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Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: A Co-Relational Study

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Ruchi Tewari Ritu Sharma

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 Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: A Co-relational Study

Dr. Ruchi Tewari; Faculty; IBS - Ahmedabad

Dr. Ritu Sharma; Clinical Psychologist; IBS Ahmedabad

Abstract

The paper explores the relationship between management students‘ academic performance and
soft skills. The corporate expects the students to be equipped with the set of managerial skills
which their role requires. These skills have been bundled under the label of soft skills for the
purpose of this study. One area in which business programs have been unable to meet the
expectations of the corporate world is the development of these skills. The ghost of the
conventional mindset still haunts management education and therefore the students focus upon
academic excellence though the recruiters aim at hiring graduates who have the content
(academic understanding of the theories and concepts) and can deliver (possible effectively
through soft skills).

Keywords: Soft Skills, Academic Performance and Managerial Skills.

INTRODUCTION

The growth India has been experiencing for the last two decades is phenomenal and there has
been an immense rise in the number of institutes and centers offering professional and technical
education yet the industry and the employers are unhappy with the kind of workforce being
churned out. Sullivan puts it as, ―the industry has a problem: It's running out of workers.‖
(2007). Therefore the situation in the Indian job market is peculiar and strange. The number of
educated and professionally eligible workforce ready to be employed is on the rise and yet the
level of unemployment is also not compromising. The Indian potential workforce has seen a
phenomenal rise in the number of educationally qualified labour force with more than 400,000
engineers and a million graduates joining the labor pool annually. Of this lot, only 100,000 are
industry ready. The recruiters have been investing heavily in training the fresh recruits which has
been the order of the day till the global economic scenario saw a change. With the onset of
recession in several developed economies and a distinct slowdown in the major developing
economies of the world, the human resource will be most affected business factor. It holds
further true for economies like India which have relied heavily on outsourcing. A large number
of young Indians have seen a surge in the number of job opportunities and in the salary structures
owing to the MNCs and the career opportunities arising out of India being a desirable
outsourcing hub. But with the changed times and developed economies getting tough on
outsourcing, the workforce need to be geared up and equipped to survive the tough times. Apart
from dwindling outsourcing job opportunities, ironical focus of cost cutting on training and a
stringent recruitment procedure indicates and leads to a simplistic conclusion that in present
tough economic scenario, the recruits needs to be better prepared and fully equipped before
envisaging a job opportunity. Apart from the qualification the candidates need to focus and hone
their soft skills to be able to manage the stress, be comfortable and effective in the managing and
working with a culturally diverse, globally spread out team. To be able to negotiate employee
and partner transactions, communicate and have the ability to successfully guide and steer
workforces towards organizational goals. All the above needs are an extension of the various soft
skill factors, therefore reiterating the importance and relevance of soft skills for the prospective
and present day managers.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Studies on managerial role

Mintzberg (1973) provided one of the most influential works on managerial roles. Prior to his
research, the roles of managers were understood to be embedded in a rigid functional approach
of planning jobs, organizing staff, and leading personnel (Pearson and Chatterjee, 2003).
However, Mintzberg observed that managers worked at a much faster pace during which they
were required to address a range of issues. The job of the manager required an ability to handle
more complex roles than those described by classical management theory. Using a descriptive
diary method to observe managers at work, Mintzberg identified ten roles of managerial work,
which were divided into three categories: interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional
roles. Expanding on Mintzberg‘s (1973) work, Kraut et al. (1989) investigated the differences
between managerial levels in the perception of role importance. They identified seven major
factors of management tasks including: managing individual performance; instructing
subordinates; planning and allocating resources; coordinating interdependent groups;
managing group performance; monitoring the business environment; and representing
one’s staff. Their findings also revealed distinct differences in role importance based on the level
of the manager. For instance, first-level managers reported that managing individual
performance and instructing subordinates were the most important set of activities in their job.
However, as managers moved up the management hierarchy to the level of middle manager, the
importance of these activities dropped and more focus was placed on tasks related to linking
groups. The act of linking groups included planning and resource allocation, managing group
performance, and coordinating interdependent groups. Executive managers took an even broader
view of their job as evidenced by their high importance ratings related to monitoring the
environment including business, economic, and social trends. Luthans (1988) research also
examined differences between top and middle managers. However the focus was more on the
distinction between the activities of an effective manager versus a successful manager. Effective
managers were identified by a high level of performance in the unit they are responsible for,
whereas successful managers were recognized by their rapid promotions within an organization.
The activities that characterize effective managers included spending time on communication
and human resource management, which can lead to long-term results. In contrast, successful
managers spent more time on networking and aimed for short-term results.
The present study tries to identify the factors that employers consider important while selecting
new employees for managerial roles. While past researches have determined what roles or
activities are important for managers and what tasks managers tend to spend much of their time
on, this paper attempts to determine what skills are important for managerial jobs. In addition, it
will examine whether managerial skills are important across different organizational levels and
organizational functions in the context of today‘s work environment.
The work on traits and skills can help those involved in management development to design
more effective training programmes to develop or enhance a particular management skill.

2.1 Managerial Skills

The impact and the consequences of managerial decisions are far reaching and most the deciding
factor in not only the functioning of the organization but in deciding its success and failure.
Therefore it is essential that a manager should be able to solve problems, make decisions, and
therefore give direction to choose the optimum and appropriate direction, all of which is not only
risky but difficult as well. The basic necessity for effective decision making process, apart from
environmental support is a clear understanding of the skills required for the assigned
responsibility or the managerial role. Further, insight into the needed skills and responsibilities of
other managers working vertically and horizontally across similar and different organizational
levels and functions is equally necessary (Kraut et al., 1989). So, a lack of understanding of
relevant skills and responsibilities would lead to failed coordination, communication gaps,
inability to deliver and provide feedback and inability to be prepared for job transitions or other
training and career development activities (Kraut et al., 1989). Concisely, an understanding
whether managerial skills are important to a manager‘s job is essential. A number of researchers
have investigated the roles, tasks, or activities of managers (e.g. Mintzberg, 1973; Luthans, 1988;
Kraut et al., 1989).However, these studies are over a decade old, some more than two or three
decades, and have not specifically examined skills. The world of work has changed since these
studies, most notably due to organizational downsizing, technology, and the globalization of the
workplace. Skills important to managers in the late 1980s and early 1990s may not be as
important today. As times change, researchers should update important findings to determine if
those findings are still applicable (Cronbach, 1975), especially when considering that the skills
and roles of managers need to be clearly defined and understood to effectively teach, select,
develop, and promote these individuals in the workplace.
GMAC report, (2007) by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce projected
that with the globalization of the world economy, ―the best employers the world over will be
looking for the most competent, most creative and most innovative people on the face of the
earth and will be willing to pay them top dollar for their services. ― This projection creates
enormous opportunities for the young business professionals but brings with it the pleasure of
competition‖. Candidates will have to be comfortable with ideas and abstractions, good at both
analysis and synthesis, creative and innovative, self-disciplined and well-organized, able to learn
very quickly and work well as a member of a team, and have flexibility to adapt quickly to
frequently changes in the labor market as the shifts in the economy become even faster and more
dramatics.‖ continues the Commission.
For well more than a decade, many schools have responded to criticisms of the relevance of
management education. One area in which business programs were found lacking was the
development of management skills (Leavitt, 1989; Porter & McKibbin, 1988). A wide variety of
curricular innovations at both the graduate and undergraduate levels have been introduced that
focus on managerial skill development (Boyatzis, 1994; Whetton, Windes, May, & Bookstaver,
1991). These innovations range from integrated sets of courses that comprise a whole curriculum
focused on development of managerial to self-contained electives or required courses within
undergraduate management majors. The successful development of these innovations requires a
large amount of intellectual, financial, and perhaps even political capital. Although some smaller
schools have been leaders in this area, we believe that many smaller schools may be reluctant to
accept the challenge and as a result are constrained from offering the best possible programs in
the management skills area.
Our experiences have informed us that a variety of learning environments and approaches
enhances effectiveness. Furthermore, for MBA students, the teacher must shift from a traditional
lecture, passive learning mode to a more facilitative, interactive mode for a skill competency
model. Both of these points with regard to adult learners have been well established for some
time (Beavers and Burris, 1976). The learning environment must be one in which students are
comfortable in examining their strengths and weaknesses without feeling threatened. The
environment must offer opportunities to explore, experiment, and learn from peers. This implies
that they have the freedom to question and debate the relevance of this course and its methods. It
has been a challenge for the instructors to balance the focus on reflection, self-awareness, and
personal planning with skill knowledge and performance enhancement. One caveat must be
noted as more methods for learning are incorporated into the program—the instructor must
become more active in organizing and assisting students with the integration of information from
the different settings and approaches. Otherwise, students may feel overwhelmed and fail to
integrate their learning.
Education, especially for MBA students, competes with other life demands—work, personal, and
social life. Most management development teaching models include five components:
assessment, learning, analysis, practice, and application. Testing is necessary to ensure that
learning occurs or, at the very least, that students give the information the level of attention we
believe to be crucial. In particular, we must remind students that the required career plan is not
evaluated on the goals chosen. Rather, the evaluation is on the quality of the planning process.
Finally, from our experience we have found competency-based education that expects more than
textbook learning to require an additional commitment from both the faculty members and
students to match up with the industry demands.
2.2 Defining Managerial Skills
Whetten and Cameron (2002, p. 8), early in their textbook, suggest that:
Whereas people with different styles and personalities may apply the skills differently, there
are, nevertheless, a core set of observable attributes in effective skill performance that are
common across a range of individual differences.
This statement appears to be contradictory: people with different styles and personalities may
apply skills differently, but there are a core set of observable attributes in effective skill
performance that are common despite individual differences in people. The suggestion is that
even though people may be individually different and even collectively different in the form of
groups, nations, cultures, etc., the core set of attributes for effective managerial skill performance
are common, even though what we observe in the application of those skills may be different?
What is actually the critical skill is not the ―skill‖ itself, but the application and performance of
the skill. If the application and performance of the skill is dependent upon different styles and
personalities, or if the context in which the skill is applied determines the manner of its
application and performance, then the skill itself becomes at best secondary and at worst
redundant in relation to behavior. What matters in this latter case is that an individual is able to
―perform‖ in a way that the context requires and that others in the context ―believe that the
character they see actually possesses the attributes he (sic) appears to possess‖ (Goffman, 1980,
p. 28).
According to a survey report by Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) 2007;
about candidate selection and hiring criteria following 16 criteria were rated in terms of
importance:
Fig.1 Rating scale 1= not at all important, 5= extremely important

Importance of Graduate Business Student Selection Criteria

The three main factors appear to determine an employer‘s choice of a graduate business student-
the candidate‘s leadership potential, prior work experience, and academic achievements. On the
other hand, student‘s unrealistic expectations and poor job –hunting skills can present major
barriers in the hiring process. According to the employers, to be successful managers, graduate
business students should further develop their conscientiousness and interpersonal skills and
focus on human capital management.

Managerial skills have been the subject of discussion in management literature for almost four
decades. Managers and managerial skills have focus of attention for writers like, Mintzberg
(1973), Boyatzis (1982), Whetten and Cameron (1984, 1991) and Analoui (1998, 1999).What
roles are they required to play and the respective corresponding skills which contribute to their
effectiveness in managerial performance? It is important to note, however, that the developers of
these taxonomies do not claim that their work is thee final word on the skills required for
managerial effectiveness. Thus, no single set of skills can fully capture the complexity of
managerial roles and the required managerial skills.

Katz’s classic taxonomy

Katz (1955) taxonomy of managerial skills was the first classification of skills required by
mangers for improving their managerial work. In katz‘s view, they required managerial abilities
are conceptualized in terms of three basic observable interrelated sets of skills: technical, human
and conceptual.

 Technical skills, primarily used by the lower –level managers, concern the ability to
follow a process with proficiencies and expertise using tools, techniques, and procedure
in a specialized field .Such skills appear to be relatively easy to acquire.
 Human skills or people skills are seen as an expression of an executive‘s ability to work
effectively in co-operation with other people. This requires them to understand, motivate
and lead other people individually or in group .Human understand, motivate and lead
other people individually or in group. Human skills are thought to be important for every
level of mangers where the highest number of interactions with subordinates is likely to
take place.

 Conceptual skills result in the mental ability to integrate and co-ordinate the
organization‘s interests and activities. It is the executive‗s ability to see the organization
as a whole ,to understand how the different parts fit together and depend on each other
and to realize how a change in one part can affect other parts and subsequently the whole
organization.

The Whetten and Cameron model

In a new approach to management development, Whetten and Cameron (1984, 1991) have
proposed a learning model based on the social learning theory originally developed by Bandura
(1977).Whetten and Cameron (1980) conducted their own study of 420 practicing mangers who
were selected as being highly effective by their peers and superiors in a variety of public and
private organizations. They emphasized that their final list of the identified skills was determined
with four important consideration s being taken into account :
1) that it consisted of highly critical personal and interpersonal skills which are prerequisites for
effective management
2) that it reflected proven characteristics of high performing mangers
3) that it focused only on characteristics that have a trainable behavioral component,
4)that it included mainly those highly applicable managerial skills which are neither
organizational nor hierarchical specific.
Their selected sets of nine skills are:
 Developing self-awareness,
 Managing time and stress,
 Solving problems creatively,
 Establishing supportive communication,
 Gaining power and influence,
 Improving employees performance through a motivation-related reward system,
delegation and decision-making,
 Managing conflict and, finally, conductive effective group meetings.
Objective

With often mismatched existence between the present prevailing education pattern and the ideal
education format yearned for by the industry, the study was conducted to analyse the
performance of the students and understand the relationship between the performance in
academic domain and in activities testing their soft skills. The study is focused at analyzing the
relationship between academic performance and soft skills of management student.

Methodology:

The hypothesis formulated for empirical testing was, ‗There is no significant difference between
Academic performance and Soft Skills of male Management students.‘

The sample through quota sampling method taken for study was performance of 412 students
comprising of 292 male and 120 female students was taken. The Grade Performance Assessment
 (GPA) in 3rd semester was taken and the performance of same set of students on Soft Skills (SS)
activities was taken for consideration. The SS activities comprised of performance in Group
Discussion (GD), Interview and an Event initiative (Group Activity) was done. To ensure
objectivity in assessment of SS activities, each student was evaluated by a set of two evaluators.
The academic scores were a result of the objective evaluation done through grading the students
as A, B, C and D with A being the best grade and D being the lowest grade. The GPA was the
cumulative performance of the students done through continuous evaluation and term end
evaluation in various domain subjects.

Analysis (Descriptive Statistics)

Std.
VARIABL Minimu Maximu Deviatio Varianc
E N Range m m Sum Mean n e
Statisti Std.
Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic c Statistic Error Statistic Statistic
GPA 412 6.20 3.80 10.00 2611.61 6.3389 .04696 .95309 .908
SS 412 5.27 1.83 7.10 1994.32 4.8406 .04455 .90428 .818
Valid N
412
(listwise)

Correlation
GPA SS
GPA Pearson Correlation 1 .378(**)
Sig. (2-tailed) .000
N 412 412
SS Pearson Correlation .378(**
1
)
Sig. (2-tailed) .000
N 412 412

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

The result of the analysis shows the r value as .378 which reflects an absence of a relationship
between the two variables (GPA and SS) which indicates no consistent relationship between the
two variables. This indicates that academic performance and SS are independent of each other.

Test Statistics
GPA SS
1481.72
Chi-Square(a,b) 376.592
8
Df 75 189
Asymp. Sig. .000 .000

a 0 cells (.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell frequency is
5.4.
b 190 cells (100.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell
frequency is 2.2.

Further validation to understand the relationship between GPA and SS was done though Chi –
Square testing, which also suggests similar results. It can be re-emphasized that no relationship
exists between academic performance and soft skills of a
Discussion:
The academic and the SS performance of the students indicate a lack of balance on the part of the
efforts put in by the students on strengthening their domain knowledge and acquiring the
required skill set. A large number of students who perform well in academics fail to have the
required skill set to successfully clear the recruitment process. The situation gets further
aggravated in times of recession when it economic situation is difficult and recruiters press upon
and tighten the recruitment process hard to closely scrutinize not only the domain knowledge but
behavioral and life skills as well. The findings help us to get close to the reason why very often
students who are academically bright fail to be placed easily or get a profile of their choice as
against those may not have a brilliant academic record yet manage to succeed in placement
interviews. Counseling the students to help them understand the importance and relevance of SS
as a complimentary skill to their academic and theoretical knowledge base is very essential. The
training modules for SS testing and training needs to be more focused.

Limitations

Since all the students belonged to the field of management education of one institute the findings
may not be equally applicable management students of only one management institute and
therefore results of study should be interpreted with caution and for further generalized
conclusions, similar studies need to be conducted on students of other institutes and other fields
of study.

Conclusion

Management education needs to be re-looked at, such that sensitivity and attention is paid
towards imparting, cultivating and enhancing managerial skills. The students need to be
explained and counseled to understand the uniqueness and on-job requirements of management
professionals. With focus towards project based assignments requiring team work would help
students in exploring innovative and creative ways of fulfilling the task and hone their in
interpersonal skills as well. This would further help them to apply the theoretical inputs as well
and therefore strike a balance between appropriate aptitude reflected through academic
performance and necessary job competencies which would facilitate them in framing their action
plan for successful campus placement activity.

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