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This study aims to investigate the effects of leadership competences (cognitive, interpersonal, and results-oriented competences) on organizational learning, organizational innovation, and business performance.

Data were collected from owners, chief executive officers, top and middle management teams, and other managers of tourism and hospitality firms in Vietnam. A total of 638 valid responses was collected and processed using PLS-SEM technique.

The findings revealed that only results-oriented competence exerted significant influences on business performance. Organizational learning was affected by all three leadership competences, while only cognitive and interpersonal competences positively affected organizational innovation. The relationships among organizational learning, organizational innovation, and business performance were also confirmed. Moreover, the findings emphasized the mediating roles of organizational learning and organizational innovation in the relationship between leadership competences and business performance. Organizational learning and organizational innovation also acted as a mediator in the relationship between cognitive competence and business performance.

This study provided some suggestions for tourism and hospitality leaders in exhibiting appropriate leadership competences, strengthening organizational learning, and fostering organization innovation to enhance business performance.

Although the topics of leadership competences, organizational learning, organization innovation, and business performance have received a great concern among worldwide academia, there is scarce research examining the relationships among these four phenomena together. This paper is among the first study that offers a comprehensive model of the relationships among these domains.

This paper specifies how to construct and validate an instrument based on multi‐item scales for the cataloguing and measurement of managerial and organizational capabilities on the basis of management perceptions. The construction and reduction of the scales have been reinforced by the Delphi and retesting techniques. The use of this methodology was illustrated in a sample of Spanish industrial firms. The paper enhances the value of the instruments for a resource‐based view with regard to the faithful and rigorous measurement of its key concept, distinctive competences. The scales created provide consistent empirical evidence to remove doubts surrounding managerial self‐evaluation, including those arising from problems of self‐esteem and reinforcement effects. In addition, the paper provides empirical evidence to support the predictive ability of distinctive competences on current and long‐term performance variability.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how human competences are associated with sustainable strategic management (SSM) within organisations.

This is a qualitative study in two phases: first, a theoretical phase is developed, resulting in a proposal for the role of human competences in organisational sustainability; second, an empirical phase including instrumental case studies of two large, sustainability-oriented Brazilian companies. Data were obtained from interviews and companies’ reports. The authors used Atlas.ti software to perform the thematic content analysis.

Despite the importance of human competences in SSM, the authors find evidence that this concept has not been developed, even for companies with a consolidated position in sustainability. Human competences are a requirement for effective SSM.

Coexisting elements within an organisation, often referred to as elements of organisational and human behaviour, can influence the dynamics of the expected interrelationships between human competences and sustainability management, in addition to the influencing factors presented in this study.

In general, studies advocate that the relationships among organisational competences, human competences and organisational strategies must be aligned and reinforced. Nevertheless, these relationships are not that solid as they should be as stated in both the literature and the conventional discourse of practitioners.

Although studies of “core competence” appear frequently, the concept lacks a clear definition that allows one to operationalize it and use it to develop falsifiable predictions. We propose a definition based on the phenomenon that core competence is typically applied to – adaptations to different external context. Sourcing insight form the paradigm of organizational ecology, we develop arguments rooted in theories of structural inertia and environmental imprinting. Empirical analyses of failure rates of entrants in the Italian automobile industry confirm our propositions that core competence is a source of competitive advantage when industry entry is based on relevant capabilities and a source of inertia and obsolescence when core competences need to be substantially altered. We conclude that whether core competence materializes as a dynamic capability or exposes the firm to liability to selection and obsolescence is a random process. Its outcome hinges on environmental variation and the resulting firm-environment (mis)alignment and is thus largely beyond managerial control.

Agile manufacturing is largely dependent on the capabilities of its people to learn and evolve with change. However, while agile manufacturing uses e‐commerce enabled technology in a decentralized organizational setting, it remains unclear how these individual capabilities should be linked to other organizational resources to create an agile organization. Another important modern management research perspective is the internal resource‐based perspective, resulting in a phenomenon called competence‐based competition with renewed attention for competence management. Competence management comprises the management, building, leveraging and deployment of strategic and operational competencies, the causal relationships and linkages between them, and the way competencies are embedded in organizational and individual resources. In this paper, we explore the relation between agile management and time‐based competence management, and study its adoption in small batch discrete parts manufacturing environments with the help of a coarse fact‐finding survey research.

Competence management should no longer be considered as disconnected activities with few relationships with the organizational goals. It is the viewpoint that competence management as a whole consists of different mechanisms and strategies that involve many functions in the organization and link strategy, product/service development, and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a public knowledge-intensive, project-intensive organization manages competence in relation to its organizational goals and to identify which mechanisms are involved in this process as well as the underlying factors of those mechanisms.

The research was conducted following a single case study approach using several sources of evidence in a public organization responsible for public transport in the south of Sweden.

A theoretical framework called the competence loop is used as a platform. The results expand the framework by identifying underlying factors constituting the mechanisms and categorizing those factors in organizational and social dimensions. Another contribution is the competence concept including the factors that generate new competence. Furthermore, the study highlights that organizational culture has an impact on efficient competence management.

This study was conducted in a public organization; similar studies should be conducted in other kinds of knowledge-intensive, project-intensive organizations.

The results provide support to practitioners when trying to understand how competence evolves, how to facilitate learning in organizations that are reliant on human resources, how to manage competence to achieve organizational success, and show the role of the project as a competence arena.

This paper is concerned with the formulation of a framework for understanding the development and change of the competences of firms. Today, there is near universal agreement that the competitiveness of firms rests on the (core) competences that firms possess. However, little attention has been devoted to the notion of competence development. In the paper, it will be argued that there is, indeed, a need for research and management practice of competence development. It will also be argued that organisational learning theory is a key to understanding competence development. Based on this, a model for competence development is proposed. This is the main contribution of the paper. The paper then concludes with a number of questions yet to be answered by research on competence‐based strategy.

The present paper aims to discuss the concept of competence from a multicultural perspective, for organisational success. It argues that models that view competence as a sum of competencies for management development within organisations could benefit from a multicultural perspective that put those competencies within the context of cultural sensitivity and understanding, so as to promote a trustworthy organisational environment crucial for any institutional change for competitive edge. It analyses theoretical approaches to the concept of competence in organisations, focusing particularly on those that take into account multicultural concerns and the need for building trust within organisational environments. It then addresses the meanings of competence as understood by executives acting in some organizations in Brazil, depicting emphases and silences in those discourses, as well as implications for logistics and management decision in a multicultural perspective.

This paper aims to examine how organisational values affect diversity in terms of different competencies in rural family Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Recruiting a diverse workforce in rural family SMEs can be particularly difficult due to the prevalence of internal family values and the lack of available local specialised competencies. A deficiency of diversity in employment and competence acquisition and development can create problems, as it often prevents rural family SMEs from recruiting employees with a wide variety of qualifications and skills.

The study takes on a multi-case method of Swedish rural family SMEs, applying a qualitative content analysis approach. In total, 20 in-depth structured interviews are conducted with rural family SME owners and 2 industries were investigated and compared – the tourism and the manufacturing industries.

Rural family SMEs lack long-term employment strategies, and competence diversity does not appear to be a priority for rural family SMEs, as they often have prematurely decided who they will hire rather than what competencies are needed for their long-term business development. It is more important to keep the team of employees tight and the family spirit present than to include competence diversity and mixed qualifications in the employment acquisition and development.

Contrary to prior research, our findings indicate that rural family SMEs apply short-term competence diversity strategies rather than long-term prospects regarding competence acquisition and management, due to their family values and rural setting, which strictly narrows the selection of employees and competencies. Also, a general reluctance towards competence diversity is identified, which originates from the very same family values and rural context.

The authors aimed to investigate whether the competencies of public servants (self-competence, teamwork competence, change competence, communication competence (CC) and ethical competence) influence their organizational commitment and indirectly their job satisfaction.

Based on a structural model from the literature, the authors conducted a survey with 463 Brazilian public servants using a questionnaire, and the authors evaluated the measurement model through confirmatory component analysis (CCA). Then, the authors used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the structural model.

The authors' results showed that the ethical competence construct tends to have a direct positive influence on the organizational commitment construct and indirectly influences the job satisfaction of public servants. On the other hand, the authors found that the self-competence, teamwork competence, change competence and CC constructs did not impact organizational commitment or job satisfaction indirectly.

The authors conclude that developing ethical competence in public servants is likely to increase their organizational commitment and indirectly positively affect their job satisfaction. This research tested the five dimensions of competencies under a new focus, public service, seeking to evidence their relationships with the organizational commitment and job satisfaction of public servants, filling a gap in the literature.