Search results

The entrepreneur is the main decision-maker in small and medium-sized enterprises and is the principal force in the implementation of a firm's international strategy. Research has paid limited attention to the intangible aspects of human capital, namely behavioural competencies that may have an impact on the entrepreneur's ability to take advantage of international opportunities. This study addresses this gap, identifying the behavioural competencies that distinguish entrepreneurs who pursue a stronger internationalisation expansion beyond the European market.

A competency modelling process is implemented for a sample of Italian entrepreneurs. Data on behavioural competencies are obtained through the coding of behavioural event interviews administrated to the entrepreneurs. Export intensity is adopted as a performance criterion to classify the entrepreneurs.

Three behavioural competencies (change catalyst, teamwork and organisational learning orientation) emerged as more significantly activated by entrepreneurs who show a higher export intensity in the global market.

The exploratory nature of the study, conducted in a small sample and in a specific geographical area, may reduce the generalisability of the findings.

Entrepreneurs can become aware of the behavioural competencies needed for the implementation of internationalisation processes. Additionally, training programmes can be designed to promote the development of these behaviours.

Bridging the literature on international entrepreneurship, cross-cultural studies and competency-based research, this study highlights the role of behavioural competencies in the internationalisation process from a micro level of analysis. This article proposes a competency framework that can be adopted to assess a broader portfolio of entrepreneurs' behaviours.

Analytics technologies are profoundly changing the way in which organizations generate economic and social value from data. Consequently, the professional roles of data scientists and data analysts are in high demand in the labor market. Although the technical competencies expected for these roles are well known, their behavioral competencies have not been thoroughly investigated. Drawing on the competency-based theoretical framework, this study aims to address this gap, providing evidence of the emotional, social and cognitive competencies that data scientists and data analysts most frequently demonstrate when they effectively perform their jobs, and identifying those competencies that distinguish them.

This study is exploratory in nature and adopts the competency-based methodology through the analysis of in-depth behavioral event interviews collected from a sample of 24 Italian data scientists and data analysts.

The findings empirically enrich the extant literature on the intangible dimensions of human capital that are relevant in analytics roles. Specifically, the results show that, in comparison to data analysts, data scientists more frequently use certain competencies related to self-awareness, teamwork, networking, flexibility, system thinking and lateral thinking.

The study was conducted in a small sample and in a specific geographical area, and this may reduce the analytic generalizability of the findings.

The skills shortages that characterize these roles need to be addressed in a way that also considers the intangible dimensions of human capital. Educational institutions can design better curricula for entry-level data scientists and analysts who encompass the development of behavioral competencies. Organizations can effectively orient the recruitment and the training processes toward the most relevant competencies for those analytics roles.

This exploratory study advances our understanding of the competencies required by professionals who mostly contribute to the performance of data science teams. This article proposes a competency framework that can be adopted to assess a broader portfolio of the behaviors of big data professionals.

Even with the recognized impact organizational leaders have on the outcome of digital transformation (DT), a comprehensive scholarly understanding of the competencies that leaders must possess to lead a DT to success is lacking.

To derive and list the competencies considered by experts as necessary for managing DT, the authors recruited 18 international senior managers with relevant experience and applied the Delphi method to survey the managers. Upon the completion of three survey rounds and the authors modifying the response list until consensus was reached, 39 items were shortlisted as constituting key competencies for managing DT. Furthermore, the authors engaged in inductive theorizing to derive propositional statements using these findings.

The practitioners agreed on visionary thinking, agility, understanding the value of data, data-driven decision-making, knowledge of strategy and accepting change as the most important requirements for managing DT. Through inductive theorizing, the authors further derived that the seven discovered clusters fell into two broader competencies – behavioral and strategic – and that each behavioral competency would have varying importance depending on the country and industry that the organization operates in.

As is typical for Delphi studies that involve multiple survey rounds, the study participant response rate was moderate. The implications of this study, in finding that a variety of leadership competencies are needed to ensure successful DT, validate prior research that people, not technology, drive DT.

This study helps mitigate assumptions that successful DT processes are only possible by hiring technological experts, as doing so highlights the importance of behavioral leadership competencies.

The study is one of the first to interlink digital leadership with DT by inductively theorizing behavioral and strategic competencies. The authors also establish that contexts are vital in determining which aspects of leadership competencies are deemed most important in driving DT.

This study aims to explain the importance of human resources and attempts to identify the competencies required by the personnel involved in disaster management operations.

The research uses a qualitative methodology to explore the competencies required by the relief workers using a content analysis approach to analyze the disaster literature and the job advertisements. The data for the content analysis was developed with the help of 23 independent coders, and exploratory inferences were drawn.

A detailed review of the literature highlighted the importance of competent personnel in disaster relief organizations. The analysis listed 34 mutually exclusive competencies and their relative importance, which were further divided into four competency clusters. The study also creates a competency dictionary that defines the competencies with the expected behaviors.

Deploying the right resources in the acute time frame during a disaster event can make a difference, and with lives at stake, such deployment acquires prime importance. In addition to contributing to humanitarian logistics literature, the competency model developed will also help forecast the future requirements and help the organization choose “the right person for the right job.”

The inferences drawn in the study are based on disaster management areas, unlike earlier research which also considered business logistics research.

Few models have attempted to explain intrapreneurial behavior from the perspective of competencies. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to contribute along this line by developing and validating a scale to measure intrapreneurial competencies for a Costa Rican organizational context.

A three stage process was followed. The first stage considered literature review, expert judgment, cognitive interviews, and back-translation. In the second stage, the questionnaire was administered to a sample of 543 university professionals who worked mainly in private organizations in Costa Rica. The third stage led to evaluate of the proposed scale’s psychometric properties, including, exploratory factor analysis procedure performing by SPSS 19; confirmatory factor analysis procedures by means of structural equation modeling using EQS 6.2 version and finally, a linear regression model to obtain evidence of external criterion-related validity, performed by SPSS 19.

This study provides evidence of five sub-dimensions of employee attributes, i.e., “opportunity promoter”, “proactivity”, “flexibility”, “drive”, and “risk taking” that constitute a higher-level construct called intrapreneurial competencies. The scale provided evidence of convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity – the latter, using an employee innovative behavior scale.

The model offers a first step to continue studies that aim at developing a robust model of intrapreneurial competencies. This potential predictive capacity of an instrument of this nature would be useful for the business sector, particularly as a diagnostic instrument to strengthen processes of staff development in areas that promote the development of innovation and the creation of new businesses for the company.

The study examined the influence of small and medium enterprise (SME) owner-managers' managerial competencies on supply chain performance, the mediation role of information quality on the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship, the mediating role of information quality on the information sharing and supply chain performance relationship and the mediating role of both information sharing and information quality on SME owner-managers' managerial competences and supply chain performance relationship.

Data were collected from SME agro-processing firms. The determined sample size for the agro-processing firms was 200, while an effective sample size of 177 was obtained. The Covariance Structural Equation Modelling software was used to obtain results on the influence of SME owner-managers' managerial competencies on supply chain performance, the mediation role of information quality on the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship, the mediating role of information quality on the information sharing and supply chain performance relationship and the mediating role of both information sharing and information quality on SME owner-managers' managerial competences and supply chain performance relationship.

Findings indicated that a positive significant influence of SME owner-managers' managerial competencies on supply chain performance and the presence of partial mediation effects when the mediating role of information quality in the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship and the information sharing and supply chain performance relationship is tested. Also, a partial mediating role of information sharing and information quality is obtained in the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship.

The study mainly focused on SME agro-processing firms eliminating other SME manufacturing firms. Also, the research employed a wholistic approach when studying the SME agro-processing firms without focusing on how SME owner-managers' managerial competencies would affect information sharing, information quality and supply chain performance based on the market type (local or foreign) and the source of raw materials (local or foreign) and the impact of information sharing on information quality hasn't been given significant attention in the existing literature.

The research focused on the mediation role of quality of information shared by SME owner-managers in the relationship between information sharing and supply chain performance, the mediating role of information quality in the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance and the mediating role of both SME owner-manager's information sharing and quality of information shared in the relationship between SME owner-managers' managerial competences and supply chain performance. These mediation effects haven't been given significant attention in previous research. Further, while information sharing and information quality have been studied, they have been studied at a supply chain level, not at a managerial level.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the gaps between the importance perceived and the competence gained by the hospitality students in terms of the employability skills.

Questionnaires were distributed to 841 hospitality students in five regions in Malaysia. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data.

The findings show that there are significant differences between importance perceived and competence attained in teamwork, leadership, basic, technical skills and ethical skills. Additionally, the finding of this study indicates that the culinary and bakery students perceive that they are not given adequate exposure to possess such skills. It is important to ensure that graduates are equipped with the twenty-first century skills such as problem solving and analytic, decision making, organization and time management, risk taking and communication.

The findings provide insights to curriculum developers and policy makers on the appropriate interventions that need to be taken to improve the employability skills of the graduates.

An original contribution is made by linking employability model to TVET sector.

In the context of the question of how entrepreneurship education can contribute to entrepreneurial competency development, this paper aims to outline the deliberate practice (DP) method and showcase how it can be applied in entrepreneurship education. To this end, this paper presents a learning innovation in which DP improves entrepreneurial competencies.

The paper describes an entrepreneurship training in which participants, over a seven-week period, learn about DP and use this approach to develop an aspect of an entrepreneurial competency of their choosing.

Evaluations show that participants find both short- and long-term gains in their competency development, and value having learnt a competency development method as well.

The presented format is designed in accordance with the DP principles as originally described in the literature on expert performance, and shows that DP can be applied in the context of entrepreneurial competency development at lower levels of proficiency. Entrepreneurship educators interested in competency development can consider to adopt (aspects of) the described approach.

The format applies DP principles as described in the literature on expert performance. The value lies in the short- and long term effects of the training.

The study sought to fit managerial competencies in the metatraits of the Circumplex Personality Metatraits Model (CPM) by Strus, Cieciuch and Rowinski (2014). The authors assumed that managerial competencies would be located in the sector of personality metatraits, specifically, the plus poles: Integration (Gamma-Plus) through Stability (Alpha-Plus) and Self-restraint (Delta-Plus) to Plasticity (Beta-Plus).

A group of 327 managers took part in this study. Managerial competencies related to social skills, problem-solving, management and goal striving, openness to change and employee development were evaluated via the assessment center (AC).

The results revealed a negative relationship between all managerial competencies and negative metatraits of Disharmony (Gamma-Minus) and Passiveness (Beta-Minus). On the other hand, Integration (Gamma-Plus) and Plasticity (Beta-Plus) appeared to be positively related to two competencies only: openness to change and problem-solving.

All managerial competencies fitted well in the CPM pattern with adequate degrees of fit. The discussion indicates the role of managerial competencies and personality assessment in the selection process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the impact of persistent racial bias, discrimination and racial violence is facilitated by otherwise well-intentioned individuals who fail to act or intercede. Utilizing the aversive racism framework, the need to move beyond awareness raising to facilitate behavioral changes is discussed. Examining the unique lens provided by the aversive racism framework and existing research, the bystander effect provides important insights on recent acts of racial violence such as the murder of Mr. George Floyd. Some promise is shown by the work on effective bystander behavior training and highlights the need for shared responsibility in preventing the outcomes of racial violence and discrimination to create meaningful and long-lasting social change.

This paper uses literature based on the aversive racism framework together with the literature on the bystander effect to understand the factors, conditions and consequences for lack of intervention when the victim is African American. This paper also provides evidence and theory-based recommendations for strategies to change passive bystanders into active allies.

The use of the aversive racism framework provides a powerful lens to help explain the inconsistencies in the bystander effect based on the race of the victim. The implications for intervention models point to the need for behavioral and competency-based approaches that have been shown to provide meaningful change.

Several different approaches to address incidents of racial aggression and violence have been developed in the past. However, given the principles of aversive racism, a unique approach that considers the inconsistencies between self-perceptions and actions is needed. This sets a new agenda for future research and meaningful behavioral intervention programs that seek to equip bystanders to intercede in the future.

The need to address and provide effective strategies to reduce the incidence of racial aggression and violence have wide-ranging benefits for individuals, communities and society.

By connecting the aversive racism framework to the bystander effect, the need for different models for developing responsive and active bystanders can be more effectively outlined.