Competencies for Senior Manager Roles
Authors: Khandwalla Pradip N 
Published: January 2017

This paper identifies competencies that may aid role effectiveness at senior managerial levels. It fills a research gap: while managerial roles and competencies have been studied fairly extensively, their relationships have not been demonstrated. The performance of senior level managers — and therefore of the organization — depends upon how well they play their varied roles. In this paper, the roles of senior managers have been categorized into nine strategic, nine operations-related, and nine leadership roles. Strategic roles relate to such matters of long-term and organization-wide import as policy formulation, setting of long-term objectives, articulation of a vision of excellence for the organization, contributing to the organization's growth and diversification, procuring of strategic resources and intelligence, etc. Operations-related roles cover implementation of policies and changes, setting short-term targets, work allocation to staff, operating a control system, crisis management, etc. Leadership roles encompass inspiring subordinates, developing effective relationships, getting cooperation, emphasizing core values and norms, mentoring, fostering teamwork and collaborative effort, effective conflict resolution, etc.

Forty-five senior manager-level competencies have been categorized into six groups as follows: competencies related to contextual sensitivity (power structure management) management of initiatives introduction of innovations resilience and effective coping through problem solving effective task execution interpersonal competence and leadership.

The data were gathered from 73 managers attending training programmes for top and senior level managers at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and several associates of these managers. The ratings of each participant and his/her associates for the participant's role effectiveness and competencies were averaged to secure scores for each participant. Correlation analysis was employed to identify relationships between perceived role effectiveness and perceived competencies. The number of statistically significant correlations between the 27 roles and 45 competencies was over a thousand, suggesting a close overall relationship between roles and competencies. To focus only on strong relationships, a cut-off of a correlation of 0.50 was kept. The key findings were: There was a relative deficiency in playing leadership roles and in leadership and interpersonal competencies. There was greater proficiency in playing strategic and operations-related roles. Two relatively weak competency categories were initiatives management and introduction of innovations. The senior managers' main strengths were in the areas of task execution and contextual sensitivity. The number of ‘core’ competencies (competencies strongly correlated with at least 75 % of the roles in a category) ranged from 11 for leadership roles to 18 for strategic roles. Competencies varied considerably in the breadth of their impact on role effectiveness - there were six competencies that were ‘core’ for all three categories of roles (versatile competencies), while nine competencies were specialized in their relationship to specific categories of roles. The six competencies that were ‘core’ for all three categories appeared to be those that enhanced the credibility of the possessor to his/her associates, and possibly thereby enabled the possessor to play so many roles effectively.

This paper concludes with several implications of the findings for management and further work.