Managerial Competence and Performance: A Theoretical Review

The ultimate objective of strategic management as a discipline is to facilitate business organization to respond to dynamism in the environment to enable them thrives in the competitive business world by attaining sustainable competitive advantage. This paper seeks to review literature on the constructs of management competence and performance and related phenomena in an attempt to identify the gaps in literature, emerging trend or phenomena and present a case for a suitable new theoretical model in an effort to further the current understanding of the construct and its outcome. This will be achieved by reviewing conceptual and empirical literature on the construct, identify its various attributes of strategic thinking, network building and collaboration, organization learning and entrepreneur competencies, review related theories and models of resource based view, theory competency based, institutional theory, competitive advantage and balanced score card models. The review demonstrated that despite the rich interest in the construct of managerial competence, there exist a number of gaps in that a common definition which remains elusive for the construct and it attributes of strategic thinking, there no clear link between the construct, strategy and performance, most of the studies have been done in developed countries and therefore cannot be generalized for the industry and developing countries, there remains mixed finding on the relation between some attributes and performance, most of the research are single dimensional, some attributes are difficult to measure and need to identification of additional performance indicators and lastly there is lack of clear set of specific competences needed by a manager in carrying out the various managerial functions, and all of which shall form basis for future research in this area.