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The goal of this chapter is to explore the requirements modern companies expect of HR professionals’ competences.

Departing from the widely acknowledged HR competence studies of Ulrich and associates, we extended them with the continuous learning competence profile and HR professionals’ individual job performance. The empirical study is built on open interviews with HR leaders of ten large Dutch companies.

The study offers a new set of HRM competences. This set includes six HRM profiles: Business Focus, Learning Focus, Strategic Focus, HR Technology, HR Delivery, and Personal Credibility. Several contingency factors are thought to play a role in supporting these HRM competences: company culture, strategy, size, sector, scope, and position of HR professionals.

Based on these contributions, we recommended conducting a quantitative study to gain understanding of the relevance of the individual HRM job performance and to find associations between the HRM competences and the individual HRM job performance.

The focus of this chapter is a combination of HRM competences and the individual job performance of HR professionals.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to study which perceived and attained entrepreneurial competences acquired by students while developing a business plan are rated most highly; and second, to analyse the differences observed in entrepreneurial competences, depending on whether the business plan developed is real or fictitious.

To analyse the role played by business plans in perceptions and attainment of competence, data were collected from students enrolled on a final project course of a bachelor’s degree, specifically the Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Management at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The course in question focussed on entrepreneurship and business plans. The data on perceived and attained competences were obtained through questionnaires and assessment rubrics, respectively. Mean comparison analyses were conducted to investigate any differences in entrepreneurial competences existing between students developing real or fictitious business plans.

The paper finds evidence that the process of creating a business plan results in entrepreneurial competence being highly rated and that whether the business plan is real or fictitious does not affect the level of entrepreneurial competence.

A longitudinal study will be required to analyse how entrepreneurial competences evolve during the business plan creation process.

This paper finds that few studies have been conducted to explore entrepreneurial competences in relation to business plan development and shows that more complete research is required. Moreover, both perceived and achieved competences are considered, an analysis not previously carried out.

Competence-based theory provides valuable insights in a business context characterized by global ecosystems, co-specialization, and asset orchestration. As the unit of analysis shifts from the individual enterprise to the ecosystem, pursuing proper competence building and competence leveraging activities considering both firm-specific and firm-addressable resources becomes a key issue in strategy development.

Based on the original concepts of the competence-based theory, this paper suggests that the competence space can be a useful framework when considering alternative ecosystem strategies. Competence-based theory, emphasizing the simultaneous pursuit of competence leveraging and competence building, provides an important complement to other dynamic perspectives on strategy, such as dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity. The paper also suggests considering the inclusion of aesthetic properties as an important part of competence-based theory.

This paper proposes a semi-Beerian frame of reference for designing a business organization as a system with four subsystems and eight modes of thinking and interacting in both offering and resource markets. A systemic organizational competence includes an ability to connect a business unit with its markets. It possesses absorption, attenuation, and amplifier capacities. It guides and re-specifies all technology, embedded knowledge, capabilities, and other resources that together enable a business unit to act in the predefined, emerging, or innovative ways needed for goal attainment. Ex ante, various research traditions were regrouped into eight schools of thought on business management based on Porter's frameworks, resources, competences, knowledge, organizations, processes, business dynamism, and evolution. The findings reveal that various core, distinct, organizational, higher, and lower competences and capabilities play both primary and secondary roles, across the eight schools of thought, within a population of 84 competence-related business-management concepts published between years 1990 and 2002. Most authors do not deal with competitiveness boundary setting and modeling. A new frame of reference points to some viable avenues of producing highly applicable competence-based concepts as four semi-Beerian subsystems (boundaries, models, designs, and actions). Managing a business unit successfully involves eight kinds of explicit and tacit knowledge, situational information, reflections, decisions, models, designs, and interactions. It is proposed that a high degree of systemic advancement is one of the necessary attributes of any competence-based concept that will be proven to be highly applicable in managing a real dynamic business. Thus, competence-based scholars are encouraged to adopt the suggested assumptions, redesign their concepts as one or several semi-Beerian subsystems, and thus advance their school of thought markedly in the future.

In recent years, the rise of big data has led to an obvious shift in the competence profile expected from the controller and management accountant (MA). Among others, business analytics competences and information technology skills are considered a “must have” capability for the controlling and MA profession. As it still remains unclear if these requirements can be fulfilled by today’s employees, the purpose of this study is to examine the supply of business analytics competences in the current competence profiles of controlling professionals in an attempt to answer the question whether or not a skills gap exists.

Based on a set of 2,331 member profiles of German controlling professionals extracted from the business social network XING, a text analytics approach is conducted to discover patterns out of the semi-structured data. In doing so, the second purpose of this study is to encourage researchers and practitioners to integrate and advance big data analytics as a method of inquiry into their research process.

Apart from the mediating role of gender, company size and other variables, the results indicate that the current competence profiles of the controller do not comply with the recent requirements towards business analytics competences. However, the answer to the question whether a skills gap exist must be made cautiously by taking into account the specific organizational context such as level of IT adoption or the degree of job specialization.

Guided by the resource-based view of the firm, organizational theory and social cognitive theory, an explanatory model is developed that helps to explain the apparent skills gap, and thus, to enhance the understanding towards the rationales behind the observed findings. One major limitation to be mentioned is that the data sample integrated into this study is restricted to member profiles of German controlling professionals from foremost large companies.

The insights provided in this study extend the ongoing debate in accounting literature and business media on the skills changes of the controlling and MA profession in the big data era. The originality of this study lies in its explicit attempt to integrate recent advances in data analytics to explore the self-reported competence supplies of controlling professionals based on a comprehensive set of semi-structured data. A theoretically founded explanatory model is proposed that integrates empirically validated findings from extant research across various disciplines.

This paper aims to investigate the moderating dynamics of social competence in the relationship between intangible resources and the performance of women businesses from an emerging market context. Developed economy literature provides ample evidence of a positive relationship between intangible resources and the performance of women business ventures. Little is known of the complexity of this orthodoxy in developing markets such as Ghana. In particular, this paper investigates the moderating role of social competence in the relationship between intangible resources available to women entrepreneurs and performance.

An exploratory sequential mixed method research design was used. First phase involved qualitative data collected through interviews, and the second phase was quantitative data collected from 264 participants. Content analysis and multiple regression analysis were used.

Social competence is important to the success of women businesses as it influences the outcome of entrepreneurial interactions and communications. Also, it positively moderated the relationship between organisational reputational capital (RC) and women business growth. On the flip side, it negatively moderated the relationship between human capital, social capital, individual RC and women business growth.

To sustainably grow their businesses, women entrepreneurs must ascertain the right level of social competence needed. The utilization of social competence at higher rather than lower levels could mean more costs and more training for which the business may not have immediate use.

This paper advocates the need to improve the content of entrepreneurial training packages to include the reinforcement of social competency skills in terms of relationship management as this may be the key to the facilitation of access to resources for innovation and growth.

This chapter is based on a four-year literature review process that focused on conceptual business management research. A new platform for advancing business management in competence-related ways is compiled using 66 references that contain a population of 84 competence-related business management concepts published in English between the years 1990 and 2002. For the purposes of this study, the home bases of focal firms are limited to the OECD countries. Ex ante, various research traditions were regrouped into eight schools of thought on business management based on resources, competences, knowledge, organizations, processes, business dynamism, evolution, and Porter's frameworks. The eligible concepts were identified via an analysis of 50 journals and books of 18 publishers. The findings reveal that 99 authors have assigned primary or secondary roles to a firm's competences within their 84 concepts across the eight schools of thought. The two schools with primary emphasis on a firm's competences, the dynamism-based school (18 concepts) and the competence-based school (16 concepts), have produced 34 (41%) concepts. The six other schools have generated 50 (60%) concepts: 14 knowledge-based, ten resource-based, ten evolutionary, seven Porterian, seven organization-based, and two process-based concepts. The platform developed in this chapter may help researchers to focus on the most promising areas and ways to produce highly applicable concepts for managing a firm's dynamic business. Some suggestions to this end are put forth: (i) increase future collaboration between scholars, business managers, and business consultants, (ii) advance competence-based concepts primarily along the international business dimension, and (iii) conduct future competence-related literature reviews. The rigorous conduct of future reviews involves the replicable ways of searching, browsing, including or excluding, retrieving, inferring, coding, and presenting the conceptual data.

An issue of managing a business (unit) as a whole successfully is perceived to belong to the fundamental issues within strategic management. This paper proposes that a business unit can be managed successfully in short and longer term in its focal contexts as a set of three recursive, competence-based, and process-based systems. Many elements of Stafford Beer's (1985) viable system model along the key competence-based theoretical bases are applied to this system design task. The outcome is an ideal, recursive template for advancing competence-based business management (CBBM) and its conceptual modeling. It is assumed that it is possible to design a business unit as a viable system that is capable of sustaining a separate existence at only three levels of hierarchy, as part of single or multi-business firms. Business-process models and their redesign processes are chosen as the 2nd-order, focal system which produces a business unit's competitiveness and solves longitudinal CBBM problems. One level of recursion down includes a unit's value creating, capturing, releveraging, and respective processes that enable to solve cross-sectional problems. One level of recursion up includes a unit's existential foresights and their crafting processes that solve existential problems. Recursivity is designed inside each system in terms of three kinds of subsystems for (a) primary value releveraging, process-model redesign, and business-foresight crafting, (b) the management of varieties in releveraging, modeling, and foreseeing, and (c) the monitoring and probing of all three systems. Systemic competences are incorporated inside respective systems. Such competences possess three flexibilities of absorption, attenuation, and amplification. At each level of recursion, a competence-based process is a unit of conceptual modeling of CBBM. A business unit is defined as a set of its purposeful processes. No thing or one is left outside them. Viability is ensured by real-time interaction and the 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-order feedback loops between three systems. Overall, the suggested, recursive, 3-system template is intended to serve future, compatible modeling efforts among interested, pioneering firms, professional CBBM modelers, scholars, and alike. Its novelty is produced by choosing and designing the CBBM modeling as the 2nd-order system-in-focus with its two recursions, by designing and using systemic, competence-based processes as the units of conceptualization, and by choosing and drawing the figures to illustrate the 3-system template in the ways that allow also business managers comprehend and apply the suggested template in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what competences are considered critical for team and human resources (HR) managers when selecting inexperienced Business graduates. Second, the authors aim to find out differences existing among businesses and organizations according to company size, and very particularly, the resources used with respect to the inexperienced graduate personnel selection practices.

To this end, the authors have performed an empirical study consisting of two qualitative data-gathering processes and a survey. First, the authors completed 12 in-depth interviews, followed by three world cafés with HR managers and consultants. Second, a survey was also conducted with 186 experienced Business graduates, team managers or middle-level staff.

The main results support the idea that generic competencies are the ones most appreciated in graduates. Attitudes are among the generic competencies considered most critical in inexperienced Business graduates. In particular, intra-personal, followed by inter-personal attitudes and values, were the most frequently cited and highly valued competencies. In contrast, most of the specific knowledge competences that are required for Business graduates are taken for granted. For its part, the authors found that excelling inexperienced graduates are those who show convincing proofs of holding attitudinal competences, signaled through some experience of international interchange programs, or pre-graduate internships in companies. Also, the authors found that HR managers and consultants show clear differences of preference for a set of competences or another depending on the size of the recruiting company. In particular, generic competences of knowledge, abilities, attitudes and values rate higher among small firms than larger ones.

Finally, the authors give recommendations for faculties and business schools headed to a more intensive development of generic competences, and the learning of skills on how to tailor curricula during studies and how to find jobs.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how business process configurations influence motivation among process participants.

An experiment was conducted in which business process rules complexity, work backlog, and case distribution method were manipulated. Participant motivation and its antecedents were measured using a survey.

The study finds that business process configurations influence the motivation of process participants through their effect on perceived competence. Increasing business process rules complexity reduces competence. The effect of case distribution method on competence depends on backlog. Sequential distribution undermines competence in the presence of backlog, and enhances competence when backlog is absent. However, batch distribution results in higher competence in the presence of backlog than in its absence.

The study confirms the applicability of self-determination theory for analyzing the effect of work settings, including business process configurations, on employee motivation. The study further demonstrates the applicability of the task technology fit model in the context of business process automation.

The study suggests that reducing process complexity through the use of information technology can benefit process participant motivation. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of case distribution method on performance expectations.

While much of the extant research has considered the enhancement of business processes at the organizational level, this study examines how business process design can be used to preserve and potentially enhance the motivation of human process participants.