradition of research, researchers disagree with each other on the nature of social competence, and hence a unified definition of the social competence has not been reached even until present. At least three approaches to defining social competence can be discerned in literature, including the skill-approach, the outcome-approach and the integrated approach, respectively. Based upon these conceptualizations, especially the integrated approach, several theoretical models of social competence have been proposed in extant literature, including the component models, the process models, the prism model and so on. This paper first reviewed these major conceptualizations and related theoretical models, and then proposed an integrative view of social competence. Possible cultural differences in social competence from this integrative view are also discussed.

Key words: social competence, the integrated approach, the prism model