Abstract
Employers and students concur that soft skills or interpersonal skills are critical to managerial success, yet we know little about how MBA program admissions professionals conceptualize and assess these skills in the context of global management education. Such practices have key implications for interpersonal skills curriculum and training in MBA programs around the globe. A survey of 182 MBA admissions professionals from 24 countries revealed surprising agreement in how interpersonal skills were conceptualized, and suggest interpersonal skills and soft skills are not synonymous. Results also indicated that only 30% of U.S. and international MBA programs use specific criteria to assess applicants’ interpersonal skills, with the remainder using nonspecific criteria or no assessment method. We discuss the need for more rigorous assessment of interpersonal skills in MBA admissions, closer coordination between admissions officers and curriculum developers, and tighter alignment between interpersonal skills assessment and MBA curriculum and learning outcomes.
Although employers and management education researchers agree that “soft skills” or interpersonal skills are a key component of what effective managers do (Azevedo, Apfelthaler, & Hurst, 2012; Graduate Management Admissions Council [GMAC], 2005; Halfhill & Nielsen, 2007; Riggio & Tan, 2014; Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009, 2011), there is some controversy regarding the extent to which MBA programs and business students value such skills (Navarro, 2008; Rynes, Trank, Lawson, & Ilies, 2003). Along with technical skills (e.g., functional expertise) and conceptual skills (e.g., strategic thinking), interpersonal skills are one of three primary competency dimensions that are integral to managerial work (Dierdorff, Rubin, & Morgeson, 2009). In fact, skills such as coaching and developing others, team building, and conflict resolution are among the most salient skills that come to mind when people think about managerial work. They also are relatively less of a focus in MBA curriculum than technical and conceptual skills (Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009). Given the sparse coverage of interpersonal skills in MBA curriculum (Navarro, 2008; Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009), it is no wonder they are the very skills that MBA graduates lack (Fisher, 2007; Ghannadian, 2013). This lack of soft skills training has financial implications for employers. For instance, a deficit in soft skills in the United Kingdom (Hurrell, 2016) could have a detrimental impact on Britain’s economy (Clarke, 2016).
On the other hand, the degree to which MBA programs emphasize interpersonal or soft skills is likely to vary across business schools. MBA program offerings and faculty activities for Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)–accredited schools are supposed to be guided by each individual school’s mission, and some schools emphasize interpersonal skills more than others (Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009). For instance, Bennis and O’Toole (2005, p. 104) argued that MBA programs are more likely to focus on skills that professional managers need, including interpersonal skills, when they are not housed in research universities. There also is a growing awareness among business schools that interpersonal skills should play a more prominent role in their curriculum (Baldwin, Bedell, & Johnson, 1997; Rynes et al., 2003). Nearly all business schools sampled required at least one organizational behavior course, with almost 30% requiring two or more courses (Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009). A survey of top 50 U.S. business schools found that 60% required coursework covering interpersonal skills topics (e.g., communications [Navarro, 2008]). These findings suggest that at least some graduate business programs view interpersonal skills as a priority for their graduates—though perhaps not as high of a priority as technical or conceptual skills.
In fact, some business schools and MBA programs reportedly evaluate interpersonal skills development (Beard, Schwieger, & Surendran, 2008; Hoover, Giambatista, Sorenson, & Bommer, 2010; Ingols & Shapiro, 2014; Kretovics, 1999). To meet AACSB learning outcome assessment standards, new services that assess soft skills improvements for business students are emerging (e.g., BizEd, 2016). Some MBA programs and employers are even including interpersonal skills in their selection processes (Bommer, Rubin, & Bartels, 2005; Hedlund, Wilt, Nebel, Ashford, & Sternberg, 2006; Rubin, Bommer, & Baldwin, 2002; Sackett, Schmitt, Ellington, & Kabin, 2001; Sternberg, 2004) to increase predictive validity and reduce subgroup differences. One reason why many MBA programs require work experience is the assumption that such experience is positively associated with interpersonal skill development, which should predict academic performance and successful job placement (Dreher & Ryan, 2004, p. 87). Research has shown interpersonal skills among MBA students predicts work performance above and beyond general mental ability (Zimmerman, Triana, & Barrick, 2010). Yet the most widely used MBA entrance exam—the GMAT—does not assess interpersonal skills at all (see www.gmac.com).
If interpersonal skills are important for the employability of MBA graduates, it follows that MBA admissions professionals should have procedures in place to assess applicants’ interpersonal skills, or at least their capacity to develop these skills. As gatekeepers who manage the inflow of aspiring MBA students and graduates, MBA program admissions professionals play a crucial role in both conceptualizing and potentially evaluating these skills. Yet, to our knowledge, there has been no systematic investigation of how MBA program admissions professionals define and assess such skills. Additionally, for MBA faculty interested in remediating curriculum gaps in the coverage of interpersonal skills, admissions screening practices are key inputs to course design, content, and delivery. For instance, if MBA programs do a rigorous job of ensuring that applicants already have strong interpersonal skills, it may be possible to justify or at least explain the lack of coverage of such skills in many MBA programs. On the other hand, if assessment of these skills in the admissions process is sorely lacking, it is important to consider ways to improve assessment practices and align them with curriculum and learning outcomes aimed at developing MBA graduates’ interpersonal skills.
Furthermore, in a global economy and in a world of global management education, culture may be a potential boundary condition for the relevance of these skills. Increased globalization challenges the North American perspective that has dominated management education. Research showing cross-cultural skills are a key driver of expatriate success (e.g., Black & Mendenhall, 1990; Varma, Pichler, Budhwar, & Biswas, 2009) suggests it is possible that cultural norms are relevant to the conceptualization and relative importance of managerial interpersonal skills. For instance, nonverbal cues in communication differ substantially across cultures, implying the skills of deciphering those cues may be at least partly culturally bound (e.g., the nine ways to say “no” in Japanese culture; Robbins & Judge, 2017). For this reason, managers should be able to interpret culture-specific cues in interpersonal exchanges (Earley & Peterson, 2004; Offermann & Phan, 2002). It is possible that interpersonal skills are viewed with varying degrees of importance by MBA administrators who may not adhere to a North American perspective.
Finally, understanding which interpersonal skills matter to MBA admissions professionals includes understanding what they are not. For instance, subject matter experts have suggested soft skills include both skills that are interpersonal (e.g., communication skills, interpersonal skills), and those that are not (e.g., decision-making and problem-solving skills; Kantrowitz, 2005). In contrast to “hard skills” that are typically more quantitative or technical in nature, “soft skills” are an inherently vague description that conjures up skills that are allegedly less rigorous and important (Levinson, 2016), more difficult to measure and train, and not exclusively interpersonal in nature. Since interpersonal skills and soft skills often are used interchangeably (Halfhill & Nielsen, 2007; Hunt & Baruch, 2003; Riggio & Tan, 2014; Robles, 2012), it is important to explore their degree of potential overlap and relative distinctiveness.
In consideration of these issues, this study aimed to answer four research questions:
In the rest of this article, we answer these questions with a study of MBA program admissions professionals from 24 countries. Using unaided recall, study participants were asked to identify which specific “soft skills” they viewed as important for MBA students. This allowed us to assess the degree of overlap between soft skills and interpersonal skills, and to assess the relative importance of these skills as measured by the frequency with which each were mentioned. Participants also were asked how they assess such skills during the admissions process. Our results suggest soft skills and interpersonal skills have substantial overlap, although they are not synonymous, and that there is consistency regarding how interpersonal skills are conceptualized and assessed across both United States and internationally based MBA programs. Although there is a consensus of which interpersonal skills are viewed as important by these stakeholders, little is being done to assess them during the admissions process, or to develop them within MBA programs. Consequently, we conclude with suggestions on how to facilitate alignment between MBA admissions and training to enhance interpersonal skills assessment and curriculum.
Method
Study Sample and Questions
Our sample included graduate business school admissions directors and deans, and associate deans. The GMAC sent an online survey to MBA admissions professionals at 1,365 schools to understand how graduate business schools define and assess soft skills by asking them a series of open-ended questions. Respondents included admissions professionals, program directors, and associate deans who were responsible for MBA admissions. This unaided recall approach ensured respondents were not biased by a list of predefined skills that were presented to them. It also allowed us to determine if soft skills were synonymous with interpersonal skills, or whether they represented a broader set of skills that may include but not be limited to interpersonal skills. Respondents were asked, (1) “What soft skills do you look for in MBA applicants?” and (2) “What methods do you use to assess these soft skills during the admissions process?”
A total of 182 admissions professionals from 182 schools (13.3% of 1,365 schools surveyed) representing 24 countries provided completed responses to the first question, and were used in our analysis of defining soft skills and interpersonal skills. Respondents were from the United States (63%), Europe (26%), Asia and the Pacific Islands (4%), Canada (3%), Australia and New Zealand (2%), Latin America (1%), and the Middle East (1%). A total of 115 admissions professionals from 115 schools (8.4%) responded to the second question. Respondents were from the United States (60%), Europe (31%), Asia and the Pacific Islands (2%), Canada (4%), Australia and New Zealand (2%), and Latin America (2%). This sample included but was not restricted to schools accredited by the AACSB.
To assess the representativeness of the mix of U.S. and non-U.S. schools in our sample, we analyzed the current mix of U.S. and non-U.S. schools accredited by the AACSB. Out of 777 currently AACSB-accredited schools worldwide, 517 (66.5%) are located in the United States. The fact that 63% of Question 1 responses and 60% of Question 2 responses were from U.S. MBA programs (compared with 66.5% for AACSB-accredited schools) suggests our sample responses were approximately representative of the mix of U.S. and non-U.S. business schools.
Coding Taxonomies, Procedures, Analysis, and Results
Coding responses to Question 1 (“What soft skills do you look for in MBA applicants?”) required a comprehensive and parsimonious guiding taxonomy. Numerous skills have been classified as interpersonal including, among others, communication (Riggio, Riggio, Salinas, & Cole, 2003; Robbins & Hunsaker, 2009; Whetten & Cameron, 2015), self-management and emotional intelligence (Caruso, Mayer, & Salovey, 2002; Rubin et al., 2002; Whetten & Cameron, 2015), leadership and political influence (Dierdorff & Rubin, 2006; Ferris et al., 2005; Robbins & Hunsaker, 2009), and negotiation and conflict management (De Dreu, Evers, Beersma, Kluwer, & Nauta, 2001). In perhaps the most comprehensive review to date, Klein, DeRouin, and Salas (2006) identified over 400 specific workplace interpersonal skills. They proposed a complex definition 1 and taxonomy of interpersonal skills consisting of 12 subdimensions organized under two higher order dimensions of communication (listening, oral, written, assertive, nonverbal) and relationship building (cooperation/coordination, trust, intercultural sensitivity, service orientation, self-presentation, social influence, conflict resolution/negotiation). Although comprehensive, their definition includes overlap with conceptual or technical skills (e.g., “complex perceptual and cognitive processes,” writing, coordinating), and at least one skill—service orientation—that may not be common in MBA programs. As a coding framework for interpersonal skills, we adopted a taxonomy that is both parsimonious and comprehensive and focuses on five key skills: self-management, communicating with others, supportive relationship development, motivating others, and conflict management; that is, “competencies that help managers understand, communicate with, motivate and influence others, and resolve conflicts in goal-directed organizational settings” (Pichler & Beenen, 2014, p. 14). These five skills provide comprehensive coverage of interpersonal managerial competencies identified by Rubin and Dierdorff (2011), and are generally consistent with Klein et al.’s (2006) dimensions (e.g., communication, relationship building, conflict resolution/negotiation). They also are consistent with interpersonal skills recently identified for workforce preparedness and management education (Azevedo et al., 2012; Jackson & Chapman, 2012).
We used the following coding procedure for Question 1 (“What soft skills do you look for in MBA applicants?”). Two members of the research team reviewed responses for consistency with our a priori taxonomy of five interpersonal skill themes (managing self, communicating, supporting, motivating, managing conflict; Pichler & Beenen, 2014), and by identifying responses that diverged from these themes to find any new emergent themes or subcategories contained in the data. New themes and subcategories that emerged from the data were discussed, and the process was repeated until no new themes or subcategories were found. This resulted in the development of a coding taxonomy with seven themes and 62 subcategories (see Table 1) that included two new themes representing a broader superset of soft skills that were not distinctly interpersonal (i.e., judgment and decision making, miscellaneous). For example, specific responses like “critical thinking” or “project management” represented subcategories that did not fit any of the five interpersonal skill themes, but were consistent with the new theme of “judgment and decision making.”
Coding Taxonomy.
Note. N = 182 MBA program professionals with 603 coded responses.
After the coding taxonomy was developed, two trained coders working independently, without knowledge of where each respondent was from, coded 603 specific skills or other attributes under these seven themes. There was an average 88% agreement between coders with any discrepancies reconciled through discussion. Table 1 displays all 62 skills or other attributes, and distinguishes “interpersonal” and “soft skills.” Figure 1 shows results only for those responses classified as interpersonal skills.
Comparison of U.S. and non-U.S. responses (interpersonal skills only).
Skills coded as judgment and decision making were consistent with Dierdorff et al.’s (2009) taxonomy of conceptual skills (e.g., strategic decision making), and not coded as interpersonal. Skills coded as miscellaneous included personality attributes and other uncertain responses (e.g., “I don’t know what soft skills are”). Table 1 shows 29% of the coded responses for “soft skills” were not interpersonal in nature, indicating MBA program professionals defined soft skills more broadly than interpersonal skills.
Figure 1 compares how often each interpersonal skills dimension was mentioned by U.S. and non-U.S. MBA administrators. There were few differences with the largest for self-managing (14% for U.S. vs. 17% for non-U.S.) and managing conflict (11% vs. 8%), and all others showing a 2% difference. Chi-square difference tests found none of these differences were significant. Overall for the combined total, supporting was the most frequently mentioned skill (35%), followed by communicating (22%), motivating (18%), managing self (15%), and managing conflict (10%).
For Question 2 (“What methods do you use to assess these soft skills during the application process?”), two researchers carefully reviewed each response to identify themes that would indicate the specificity of assessment criteria used. Based on this approach, four themes emerged as a coding schema ranging from low to high specificity: (0) not assessed (e.g., “no special method experience”; (1) assessed based on some nonspecific criteria (e.g., “interview discussions”); (2) assessed based on some specific criteria without indicating use of a quantitative methodology (e.g., “targeted selection interview method”; (3) assessed based on some specific criteria using a quantitative methodology (e.g., “a competency model and the behavioral event interview developed by David McClelland”). Two trained coders working independently, without knowledge of where each respondent was from, coded the data using this schema with 82% agreement. All discrepancies were resolved by discussion between the coders.
Figure 2 displays the results for Question 2. Consistent with Question 1 responses, a chi-square difference test found there were no significant differences in the distribution of assessment criteria specificity between the U.S. and non-U.S. samples. For instance, very few non-U.S. and U.S. respondents (2.2% vs. 2.9%) reported using a specific quantitative methodology to assess soft skills (Code 3), while the majority (71% vs. 71.7%) reported not assessing these skills or using no specific criteria to assess them (Codes 0 and 1). Exactly 26.1% of respondents for the U.S. and non-U.S. respondents reported using specific, nonquantitative criteria (Code 2).
U.S. and non-U.S. soft skills assessment techniques for MBA applicants.
Discussion
A variety of management education stakeholders from recruiters to business school administrators agree that soft skills, including interpersonal skills, are perhaps the most important set of skills for success in management education and practice (e.g., Dierdorff & Rubin, 2009; Pichler & Beenen, 2014). Yet there is little research examining the extent to which interpersonal skills are distinct from soft skills and to our knowledge, no research on how MBA admissions professionals in the United States and abroad conceptualize and assess these skills. We addressed these important gaps in the literature to shed light on the types of skills on which MBA programs might want to focus.
Our analysis of GMAC data indicated that MBA admissions professionals viewed interpersonal skills as a distinct subset of soft skills. This is important because these terms have been used interchangeably in the literature and by management educators (Halfhill & Nielsen, 2007; Riggio & Tan, 2014). Some respondents even found soft skills either too vague to define, or did not have an a priori understanding of what soft skills are. Although further research may be needed to define more precisely what the broader superset of soft skills includes, our results clearly indicated interpersonal skills and soft skills should not be used interchangeably. In management education, soft skills may include both the interpersonal and conceptual components of managerial skills such as creative thinking or strategic decision making (Dierdorff et al., 2009).
Our results also suggested U.S. and non-U.S. MBA administrators report the same sets of managerial interpersonal skills as important, with no differences in the frequencies with which each skill was mentioned. To our knowledge, no other research has compared how managerial interpersonal skills are defined in different countries. Given the unaided recall methodology used in this study, frequency is a reasonable proxy for importance. We found responses from non-U.S. and U.S.-based MBA admissions professionals yielded no differences in how frequently specific interpersonal skills were mentioned. We acknowledge some interpersonal skills may be expressed differently across cultures. Nonetheless, in graduate management education, it appears that U.S. and non-U.S. MBA admissions professionals agree about the relative importance of a core set of five managerial interpersonal skills (managing self, communicating, supporting, motivating, managing conflict).
This is good news for business school faculty and administrators. Despite important differences across cultures in how interpersonal skills are expressed (e.g., Varma et al., 2009), our results suggested that management educators can potentially focus on a consistent set of skills. This does not mean that management education programs that offer interpersonal skills training should necessarily leverage similar pedagogies. In fact, it is likely that management students in different cultures will benefit differentially from different types of learning, training, and development systems. For instance, management students in the United States may be much more likely to engage in more active pedagogies, such as role-plays, than students from more Confucian cultures, such as China or Japan (Volet, 1999). Consequently, more research is needed on cultural differences in the expression of these skills, their antecedents and outcomes, and conditions under which these skills may be more or less effective or relevant for managerial performance.
Along with agreement in how interpersonal skills were conceptualized by MBA admissions professionals, there also was consistency in how U.S. and non-U.S. business schools assessed these skills among program applicants. The largest proportion of respondents (67%) suggested applicant assessments and interviews were used, with no specific criteria identified. Only 26.1% indicated use of specific criteria or structured interviews, which is a more valid predictor of success than unstructured interviews (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Very few reported using specific quantitative methods (2.6%) for assessing students’ interpersonal skills. These results suggest a strong need for a validated, widely used measure of these skills, whether it be a survey-based measure or other assessment method, such as a situational judgment test (Lopes et al., 2011). Such a measure could be used for both assessing applicants, and student learning outcomes over the duration of their MBA programs. We hope this research stimulates future work in this area.
Integrating Interpersonal Skills Into MBA Curricula
Although interpersonal skills are an educational priority for the primary accrediting body for MBA programs (AACSB), MBA programs tend not to differentiate themselves based on such priorities (Navarro, 2008). In fact, these skills are substantially underrepresented in MBA programs, even though they are among the most important skills identified by managers (Murphy, Putter, & Johnson, 2014; Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009, 2011). Our results suggest this lack of attention to interpersonal skills extends to MBA program admissions practices. If management educators are charged with developing these skills in MBA students, it is important to have a baseline understanding of how proficient students are with these skills. The lack of attention given to both assessing and developing these skills indicate MBA faculty and administrators must overcome some key obstacles, including facilitating effective assessment and curriculum alignment, and navigating the political barriers to revising MBA curricula.
Improving Assessment and Curriculum Alignment
Our research showed a clear need for more effective assessment of interpersonal skills for MBA programs that consider such skills a priority for their graduates. This points to the need for greater standardization, and more deliberate and structured assessment practices during the admissions process. At the same time, admissions officers should adapt these practices to accommodate potential language barriers or cultural differences such as lower assertiveness in student teams with some Asian populations (Beenen & Pichler, 2016). It also points to the need for greater alignment between assessing students’ interpersonal capabilities, and curriculum content focused on building on the strengths and remediating the deficiencies identified by such assessment practices.
Since about 70% of respondents in this study appeared to use assessment criteria that were nonspecific, there is substantial room for improvement in interpersonal skills assessment for MBA applicants. For MBA programs that use unstructured interviews to assess these skills, it is important to recognize the biases and limitations that are linked to this method (Dana, Dawes, & Peterson, 2013). These can be addressed in part by standardizing and structuring the interview to address the specific skills being evaluated (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). The question remains, which specific skills should be assessed?
Although schools may want to decide which skills they view as important for their graduates, the fact that there was agreement in the frequency with which five key interpersonal skills (managing self, communicating, supporting, motivating, managing conflict; Pichler & Beenen, 2014) offers a starting point for a comprehensive and parsimonious assessment model. There are other more complex options with varying degrees of overlapping skills that could serve as candidate skill models also. These include Hogan and Lock’s (1995) seven skills (sensitivity to others’ needs, flexibility, perceptiveness, instilling trust in others, consistency across interactions, accountability, effective communication); Hayes’s (2002) nine skills (self-awareness, listening, helping, facilitating, asserting, influencing, negotiating, working with groups, and managing relationships); or 12 subdimensions of two higher order skills of communication (listening, oral, written, assertive, nonverbal) and relationship building (cooperation/coordination, trust, intercultural sensitivity, service orientation, self-presentation, social influence, conflict resolution/negotiation; Klein et al., 2006).
Whichever model is selected, the important point is MBA admissions committees should standardize their selection process to ensure candidates are evaluated with minimal bias. The gold standard may be a multimethod approach that relies on structured interviews, survey self-report, and other-report (e.g., current or former supervisors or instructors of applicants) and behavioral responses to interpersonally challenging scenarios. With numerous scales and subscales addressing a broad range interpersonal skills, the field currently lacks a concise standardized psychometric self or other-report survey, pointing to the need to develop such an instrument. This is not uncommon with such complex skills as interpersonal skills (see Demaray et al., 1995) and may point to the need for a standardized survey as part of a larger set of multimethod assessments (Boyatzis & Saatcioglu, 2008).
An equally important step to improving assessment is to align assessment outcomes with instructional outcomes. For instance, students who demonstrate a need to develop supportive relationship development skills or conflict management skills should be directed to courses and other instructional interventions focused on developing those specific skills. A core required people management course could focus on any of the skill models noted above, with 1 or 2 weeks focused on each specific skill. Students who demonstrate obvious strength in specific skill areas can be peer mentors. Extracurricular activities, case analysis competitions, and internships also can be leveraged to develop interpersonal competence. Online portfolios or other administrative structures that are linked to students’ application files may be needed to ensure students meet competency requirements and address gaps that may have been identified during the application process. In other words, capturing longitudinal data that demonstrates interpersonal skill improvements throughout the duration of an MBA program would provide compelling evidence that students are developing these skills.
Effective Instruction: Information, Demonstration, Practice, and Feedback and Evaluation
Integrating interpersonal skills into MBA curricula should rely on four key elements supported by the science of learning, training and development: information, demonstration, practice, and feedback and evaluation (Bedwell et al., 2014; see Table 2). Information and demonstration confer declarative knowledge that helps students understand conceptual foundations of why each skill is important and how it operates. For example, reading an article on active listening followed by video clips exemplifying active listening at its best and worst. A key challenge with teaching interpersonal skills is the issue of how to simulate real-world interpersonal situations that students may face. Practice addresses this challenge by providing students with opportunities to convert declarative knowledge into actual skills. For instance, an experiential exercise in which students must actively listen to one another while discussing inherently controversial topics on which there is vehement disagreement (Whetten & Cameron, 2015). Feedback and evaluation provide a necessary condition for learning as students remediate deficiencies and focus on strengths. This includes standardized assessments of the declarative knowledge acquired through informational and demonstrative approaches, and experiential skills acquired through practice. It is also essential that feedback be given at multiple points in time so that learners can track their progress. Interpersonal skills training should ideally occur in multiple modules across an MBA program, as should evaluation and feedback.
Key Elements for MIPS Education and Development (Bedwell, Fiore, & Salas, 2014).
Overcoming Political Challenges
The political environment of a business school can affect the priority given to interpersonal skills training. For instance, in a business school with a strong reputation in financial analytics, management faculty may have greater difficulty advancing interpersonal skills curriculum than they would in a business school with a strong reputation in leadership development. Internal and external stakeholders in the former scenario may be more resistant to changes that detract the school from its core identity and competencies. In either setting, for this type of training to be accepted and used, stakeholders must be persuaded that interpersonal skills will make a measurable difference in the quality of graduates. Evaluating the training intervention in a pretest–posttest format is important to demonstrate the business case for the program’s return on investment (e.g., Hunt & Baruch, 2003). We know that manager effectiveness (Dierdorff et al., 2009) and intrafirm knowledge transfer (Kaše, Pauuwe, & Zupan, 2009) are enhanced by interpersonal skills. These skills seem critical, therefore, both for management education and for training and development in organizations (e.g., Tannenbaum & Yukl, 1992). The gap between what managers do and what management education offers has been an ongoing source of criticism (Murphy et al., 2014; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999; Rubin & Dierdorff, 2011). Rubin and Dierdorff (2011) caution the solution to appropriately aligning MBA curricula with what managers need is not in replacing a technically focused course with a people-focused one. As unpopular as it may be, the best solution may entail additional content to prepare MBA graduates for the managerial role. Many MBA programs pack their orientations full of experiential activities aimed at interpersonal and leadership skills assessment and development. Alternatively, voluntary extracurricular programs can provide motivated students with a path to acquire these skills while sidestepping potential battles with resistant stakeholders as noted above. Finally, making internships a requirement designed to give students the opportunity to apply their interpersonal skills and receive feedback in a real business world setting may be beneficial. Internships are common to fulltime MBA programs (Beenen & Rousseau, 2010), though most do not require them.
Study Limitations and Contributions
A few limitations of this study highlight the need for more research. First, the actual proportion of respondents indicating they did not assess applicant soft skills may be higher than reported. For example, 69 out of the 184 (about 37.5%) participants who responded to the first question (“What soft skills do you look for in MBA applicants?”), did not respond to the second question (“What methods do you use to assess these soft skills during the admissions process?”). We suspect some if not most of those who did not respond to the second question also do not assess interpersonal skills of applicants and did not reveal this due to self-presentation or social desirability bias. If this is the case, it is possible the actual proportion of participants who do not assess applicants’ interpersonal skills at all could be over 40%, and likely ranges somewhere between 10% and 40%. Future research should attempt to determine more precisely what percentage of MBA programs do not assess interpersonal skills in their applicants.
Second, the unaided recall structure of the questions used in this study limited our ability to analyze with greater precision the specific methods and tools used to assess interpersonal skills. Future investigations may want to consider exploring with greater precision which methods and tools MBA admissions officials use when evaluating applicants’ interpersonal skills.
Finally, given that MBA programs abroad have been heavily influenced by a North American MBA model, it is possible that our results reflect this perspective more than a truly global perspective on managerial interpersonal skills. In other words, non-U.S. employers and managers may have a different perspective on the nature of soft skills, managerial interpersonal skills and the relative importance of such skills than non-U.S. business school admissions professionals who are entrenched in a North American educational model. Future studies should consider investigating whether MBA programs have narrowed and homogenized an otherwise diverse, global perspective on the nature of managerial interpersonal skills. For instance, it may be useful to examine differences in perceptions of managerial interpersonal skills among a broader range of international stakeholders including employers, managers, and MBA applicants who have not yet been indoctrinated by a predominantly North American management education model.
Our study makes several contributions to research on interpersonal skills in management education. First, to our knowledge this is the first study to explore interpersonal skill assessment practices in MBA admissions. We found robust consistency between U.S. and non-U.S. programs in how interpersonal skills were both conceptualized by admissions professionals and how they were assessed in the admissions process. Second, this was one of the few studies to investigate the degree of overlap between “soft” and “interpersonal” skills. Our results clearly showed the former is more broadly construed and includes skills that are more conceptual in nature (e.g., creativity) or that are more focused on judgment and decision making (e.g., strategic thinking). Third, we have offered some specific suggestions on how to improve assessment and training of interpersonal skills in management education, including recommendations on enhancing alignment of admissions processes and development of these skills in MBA programs. We hope this article kindles further research efforts to further understand how to conceptualize and assess these critical skills with a broader range of international stakeholders.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to thank the Graduate Management Admissions Council for their generous support of this research through a Management Education Research Institute grant.