Soft skills para un desempeño exitoso de trabajoestudio comparativo intercultural sobre las competencias transversales en los managers

Abstract

Abstract The issue of soft skills has been dominating the international debate for twenty years, producing effects on the choices in the field of economic and social policies of countries. LifeComp (2020) is the latest document drawn up by the European Commission that places life skills as an integrated tool to guarantee the right of citizenship: Personal, Social and Learning to Learn skills act as drivers for an active and aware Citizenship. On the organizational level, economic actors look to the implementation of transversal skills as a necessity to face and manage the organizational change given by Industry 4.0. Technical skills alone are not enough to guarantee business success, and the possession of transversal skills becomes a means of interconnection between technical resources and human capital. The manager therefore assumes the key role of the organization which must constantly implement the development of transversal skills with a view to innovation and development. What are the soft skills that determine successful performance? Is management aware of this importance? Authors such as McClelland, Boyatzis, Spencer & Spencer, Goleman, have laid the foundations for the study of the skills necessary for corporate competitiveness and have given rise to a line of research that has led large companies to conduct surveys on the topic in question. ManpoweGroup, Linkedin, Google, among many have questioned their employees on the importance of soft skills in their daily practices, finding the same results: most of the interviewees say that transversal skills are necessary for organizational well-being and business success. Our research is part of a complex framework, still little explored and full of variables. The goal of the work is to investigate the level of soft skills in managers with more than five years of professional experience behind them, in order to build training courses for the implementation of transversal skills. Starting from the hypothesis that professional experience has a decisive influence on the acquisition of these skills, the research has developed on the intercultural comparison between groups of Italian, Portuguese and Finnish managers, through an integrated methodology. Through the use of the BIP Questionnaire (Business Focus - Inventory of Personality) the levels of soft skills were measured in a group of 106 Italian managers and subsequently compared with the group of 106 Portuguese managers. The quantitative measure was implemented by semi-structured interviews that investigated the importance of skills through the comments of 32 Italian and 32 Finnish managers. Exploratory research has produced interesting results from a pedagogical point of view which will be the new beginnings of future research.