Posted by As I have shown in previous posts, managerial skills have become one of the dominant approaches to representing managerial work in research since 1967. This has done little to understand what a manager actually does. Why?
Well, if we learn what skills a particular manager or group of managers had in a given situation, we will only get an answer to the question of what they were able to do, but we will not know what they actually did. Of course, this is important knowledge, because a robotic manager could be equipped with the same skills as a human, but… which of these skills and when would the manager use them? That is not known.
Studies of managerial skills over the past 50 years have covered a wide range of business situations, managerial levels, enterprises and social phenomena. Below is a summary of, in my opinion, the most important research in this area.
Table 1. The examples of published results on skills managers over last 50 years. Part 1
Table 2. The examples of published results on skills managers over last 50 years. Part 2
McLennan, K., (1967). The manager and his job skill. Academy of Management Journal, 10(3), 235-245.
Buttner, E.H., Gryskiewicz, N., & Hidore, S.C., (1999). The Relationship between styles of creativity and managerial skills assessment. British Journal of Management, 10, 228-238.
Tewari, R., & Sharma, R., (2011). Managerial skills for managers in the 21st century. Review of Management, 1(3), 4-15.
Kaifi, B.A., & Noori, S.A., (2011). Organizational behavior: a study on managers, employees, and teams. Journal of Management Policy and Practice, 12(1), 88-97.
Ananthram, S., & Nankervis, A., (2013). Global managerial skill sets, management development, and the role of HR: an exploratory qualitative study of north American and Indian managers. Contemporary Management Research, 9(3), 299-322.
El-Sofany, H.F., Alwadani, H.M., & Alwadani, A., (2014). Managing virtual team work in IT projects: survey. International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, 7(4), 28-33.
Vandana, B.K., & Dhull, P.I., (2014). An exploration of managerial skills and organizational climate in the educational services. Journal of Services Research, 4(1), 141-160.
van Dun, D.H., Hicks, J.N., & Wilderom, P.M., (2015). Values and behaviors of effective lean managers: Mixed-methods exploratory research. European Management Journal, 35(2), 174-186.
Zaťková, T.S., & Poláček, M., (2015). Social skills as an important pillar of managerial success. Procedia Economics and Finance, 34, 587-593.
Mihalcea, A., & Mihalcea, D., (2015). Management skills assessment using 360° feedback – MSF 360. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 187, 318-323.