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Accounting Education Change Commission reveals that accounting professionals are required to have interpersonal skills. For this reason, higher education requires the dynamics of learning that can foster critical thinking skills, analysis, communication, negotiation, cooperation and argumentation. Therefore, studies in the field of accounting education have led to a project approach to provide students with complex learning experiences to develop various supporting skills in addition to learning outcomes. Interestingly, the methods have its own dilemma with social loafing in groups. Therefore, a lecturer must be able to match it with an appropriate evaluation instrument. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of implementing peer evaluations and project-based learning (SMEs project) on improving the interpersonal skills of accounting students.

The population of this research is Accounting students at Medan State University, while the sample is students who are undergoing Cost Accounting courses taken with purposive sampling. The within-sample of field experiment method was conducted in the current study. Furthermore, data analysis was performed using one-way ANOVA analysis assisted by SPSS 19.

The results of this study showed that students had an increase in interpersonal skills in their board, and peer-evaluation design resulted in learning satisfaction and fairness in students.

The results of this study produce practical recommendations for lecturers to innovate their learning activities with actual project design and control group dynamics with accommodative evaluation designs. This study provides new insights in building a comprehensive instructional design, so it can strengthen the concept of instructional and evaluation designs which are integral parts that should match between one another.

Managerial interpersonal skills (MIPS) are widely considered important for management development, yet the nature of MIPS has eluded researchers. The purpose of this paper is to propose five MIPS core skills, giving attention to the role of context, the relationship of MIPS to traits, and implications for training design, assessment and evaluation.

The authors interweave a discussion forum of domain experts (Hillary Anger-Elfenbein, Timothy Baldwin, Paulo Lopes, Bronston T. Mayes, Ronald Riggio, Robert Rubin and David Whetten) with research commentary and implications for management development. The discussion focussed on: first, how do we define MIPS? Second, how important is context for defining, assessing or developing MIPS? Third, are MIPS traits, or skills that can be developed?

The authors propose MIPS include five core skills that sequentially build upon one another: managing-self, communicating, supporting, motivating and managing conflict. Although context may impact the importance of each skill across cultures, situations and jobs, the authors offer these skills as a useful starting point for MIPS assessment, training design and evaluation.

The proposed five core skill model for MIPS needs further research and psychometric validation.

By proposing MIPS include five specific trainable skills that are relevant across contexts, this paper advances MIPS research, assessment and development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of interpersonal skills (emotional and political skills) and work engagement on transformational leadership and leader well-being at work.

Emotional control, emotional sensitivity, political skills, work engagement, transformational leadership behaviors, and job satisfaction were assessed in an empirical study of 278 employees. The relationships between emotional skills, political skills, work engagement, and transformational leadership were evaluated using participants in managerial positions (n=159). The combined influence of interpersonal skills and work engagement on job satisfaction was examined as a comparison between managers and non-managers (n=119).

In addition to the positive effects of work engagement on outcome measures, results showed political skill is an important capability contributing to transformational leadership and leaders’ job satisfaction. Findings also showed the interaction of emotional skill, political skill, and work engagement contributed to job satisfaction among managers.

Organizations must provide managers with opportunities to develop political skills or modify selection processes to identify candidates who possess political skills for management positions. Organizations will also benefit from implementing ways to engage managers in their work to facilitate transformational leader behaviors and promote their well-being. In addition, organizations can work to identify and develop managers’ emotional control and sensitivity skills specific to individual needs.

Research investigating personal attributes that influence transformational leadership as an outcome is limited. This study contributes to the leadership literature and sheds light on the literature on the microfoundations of management competencies by examining managers’ skills and engagement on their leader behaviors and job satisfaction. Insights are discovered regarding the combination of emotional skills, political skills, and work engagement that indicate interpersonal skills and engagement have supplementary effects on transformational leader behaviors and leader well-being.

This chapter reports how accounting professionals and students perceive the proficiency of their communication skills. We find that professionals perceive themselves as having higher interpersonal skills, writing skills, and speaking skills than do students. Despite decades of accounting curricula’s focus on communication skills, there remains a perception gap between students and professionals on the importance of these skills. Professionals not only perceive that they have stronger communication skills, but they also consider these skills as more important for career success than do students. Furthermore, we find that, even after controlling for the difference in perceived communication skill levels, this perception gap continues to exist between accounting professionals and students.

IES 3 Professional Skills, issued by the International Federation of Accountants in 2003, lists five essential skills that professional accountants need to acquire: intellectual, technical and functional, personal, interpersonal and communication, and organisational and business management skills. In education programmes, accounting students may be required to work in teams and may therefore acquire some of these skills through the team experience. IES 8, Competence requirements for audit professionals, includes “working in teams effectively” and “presenting, discussing, and defending views effectively through formal, informal, written, and spoken communication” as part of the skills requirement which should be included in the education and development programme for audit professionals. Working in teams, or cooperative learning, is a teaching technique used in the formal education phase, which enables students to acquire some of these skills. The paper uses the results of a questionnaire survey to investigate how teams function in an accounting project. Although the results indicate that skills such as meeting management and interpersonal skills have a positive effect on the students’ satisfaction with the team, no link could be found to the students’ project mark. These results suggest that skills such as meeting management and interpersonal skills, if included in the formal education phase, may contribute positively to students’ career preparedness. The study also found that students did not consider peer assessment appropriate.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether engaging in course service-learning projects can impact interpersonal oral communication confidence and skill development beyond that of traditional course research projects.

Three sections of a university management course were randomly assigned to have a service-learning team project, while the other three retained the traditional research team project. All projects were student-generated. Survey data were collected at the beginning of the semester and at the end four months later.

Results indicated that service-learning produces greater oral communication self-efficacy. For female students, service-learning projects also increased their interpersonal communication self-efficacy and interpersonal communication competence (but not for males).

The sample was limited to students in a management course, service-learning projects were only completed by groups and the study did not examine outcomes beyond four months. Future research could examine outcomes from projects by individuals, and examine what service-learning components create differing results between men and women.

Oral communication confidence can be bolstered through service-learning. Benefits may depend upon participant characteristics (like gender). Inasmuch as different service-learning projects positively impacted oral communication, students can be given flexibility in the kinds of projects they undertake.

This study answered the widespread calls for empirical data to support the claims of service-learning as a beneficial pedagogical tool. The experimental and measurement design overcame the limitations of some previous research. In addition, the study examined the crucial skill area of interpersonal oral communication.

Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software development concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely help in determining personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether employers' soft skills requirements, as advertised in job postings, within different roles of software development, are similar across different cultures.

The authors review the literature relating to soft skills before describing a study based on 500 job advertisements posted on well‐known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations, including North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The study makes use of nine defined soft skills to assess the level of demand for each of these skills related to individual job roles within the software industry.

It was found that in the cases of designer, programmer and tester, substantial similarity exists for the requirements of soft skills, whereas only in the case of system analyst is dissimilarity present across different cultures. It was concluded that cultural difference does not have a major impact on the choice of soft skills requirements in hiring new employee in the case of the software development profession.

Specific studies concerning soft skills and software development have been sporadic and often incidental, which highlights the originality of this work. Moreover, no concrete work has been reported in the area of soft skills and their demand as a part of job requirement sets in diverse cultures, which increases the value of this paper.

Reports a study of over 600 soldiers enrolled in Junior Units of the British Army. Investigates their perceptions of leadership skills in general and their own leadership qualities both before and after experiencing a leadership course. Leadership skills and qualities are classified as innate personal qualities, personal leadership skills, interpersonal skills and managerial skills. While such courses are seen to improve the self‐perception of personal leadership skills and qualities of all types, the courses fail to emphasize the overall importance of interpersonal skills and managerial skills.

Classifies the critical knowledge/skill set according to content or domain of knowledge by means of a survey. This is conducted in accordance with what IS practitioners and educators can easily relate. The survey uses this approach and includes four broad categories of critical Information Systems (IS) knowledge/skills: IS technology knowledge/skills, organizational and societal knowledge/skills, interpersonal knowledge/skills, and personal trait knowledge/skills.

One factor which may limit the growth of interpersonal skills training is a shortage of skilled tutors to provide the feedback and guidance which trainees require to improve their performance. Effective tutoring requires both the diagnostic skills to establish what trainees should be doing differently to improve their performance and the interactive skills to put this over in such a way that trainees will accept and act on it. This article describes a model of the processes involved in interactions between people, which is designed to help tutors to identify the key “intervention points” where action can most effectively be taken to improve trainees' skills. This model is then used to show how, by means of role‐played tutoring practice, tutors' interactive skills can be improved in such areas as selection of an appropriate approach, structuring analysis and feedback sessions, verbal and non‐verbal behaviour and achievement of objectives.