PhD Project: Soft skills for successful work performance: a study on transversal competence in manager

The growing importance of soft skills requires a change of perspective that considers competence in its sense of relationality and transversality that makes it transferable in different contexts, and the manager is the figure that best represents the change in progress. According to ESCO (European Standard Classification of Occupations) “Managers plan, direct, coordinate and evaluate the overall activities of enterprises, governments and other organizations, and formulate and review their policies, laws, rules and regulations”. Is a complex professional because moves on two levels: organizational and motivational, plans activities and, at the same time leads the team to achieve the goals. According to a research by Federmanager (Federmanager 2016), the figure of the manager is evolving more and more in the direction of soft skills, so in the coming years there will be the affirmation of the network manager: this manager helps team to act in synergy in a context of osmosis and supply chain that is typical of industrial districts. The qualities of the network manager are mainly "soft": he must know how to govern relationships and mediate between the different needs. Essentially, create empathy. The network manager must therefore put into practice something more complex than problem solving: "managing democratic processes" within an organization that is not hierarchical like the network.

Research

We decided to focus on a specific relevant professional communities: italian managers working in a public a private organizations. Starting from the hypothesis that the work experience contributes a decisive way to develop the transversal skills, the main goal is to investigate the level of skills in the managers who have been doing this role for at least 5 years. The final aim is to design a training course for professionals to improve soft skills within organizations to achieve successful work performance.

In particular, the hypotheses that the research work wants to verify are: The soft skills' increase is positively correlated with the number of years of professional experience; The professional sector influences the level of soft skills; There are significant differences of skills between genders

We asked managers, to answer to a questionnaire. An accidental sample was selected at the university stakeholders companies and public organization . We adopted personal contacts, a snowball sampling, and the publication of the questionnaire in several specific management web-groups. To guarantee the sample’s commitment to the research and increase the motivation to respond honestly, a feedback was given with the results in the form of an individual profile in soft skills. Preliminary information was included in the questionnaire, indicating that it was the tool of a research project, explaining what it consisted of and its aims, as well as the benefits that the information obtained would have provided. It also included the information about the willingness in consent to participation, about the anonymous treatment of data, and about the authorisation for the use of personal data in accordance with Italian law (D.L. 196 of 30 June 2003). There was also a contact person to ask information to or clarify potential doubts. Our objective was to analyse the answers of the two different groups according to four individuated variables, and to assess specific differences and scores.

This is the link of the BIP questionnaire used in the research Spread it as much as possible between the manger

https://forms.gle/VTiDhQafomEbecZJA

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