Leadership and Managerial Competences in a Contemporary Organization from the Standpoint of Business Executives

ABSTRACT. The aim of the article is to present the insights of advanced organization management and to examine how settled ideas are reflected in the attitude of organizations' top management in Lithuania. The results of meta-analysis revealed that modern organizations should be managed with a new attitude to manager's work. A modern manager must be a leader who is able to enable employees and collaborate in a team. Scholars state that these strivings require the leader to possess managerial competences based on a high emotional and social intellect of a person. Leaders of 48 empirically examined organizations in Lithuania also emphasized the importance of leaders' specific managerial competences. The research participants noted that relations with other people are becoming much more important for the contemporary leaders than before.The research enabled to develop a model of modern leader's characteristics. The model states that only leaderhaving specific values, attitudes, competences, abilities and professional characteristics is able to overcome managerial challenges in nowadays organizations.JEL Classification: L20, M1, M12Keywords: leadership, managerial competences, organization management.IntroductionOrganization success is inseparable from the managerial practice just like any organized social activity is inseparable from the values, attitudes, abilities and behaviour of the group"s leader. Practical problems of management and leadership are being solved for as much as mankind exists. However, question of management efficiency and leadership effectiveness are still relevant. The cause of this is the fact that social, along with economic and technological environment is changing. Due to this reason challenges and assignments of organization management are changing as well. Thus each manager should renew his attitudes, managerial skills and behavior by requirements of current date.Leadership is extraordinary because a one-direction arrow cannot be drawn trying to show leader's and the organization's interdependency. It is myth to believe that leaders, who only consider the requirements of market and the society are exactly what organizations pursuing efficiency need. The organization"s dependence on its leaders is much more broader. In addition, formal and informal leaders of the organizations influence not only the work specifics and success of organizations they are working in, but also form business environment, partner organization"s communication style and even indirectly influence the market needs by forming the client"s comprehension on what they could wish for and what is possible and acceptable in general. In other words, not only the environment changes motivate organizations and their leaders to change, but also leaders affect the medium of existence of the organization and inspire changes in its environment.The factor of management is also important when considering the inward of the organization. As Thompson (2010) notices, the leaders" influence in the organization is felt in various activities, from creation of work strategy of the whole company and work planning to communication features of separate group"s members in a project. Therefore, a particular attention has to be given to the organization managers and the development of their leadership competences in order to reach good results, because leadership is the axis that kick-starts all other processes in the organization and affects numerous variables outside the organization. The insights on managers' competences should be grounded with proofs and arguments. This may be achieved by investigations, by knowledge gathered on research conclusions, and by conversance in real managerial problems.In this context, the aim of the article is to define insights of advanced management by using meta-analysis, and to examine how settled ideas are reflected in the attitude of organizations' top management. Three assignments were set in order to achieve the aim: 1) to carry out an analysis of modern scientific publications and to highlight the organization leaders" competences that are mostly required by the current time; 2) to carry out a qualitative research in order to ascertain, what managerial and leadership competences does the organizations" top management name as the most important in modern organizations; 3) to compress the results of meta-analysis and interviews by submitting a schematized portrait of a modern organizational leader, i. …